It is very interesting the evolution of the Blogs, like group, as a new massive media, using modern technologies and the evolution of the Internet.

If we concentrate on those people that make a serious Blogs, to communicate us, direct or indirectly, some news, ideas, comments, experiences or simply to entertain us with some video or photos.

Besides the fact to be able to share new know-how or experiences of people of everywhere around the world. And, in a diversity of themes that would be very long to mention.

All this new form of modern communication, of people with access to Internet, that each day they are more. So, how everything in this life, it has a good side and it has a bad side.

The good side is that without doing long and costly travel, we can know people of almost everywhere around the world and to learn their form of seeing the world and to learn his culture and form of living.

Also the Blogs can be like our curriculum of personal presentation to other people. According to our design of Blog we will get up people that have something interests in what we publish, and so will be born a fruitful friendship.

The bad side is that we can convert ourselves, in people that they are in a room with a PC, and they forget of the physical relations. Very important is the physical contact for to get good human relations.

Besides being able to make the mistake of idealizing to the people that know for Internet. Therefore, always the personal contact is decisive.

Thus, paraphrasing a great poet, the Blogs have begun to walk, they are Blogs travelers and they do road when It’s walking, and, now, when we return our view behind, we see distant and obsolete the starting point; therefore, not only, we leave wakes in the sea, but we leave wakes in the cyberspace.

See you soon,

CARLOS (Tiger without Time)

Bernie was a toddler in about 1922 (California) The ’22 photo shows us, in the suit, with his grandfather, his grandmother and his father. Next photo –look at the suit- was made in 2006

[YOUTUBE=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp0ccQVy1og]

Time to say goodbye
———————-

When Im alone
I dream on the horizon
And words fail;
Yes, I know there is no light
In a room
Where the sun is not there
If you are not with me.
At the windows
Show everyone my heart
Which you set alight;
Enclose within me
The light you
Encountered on the street.

Time to say goodbye,
To countries I never
Saw and shared with you,
Now, yes, I shall experience them,
Ill go with you
On ships across seas
Which, I know,
No, no, exist no longer;
With you I shall experience them.

When you are far away
I dream on the horizon
And words fail,
And yes, I know
That you are with me;
You, my moon, are here with me,
My sun, you are here with me.
With me, with me, with me,

Time to say goodbye,
To countries I never
Saw and shared with you,
Now, yes, I shall experience them,
Ill go with you
On ships across seas
Which, I know,
No, no, exist no longer;
With you I shall re-experience them.
Ill go with you
On ships across seas
Which, I know,
No, no, exist no longer;
With you I shall re-experience them.
Ill go with you,
I with you.

1) Anna Nicole Smith
2) Global Warming
3) Immigration
4) Iraq
5) China
6) Health
7) India
8) Education
9) Iran
10) Obama
11) Bush
12) Astronaut
13) Gay
14) Sex
15) Women

* CARLOS (Tiger without Time)

A mind is a tough thing to think about. Consciousness is the defining feature of the human species.

But is it possible that it is also no more than an extravagant biological add-on, something not really essential to our survival?

That intriguing possibility plays on my mind as I cross the plaza of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, a breathtaking temple of science perched on a high bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, California.There is, indeed, something troubling, if not downright offensive, about the effort to reduce human consciousness to the operations of a 3-pound chunk of wrinkled brain tissue.

Such reductionist thinking seems like an assault on the last redoubt of the soul, or, at least, the seat of the irreducible self.

Deny or attempt to disprove the immaterial character of the mind, and you elicit some of the same passions that have animated the culture wars over evolution in the classroom, exposing the deep divide between hard-core religious fundamentalists on one side and the equally hard-core scientific fundamentalists on the other.

But if the true believers on both sides of the emerging consciousness debate are likely to shout the loudest on the matter, neither should be allowed to have the last word.

There is, in fact, an alternative scenario-one in which the seemingly fixed battle lines of the opposing armies are shown to be drawn according to some rather dubious principles.

Not only has advanced neuroscientific research revealed an obdurate mystery at the core of consciousness, but theoretical advances in the natural and physical sciences have greatly complicated the effort to reduce all human phenomena-the mind notably included-to the effects of material causes.

And even as cutting-edge science challenges crude materialistic explanations of the phenomenal world, new thinking in philosophy and theology is questioning the assumption of an absolute divide between mind and body, spirit and matter-an assumption that has long sustained many religious conceptions of the soul. Interestingly, these parallel developments in science and religion point to a new picture of reality-or maybe even recall older understandings implicit in traditions as ancient as Judaism or Buddhism-in which subject and object, mind and matter are more interfused than opposed.

Exploring the relationship between the physical brain and consciousness is not simply one of the last great intellectual frontiers. It also sheds light on some of the most vexing life-and-death issues facing us today.

The study of consciousness, says Joseph Dial, executive director of the San Antonio-based Mind Science Foundation, which devotes a generous portion of its resources to this field, “has clear clinical applications when you talk about coma and impaired consciousness such as in the Terri Schiavo case.  

How do you understand consciousness well enough, how do you understand the self and identity well enough, to determine at what point a person is no longer in possession of a self, is no longer conscious in the way we would suggest other humans are conscious and have an identity?”

Platonic ideas have left a lasting imprint on Christian beliefs. The body may die, many Christians hold, but the soul lives on, presumably extending into eternity those qualities that we associate with our conscious minds and our sense of selfhood.  

The experimental science that began to emerge in the 17th century would eventually challenge many of the everyday assumptions of the Christian West, including the notion of an Earth-centered cosmos.

But few of the great men of early modern science viewed themselves as foes of religion. Few questioned the special status of the soul or its boon companion, the mind.

In fact, prominent among the shapers of the scientific worldview was the French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes, whose most enduring contribution to modern thought was his argument that reality consisted of two entirely different substances: material substance (res extensa) and thinking substance (res cogitans). But how did these two different substances interact?

According to Descartes, the bodily organs sent perceptions and other information via the brain to the mind, located in the pineal gland in the middle of the head.

Reflecting upon these data, the mind then made decisions and directed the body’s responses, in words or deeds.

This dualistic picture of the body-mind relationship would later come to be attacked as the “ghost in the machine” argument. But for centuries, Christians and others found Cartesian dualism a reassuring and reasonable explanation.

Following the path of many 19th-century German psychologists, the great Harvard philosopher and scientist William James carried the study of consciousness to impressive lengths, most notably in his 1890 book, Principles of Psychology.

But something curious happened within a generation of that book’s publication. Psychology quite suddenly dropped the investigation of consciousness.

Dissatisfied with the reliance on introspection-how do you make an objective science out of people’s subjective reports on their private experiences?-psychologists followed the lead of researchers like Ivan Pavlov and John Watson and turned to the observable results of consciousness: behavior.

The immortality of the soul is so often talked about that it is easy to miss that the Jewish view did not support it,” Jeeves says. “Furthermore, the original Christian view was not the immortality of the soul but the resurrection of the body.”

But Platonism did creep in, Jeeves acknowledges, winning over such influential Christian theologians as Augustine and John Calvin. In Jeeves’s view, the new science of consciousness, by showing the inseparable links between mind and body, restores the original Christian conception of the unity of the person.

As many Christian theologians now say, human beings do not have souls; they are souls.

But Jeeves is realistic in thinking that it will take decades for many of his fellow Christians to accept this way of viewing the soul. And that acceptance will not be made easier by the hard-line reductivism of people like Dennett and Crick who, Jeeves says, “commit the fundamental error of nothing-buttery.”

Here Christians and others might turn to the wisdom of Buddhism, in which the self is correctly understood not as an entity or substance but as a dynamic process.

As Galin writes in a collection of essays on Buddhism and science, this process is “a shifting web of relations among evanescent aspects of the person such as perceptions, ideas, and desires.

The Self is only misperceived as a fixed entity because of the distortions of the human point of view.”

The Buddhist concept of anatman does not suggest that the self is nonexistent but rather asserts that it cannot be reduced to an essence. In recent years, the scientific study of consciousness has taken bold, if not always steady, steps in the direction of understanding the experience of wholeness and human spirituality in general.

They even suggest that if religion can learn something valuable about the unity of body and mind from science, then science might be able to relearn something from religion about the deepest purposes of our minds.  

* It was summarized of  “Science and the Soul”, U.S. News & World Report, Oct.2006

Your unconscious is making your everyday decisions.

Mental health. But unconscious processing is not just the stuff of compelling personal insight.

For those with emotional disorders like anxiety, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, and others who suffer from traumatic brain injuries either from a stroke or an accident, peeling away the behavioral layers of their dysfunction has revealed fascinating activity out of conscious awareness that may eventually provide clues to more effective treatments.   

According to cognitive neuroscientists, we are conscious of only about 5 percent of our cognitive activity, so most of our decisions, actions, emotions, and behavior depends on the 95 percent of brain activity that goes beyond our conscious awareness.

From the beating of our hearts to pushing the grocery cart and not smashing into the kitty litter, we rely on something that is called the adaptive unconscious, which is all the ways that our brains understand the world that the mind and the body must negotiate.

The adaptive unconscious makes it possible for us to, say, turn a corner in our car without having to go through elaborate calculations to determine the precise angle of the turn, the velocity of the automobile, the steering radius of the car.

It is what can make us understand the correct meaning of statements like “prostitutes appeal to pope” or “children make nourishing snacks” without believing that they mean that the pope has an illicit life and cannibals are munching on children.

Language is limited, Zaltman says, “and it can’t be confused with the thought itself.”

Images, however, move a bit closer to capturing fragments of the rich and contradictory areas of unconscious feelings.

Participants in his studies cut out pictures that represent their thoughts and feelings about a particular subject, even if they can’t explain why. He discovered that when people do this, they often discover “a core, a deep metaphor simultaneously embedded in a unique setting.” They are drawn to seasonal or heroic myths, for example, or images like blood and fire and mother.

They are also drawn into deep concepts like journey and transformation. His work around the world has convinced him that the menu of these unconscious metaphors is limited and universal, in the manner of human emotions like hope and grief.

For the brain damaged and for the healthy, despite the evidence of the prevalence of the unconscious in our daily lives, even as fervent a believer as Zaltman urges a bit of caution.

“I don’t think we know what the batting average is for purely rational reasons or reasons dressed up that way, or reasons dressed up as purely intuition. Both can get us into trouble—often do. And both serve us well.”

It is that great tension between the two, the intermingling of the known and the unknown, the conscious and the unconscious, the 5 percent and the 95 percent, that the pioneers exploring this vast and intricate universe of our minds will continue to probe. But there will most likely never be a complete understanding.

After all, the enigmas of the mind, and the mechanics of the brain, will forever define the ultimate mystery of simply being human. 

*It was summarized of Magazine U.S.News (Feb.2005)

Technologies that reveal the inner workings of the brain are beginning to tell the sleeping mind’s secrets

Strange images appear from long-forgotten memories. Or out of nowhere: You’re roller-skating on water; your mother flashes by on a trapeze; your father is in labor; a friend dead for years sits down at the dinner table.

Here are moments of unspeakable terror; there, moments of euphoria or serenity. Shakespeare wrote, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” and 300 years later, Sigmund Freud gave the poetry a neat psychoanalytic spin when he called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious.”

The development of brain imaging is the equivalent of Galileo’s invention of the telescope, only we are now exploring inner space instead of outer space.”

Mind-brain dance. The dream researchers’ new tools, functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, have been used for some time to capture the waking brain at work–making decisions, feeling frightened or joyous, coping with uncertainty. And those efforts have shown clearly that psychology and physiology are intimately related: In someone suffering from an anxiety disorder, for example, the fear center of the brain–the amygdala–“lights up” as neurons fire in response to images that trigger anxiety; it flickers in a minuet with the center of memory, the hippocampus.

Scanning people who are sleeping, too, suggests that the same sort of mind-brain dance continues 24 hours a day.

“Psychology has built its model of the mind strictly out of waking behavior,” says Rosalind Cartwright, chair of the department of behavioral science at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, who has studied dreams for most of her 83 years.

“We know that the mind does not turn off during sleep; it goes into a different stage.” Brain cells fire, and the mind spins. Problems find solutions; emotional angst seems to be soothed; out-of-the-box ideas germinate and take root.

Start in 1953 with the discovery of rapid eye movement sleep. Using primitive electroencephalograms, researchers watched as every 90 minutes, sleepers’ eyes darted back and forth and brain waves surged.

Then, in 1977, Harvard psychiatrists Hobson and Robert McCarley reported that during sleep, electrical activity picked up dramatically in the most primitive area of the brain–the pons–which, by simply stimulating other parts of the brain, produced weird and disconnected narratives.

Much like people looking for meaning in an inkblot, they concluded, dreams are the brain’s vain attempt to impose coherence where there is none.

Crazy smart. Brain scans performed on people in REM sleep, for example, have shown that even as certain brain centers turn on–the emotional seat of the brain and the part that processes all visual inputs are wide awake–one vital area goes absolutely dormant: the systematic and clear-thinking prefrontal cortex, where caution and organization reside.

“This can explain the bizarreness you see in dreams, the crazy kind of sense that your brain is ignoring the usual ways that you put things together,” says Robert Stickgold, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard and director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

“This is what you want in a state in which creativity is enhanced. Creativity is nothing more and nothing less than putting memories together in a way that they never have been before.

“Putting memories together is also an essential part of learning; people integrate the memory of new information, be it how to tie shoelaces or conjugate French verbs, with existing knowledge.

Does dreaming help people learn? No one knows–but some sort of boost seems to happen during sleep.

Many studies by sleep researchers have shown that people taught a new task performed it better after a night of sleep.

A study of how quickly dreamers solve problems supports Stickgold’s theory that the sleeping mind can be quite nimble and inventive.

Participants were asked to solve scrambled word puzzles after being awakened during both the REM phase of sleep and the less active non-REM phase.

Their performance improved by 32 percent when they worked on the puzzles coming out of REM sleep, which told researchers that that phase is more conducive to fluid reasoning.

During non-REM sleep, it appears, our more cautious selves kick into gear.Healing power. Is it possible that dreaming can actually heal?

“We know that 60 to 70 percent of people who go through a depression will recover without treatment,” says Cartwright, who recently tested her theory that maybe they are working through their troubles while asleep.

Many clinicians working with traumatized patients have found that their nightmares follow a common trajectory. First, the dreams re-create the horrors; later, as the person begins to recover, the stories involve better outcomes.

One way to help victims of trauma move on is to encourage them to wake themselves up in the midst of a horrifying dream and consciously take control of the narrative, to take action, much as O’Brien appears to have done in her dream.

This can break the cycle of nightmares by offering a sense of mastery. “A window? A royal road? A way for the brain to integrate today with yesterday? While definitive answers remain elusive, the experience of dreaming is clearly as universal as a heartbeat and as individual as a fingerprint–and rich with possibilities for both scientist and poet.

* It was summarized of Magazine U.S. News (May 2006)

The media have in influencing Americans’ perception of risk. While a preventable ailment like heart disease kills about 700,000 Americans annually, consumers are bombarded with scary images of terrorism, school violence and pandemics without the benefit of a clear context or information about the absolute risk.

We need a citizen that takes the time to understand risk, but we also need media that refrain from preying on our emotions. 

* Ben Blink; Wisconsin (TIME, jan.2007)

For

The iPod generation, it doesn’t get more radical than wearing a veil. The hijab worn by traditional Muslim women might have people talking, but it’s the wimple that really turns heads.

And in the U.S. today, the nuns most likely to wear that headdress are the ones young enough to have a playlist. 

Over the past five years, Roman Catholic communities around the country have experienced a curious phenomenon: more women, most in their 20s and 30s, are trying on that veil. Convents in Nashville, Tenn.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and New York City all admitted at least 15 entrants over the past year and fielded hundreds of inquiries.  

One convent is hurriedly raising funds for a new building to house the inflow, and at another a rush of new blood has lowered the median age of its 225 sisters to 36.

Catholic centers at universities, including Illinois and Texas A&M, report growing numbers of women entering discernment, or the official period of considering a vocation.  

Career women seeking more meaning in their lives and empty-nest moms are also finding their way to convent doors. 

This is a welcome turnabout for the church. As opportunities opened for women in the 1960s and ’70s, fewer of them viewed the asceticism and confinements of religious life as a tempting career choice.  

Since 1965, the number of Catholic nuns in the U.S. has declined from 179,954 to just 67,773, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.  

The average age of nuns today is 69. But over the past decade or so, expressing their religious beliefs openly has become hip for many young people, a trend intensified among Catholic women by the charismatic appeal of Pope John Paul II’s youth rallies and his interpretation of modern feminism as a way for women to express Christian values. 

As this so-called JP2 generation has come of age, religious orders have begun to reach out again to young people–and to do so in the language that young people speak.

Convents conduct e-mail correspondence with interested women, blogs written by sisters give a peek into the habited life and websites offer online personality questionnaires to test vocations.

And although the extreme conservatism of a nun’s life may seem wholly counter cultural for young American women today, that is exactly what attracts many of them, say experts and the women themselves.

“Religious life itself is a radical choice,” says Brother Paul Bednarczyk, executive director of the National Religious Vocation Conference in Chicago.

“In an age where our primary secular values are sex, power and money, for someone to choose chastity, obedience and poverty is a radical statement.”

That radicalism is, ironically, embodied by the wearing of the veil. Decreed unnecessary by Vatican II and shed happily by many older nuns, the headdress is for many of today’s newcomers a desired accessory.

“A lot of my older sisters would never wear the veil,” says Sister Sarah Roy, 29, who is the only member of her Sisters of St. Francis of the Immaculate Conception in Peoria, Ill., to do so. (The others wear a simple dark dress adorned by a pin.) Though she admits “people just stare at you like you’re a freak,” she adds, “It’s a trend with younger women wanting to wear the veil now.”

Newer nuns see the veil as a public expression of faith, says Cheryl Reed, author of Unveiled: Inside the Hidden Lives of Nuns.

“You can understand why a woman who has given up sex, freedom and money would want to wear her wedding dress–which is what they consider their habits to be. You want to say, ‘I’m special. I gave this up.'”

Katharine Johnson isn’t sure yet which wedding dress she will choose–a white one or a black one. At 21, she is in her third year of discernment. For now the senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign dresses as her classmates do, though on her ring finger she wears a miniature rosary and a favorite T shirt reads, EVERYONE LOVES A CATHOLIC GIRL.

She still dates but limits physical contact to kissing. “As I date men and I date convents, I am waiting for God to say, ‘This is where your heart belongs,'” she says.
Becoming a nun typically takes seven to nine years.

After the period of discernment, a woman enters a religious community as a postulant, and she reflects upon her vocation and helps with chores around the convent.

At the end of what is primarily a yearlong spiritual retreat, the postulant and her advisers in the community decide whether she will become a novice and study Catholic theology and ministry for up to two years. She may then take her temporary vows.

After an additional four to eight years during which she serves the convent’s mission, she makes her final vows and becomes a professed nun.

At the Sisters of Life Formation House in the Bronx, N.Y., 16 young women are making their way through that journey.

They include a former Marine, a professional opera singer, a United Nations aide and a recent Yale grad.

They have left behind paychecks, apartments, even boyfriends. Sister Thérèse Saglimbeni, 27, a novice who joined the convent in 2005, recalls watching the sisters playing volleyball while she was a student at the nearby State University of New York Maritime College.

“I was with my boyfriend and had said how fun the sisters looked,” she says. “He said, ‘Well, why don’t you join them?’ And I replied, ‘Well, maybe I will!'”

The other sisters chuckle when Saglimbeni recounts her saucy retort. But many of their loved ones feel less jovial about the women’s decision to take the veil. “For those who are called, there is a real falling in love.* It was summarized of TIME, November 2006