This documentary deals with an issue that many still find hard to believe is possible.Over 40 years ago man first went into space.
Ever since ordinary people have dreamt of getting there themselves. But after several false starts, a group of space obsessed entrepreneurs believe the first commercial flights into the final frontier are only a few years away.
Now Rutan and Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson have formed a partnership to build the next generation of craft capable of taking several passengers.
Branson’s new company, Virgin Galactic, is already selling return tickets to space for $200,000. And even though the new craft that will take the first space tourists hasn’t yet been built, the company has taken $10million in deposits.
In Secrets of the Mind we gain insights through various tragedies that have affected others, thanks to the logic and insights of Professor Ramachandran regarding what he calls the most complex organized matter in the universe.
The documentary begins with “phantom limb syndrome” – pain and sensation in missing body areas. Ramachandran’s reasoning, confirmed through a CAT-scan, is that the brain has a map of various body areas, and that eg. the right arm and right face areas of the brain are adjacent. Thus, missing body areas can lead to interference by those associated brain areas trying to cope with stimulus deprivation – eg. “cross-wiring.”
However, we are still left with the problem of treating pain in a body-part that no longer exists. Dr. Ramachandran found that placing the remaining opposite body part (eg. hand) into a mirror-box fools the mind into receiving feedback from the missing part and no longer sending ever-increasing (and unmet) signals that cause the pain.
Visual activities take up almost half the human brain. Dr. Ramachandran is confronted with an individual who can “see” (detect) movement but not recognize what the object is. His explanation is that there are two pathways from the eye in humans: one to the visual cortex that recognizes the object, and other to the brain stem that simply senses movement. Thus, when the visual cortex link is severed, one would only be able to recognize movement of a fly, but not the fly itself – perhaps the way a lizard views the world. Similarly, he says to driving – most of the time it is done without consciousness while the conscious brain is taken up in talking of other thinking.
Dr. Ramachandran believes that there are some 30 areas in the brain concerned with seeing – separate areas for color, movement, shape, distance and depth perception, etc. Interference/damage to any one of these areas can lead to oddities – eg. an individual believing his parents are impostors when the emotional response area is cut.
Finally, viewers are told that some people with temporal seizures have intense religious or emotional experiences, possibly believing they are a prophet or even God, or sensing an intense emotional reaction to everything – even a grain of sand.
A vast number of statements and materials presented in the ancient Vedic literatures can be shown to agree with modern scientific findings and they also reveal a highly developed scientific content in these literatures. The great cultural wealth of this knowledge is highly relevant in the modern world.
Techniques used to show this agreement include: – Marine Archaeology of underwater sites (such as Dvaraka) – Satellite imagery of the Indus-Sarasvata River system – Carbon and Thermoluminiscence Dating of archaeological artifacts – Scientific Verification of Scriptural statements – Linguistic analysis of scripts found on archaeological artifacts – A Study of cultural continuity in all these categories.
