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Yet more evidence for my theory that “gun control” and “thinking” are inversely correlated.The stronger your belief in gun control, the less you are able to think. Or alternatively, the dumber you are, the more likely you are to believe in gun control.I heard about this (infamous) PSA back in 2014. All the people involved in creating it are damn lucky that no child ever took their PSA to heart, otherwise they would have been sued into the poorhouse.This “ad” is quite literally teaching children to commit a felony. MULTIPLE felonies, in fact.Let’s count them up:Felony theft of a firearmIllegal possession of a handgun by a minorBringing a gun onto school propertyIllegal concealed carry by a minorBrandishing (or so it seems, based on the frightened reaction of the teacher when he whips it out)And probably a number of other crimes as well. (And he shows terrible trigger discipline, but that’s another matter.)This kid is going to jail for a VERY long time. Worse yet, he has a very good chance of being tried as an adult, which means this incident will follow him for the rest of his life. Say goodbye to all your hopes and dreams, kid!Furthermore, the PSA is offensive because it encourages the creation of barriers between parents and children. If a teenager does feel unsafe in their own home, the correct thing to do would be for that teenager to talk to his parents about it. But no, according to this ad, the correct course of action is to not talk to your parents and express your feelings. The correct response is to steal a fucking gun and bring it into fucking school.Sheesh.I should also note that the uploader of this video, Rejina Sincic (who lives in San Francisco, naturally), is apparently also the creator of the PSA. So the description she attached to the video can be considered her official, declared position on the subject of guns and gun laws. Ms. Sincic says “Violent crimes have been committed by children who wrongfully had access to firearms. Society as a whole should take stricter measure to keep guns out of hands of children.”(Call me crazy, but I don’t think the best way to prevent juvenile gun crimes is to encourage juveniles to violate federal gun laws.)But I digress. This description actually changes the meaning of the PSA significantly. You think it’s talking about accidental gun deaths, as in cases where a young child finds a loaded gun and decides to play with it. But in fact, that isn’t what this PSA is saying.This kid isn’t afraid that he or someone else will accidentally injure themselves with his mom’s gun. He’s afraid that he will magically transform into a mass shooter and he wants to get that gun as far away from himself as possible. He’s not trying to keep himself safe, he’s trying to keep his friends and family safe from HIM!I have so many questions for this boy. Where do these fears come from? How frequently do you feel a desire to harm yourself or others and how long have you had these violent urges? Have you ever acted on these feelings? Is that why the neighbor’s cat disappeared? Did grampa really “die in his sleep” when you visited him last week? Please, tell these nice men in white coats all about it. They’re very interested.Frankly, this PSA is just a mess on every level. In fact I’m not even sure who its target audience is supposed to be.Is it meant for teens? If so then its message is irresponsible and offensive. It not only appears to encourage flagrant law-breaking (not to mention discouraging teens from discussing their feelings with their parents) it further suggests that teenagers are all “ticking time bombs” who shouldn’t have any access to guns at all, for fear that they will one day “snap” and go on a killing spree because…reasons.Is it meant for parents? If so then the message is just bizarre. “You shouldn’t keep a gun in your home because…your teenage son might steal it and turn it over to his math teacher”? Or maybe, “You shouldn’t keep guns in your home because…your teenage children are so mentally fragile that they can’t handle the mere sight of a gun”?Or maybe the message is, “Be sure to keep your guns locked up, because your teenage son may become so indoctrinated by the left-wing scare-mongering propaganda he learned in public school that he will commit multiple federal crimes in a misguided attempt to get the gun out of the house.”All this leads me back to my original thesis: “gun control” and “thinking” are negatively correlatedThis PSA is amazingly dumb, even by the usual standards of the gun control movement. Even setting aside the encouragement of multiple felonies, this PSA wildly overstates the risks of gun ownership, and completely obscures both the frequency and the causes of school shootings.It furthermore promotes the dubious sitcom-esque notion that children are inherently wiser than adults, and they can and should disregard their parents’ wishes (not to mention defying their authority) when they feel it’s in their best interests. Or more accurately, when left-wing agitators feel it’s in their best interest. Somehow I doubt that Ms. Sinsic would approve of a PSA where a teenager stole his father’s medically prescribed marijuana and handed it over to his teacher, saying “I don’t feel safe with drugs in my house”.* * *P.S. This is my favorite comment from the YouTube video:"Timmy, that's a BB gun. This is why you're failing my class. You're an idiot. Now excuse me while I call the police."That just kills me (metaphorically speaking). I went back over the video and, he’s right. That’s a BB gun (which incidentally would still be very illegal to bring into a school). Specifically a Crosman C11 air pistol:Image courtesy of Airgundepot.comAt 1:44 you can clearly see the distinctive grip styling, the very obvious “C11” branding on the side, and the latch at the bottom of the grip to access the CO2 cartridge.Now in Ms. Sincic’s defense, it’s not uncommon for amateur film-makers to use BB guns as stand-ins for real guns. They’re a lot cheaper than the kind of realistic prop weapons Hollywood has access to, they’re safer than using real guns, and there are far fewer legal hurdles to deal with. When you’re shooting on a budget these are the kinds of sacrifices you have to make.But anyone with even a modicum of cinematography knowledge would know that you don’t shoot tight close-ups of crappy props. There are any number of lighting and camera angle tricks you can use to cover up flaws in your props and practical effects. Film-makers have been using and perfecting these techniques for literally over a century.You would think that passion for one’s cause would encourage the highest level of professionalism. But in Ms. Sincic’s case, apparently not.

To Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti (no family relationship), Jiddu Krishnamurti has contradicted the very fundamentals of his own teaching: "He denounces systems and opens meditation schools, talks of the crippling effects of conditioning then runs schools which foster more conditioning, talks of simplicity and builds worldwide real estate organizations; says you must be on your own, then takes measures to preserve his teachings for the future." It seems that nobody can permanently live the mystical experience of spirituality.Krishnamurti did not recognize any specific philosophy, though much of his teaching is common to Advaita Vedanta.When a man in an audience quoted something a guru had told him, Krishnamurti raised a trembling hand and berated him with the words: “Sir, You must never, ever, submit to the authority of another person.” Unless, it would appear, that authority happened to be Krishnamurti.Krishnamurti TeachingJiddu Krishnamurti said:“Is it possible to live in this world without a belief - not change beliefs, not substitute one belief for another, but be entirely free from all beliefs, so that one meets life anew each minute? This, after all, is the truth: to have the capacity of meeting everything anew, from moment to moment, without the conditioning reaction of the past, so that there is not the cumulative effect which acts as a barrier between oneself and that which is.”“A belief, religious or political, obviously hinders the understanding of ourselves. It acts as a screen through which we are looking at ourselves. And can we look at ourselves without beliefs? If we remove those beliefs, the many beliefs that one has, is there anything left to look at? If we have no beliefs with which the mind has identified itself, then the mind, without identification, is capable of looking at itself as it is - and then, surely, there is the beginning of the understanding of oneself.”“Through complete negation alone, which is the highest form of passion, that thing which is love, comes into being. Like humility you cannot cultivate love. Humility comes into being when there is a total ending of conceit—then you will never know what it is to be humble. A man who knows what it is to have humility is vain. In the same way when you give your mind and your heart, your nerves, your eyes, your whole being to find out the way of life, to see what actually is and go beyond it, and deny completely, totally, the life you live now—in that very denial of the ugly, the brutal, the other comes into being. And you will never know it either. A man who knows that he is silent, who knows that he loves, does not know what love is or what silence is.”These are paradoxical utterances from Krishnamurti. There is a possible interpretation: Nonsense. Either “love” and “humility” and “silence” mean something, and we have some way of recognizing things they apply to and things they don't, or these are just empty words. Krishnamurti is either saying something, in which case he is wrong, or he is really not saying anything. The denial of the reality of distinctions undercuts believers' appeal to scriptures and Krishnamurti books. Because language necessarily involves distinctions and so, if any language accurately describes reality, some distinctions must be real. Therefore, if distinctions aren't real, the scriptures or Krishnamurti books aren't valid.Religious diversity is the most serious objection to the claim that there exist reliable religious belief formation. If there are reliable religious belief-forming practices, they should generate independent agreement. It was a thousand other supernaturals who closed the coffin of any supernatural. The most common agreement held between isolated religious communities is a sort of primitive animism. Reason and sense perception are more widely socially established and more convincingly independent and coherently supported than mysticism. The more we refine our religious beliefs to face the rigor of a public shared reality of experience confirmation, the less remains. Therefore, if the mystical perception clashes with reason and perception of senses, mystical believers can not trust​ably pledge mystical knowledge. Different religions often elicit opposite courses of action in the quest for salvation or liberation. What is the best course, jihadism or vows of silence and contemplation? Why should we say that reports of religious experiences are reliable? The authors of the Bible and the Quran, for example, despite claiming a channel with the divine, have never known the immorality of slavery or gender inequality, the truth of antibiotics or the theory of germs in diseases. Paradoxical, inconsistent, and contradictory beliefs are characteristic outputs of mystical experience. No religious form of belief formation has been found to generate beliefs that are independently corroborated. The most common mystical claim is that all things are one, the reality is an indivisible whole and good and evil are one and the same. We can make no veridical distinction among the claims of a man who eats hallucinogens and sees that all things are one, a man who has epileptic seizures and sees that all things are one, and a man who meditates and sees that all things are one. Mystical states can be induced by artificial electrical stimulation of the brain. Mystical states can be explained in other naturalistic ways that can be independently confirmed, we have no need of recourse to supernatural influence. Religions themselves will have to appeal to such natural explanations in the course of offering an account for most rival mystical experiences that they consider to be non-veridical. So the burden surely lies with them to show that some mystical experiences, those favored by them as veridical, are indeed produced by a God or Brahman or Nirvana. We have no independent criteria for determining that a God, or Brahman or Nirvana plays a role in mystical experiences. Different religions may be equally effective at producing moral and virtuous people but not equally effective at saving or liberating people, and we have no reason to think that the one is a reliable indicator of the other. One’s own sense of confidence in the truth of one’s own religious beliefs does not count as the truth’s foundation because this confidence is equally well shared by believers of all stripes.If we are all in an illusion of our conscience then it makes no sense to talk of illusion, for there isn't an independent way of seeing how well our conscience matches Brahman, the ultimate reality, because to do that, we have to use the same instrument we call into question, our conscience. Is it reality whatever makes me happy in a blissful state? Is a blissful state eternal or it is gullibility? Is the eternal blissful state the ultimate illusion? There is nothing in the data that supports the claim that increased national religiosity is correlated with increased national virtue or happiness. We should surely find it strange that something that is alleged to be a particularly important constituent of moral virtue fails to be significantly negatively correlated with uncontroversial measures of societal dysfunction. Look at the tables that plot religiosities and the tables that plot societal dysfunction, murder rates, rape rates, burglary rates, alcohol abuse rates, drug abuse rates, marital breakdown rates, teen pregnancy rates and so forth in International statistics. Religiosity is not negatively correlated with higher levels of societal dysfunction. We all know that divorce, and murder, and obesity, and so forth are correlated with unhappiness, and so we all know that, when we take the total evidence into account, we simply do not have unequivocal evidence that religious believers are happier than non-believers.The Contradictory Advaita and Krishnamurti’s Concept of BrahmanKrishnamurti's ideas are very similar to Advaita Vedanta's Brahman idea. The most influential and dominant school of Indian philosophy, Advaita Vedanta, rejects theism and dualism by insisting that Brahman, the ultimate reality, is without parts or attributes, one without a second. Since Brahman has no properties, contains no internal diversity and is identical with the whole reality it cannot be understood as a personal God. The only reality contains no diversity and to have attributes is to have diversity. The relationship between Brahman and the creation is often thought to be panentheistic. Unlike pantheism, which holds that the divine and the universe are identical, panentheism maintains an ontological distinction between the divine and the non-divine and the significance of both.Reincarnation and karma doctrines vary as notions of what a person is and what is ultimately real or Brahman vary. Advaita Vedanta is an ontology that holds that underlying the seeming change, variety, and multiplicity of existence there are unchanging and permanent entities. In contrast, Buddhism is an ontology according to which there exists nothing permanent and unchanging, within or without a man. Both traditions hold that the empirical world is a show of appearances and both traditions emphasize the human need for spiritual liberation. Buddhists do not believe that at the core of all human beings and living creatures, there is an eternal, essential and absolute something called a soul, self or atman. Buddhists call atman an illusion, maya. In contrast, Advaita describes knowing one's own soul as identical with Brahman as the path to nirvana. Buddhism has defined nirvana as that blissful state when a person realizes that he has no self, no soul. Buddhism and Shankara's Advaita Vedanta represent independent developments of the non-dualistic metaphysics from the Upanishadic period to the time of Sankara. Krishnamurti doctrine, Buddhism, Advaita, etc., could be painted as a philosophy rather than a religion, implying that it does not rely on faith. But there is plenty of faith within these doctrines. Belief in a cycle of reincarnation, or illusion of a cycle, belief in the possibility of leaving the cycle, or the illusion of leaving, the leaving by specific meditative and non-linked means, belief in Jesus, Allah, Brahman, all these are acts of faith. But, is faith not necessary where evidence is sufficient? And does anyone believe anything regardless of the evidence where there is faith? Why isn't a justification of beliefs by faith imagination completely unrestrained and anything goes? The ancient Egyptians also believed that they were right because their supernatural beliefs were thousands of years old.If Brahman is identical with the whole of reality, and it contains no plurality, then reality as a whole is an undifferentiated unity. The idea of Brahman is logically incoherent because it is a substance without properties whereas, by definition, a substance is what has properties. An entity is a set of attributes, an entity without attributes is a contradiction in terms, therefore an attributeless entity is impossible. To employ "without properties" as the description of Brahman is a mistake, because ordinary language uses it to construct a negative existential statement, it is a logical expression that serves for the formulation of a negative existential statement. If it were admissible to introduce "without properties" as the description of Brahman, the existence of Brahman is denied in its very definition. What could be meant by the assertion that everything that exists constitutes a unity, Brahman? Existence is not a genus, to say that something exists is not to classify it at all. The notion of a unity that includes all that exists is a notion devoid of content. What could be unitary in such an ostensible collection? It has been known for a long time that existence is not a property: “Being is obviously not a real predicate; that is, it is not the concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing...” (Kant). Some logical notions like identity, existence, are irreducible and fundamental. The notion of existence, like that of identity, is a primitive notion unanalysable. It is highly doubtful that existence is properly conceived as a property or attribute of anything; if it were, then it ought to make sense to say that existence exists or existence does not exist. There is an unavoidable a priori element in our knowledge of the existence of entities of any kind whatever. No single formal definition of existence is satisfactory. It is necessary to reject all attempts to explicate the notion of existence in terms of other concepts. The syntactical form in which modern logic introduces the sign for existence is such that it cannot, like a predicate, be applied to signs for objects, but only to predicates. Even a total description of the universe as unity would still leave us with the question of whether it is as it is described; this description is an empirical truth and the fact of existence remain irreducibly empirical and not logically necessary. If there is nothing which the Brahman existence denies then there is nothing which it asserts either, it means nothing. If an explanation must be evaluated, it must be testable. Religions and Krishnamurti have no warrant, no independent justification, no reliability, no method for decreeing what is and what is not beyond science, what is the ultimate reality. What would have to occur to constitute for Brahman's believers a disproof of the existence of Brahman? A believer cannot point to a description that is satisfied by Brahman alone and not by an imaginary Brahman. If believers cannot demonstrate any necessary implication from Brahman, why would Brahman be a necessary explanation? If there is really no difference between what things are like if Brahman is true, and what they are like if it is not true, we can say that the claim has no meaning at all.Believers refuse to allow that anything conceivably could occur which would count against Brahman/Nirvana and Karma existence, then Brahman/Nirvana and Karma are meaningless. An explanation, to be an explanation at all, must explain why a particular thing occurs and undergo particular events and not something else. Can an “explanation” be unintelligible?If there is no mind-independent object against which to measure my ideas, but rather my ideas help to constitute the object, then how can my ideas ever fail—how is error possible? The Brahman's believer pushes beyond common sense to the view that objects are exactly like our illusion of them. We cannot actually conceive of mind-independent objects, that is, objects existing unperceived and unthought of. Why not? Simply because in order to conceive of any such things, we must ourselves be conceiving, thinking of them. There are no trees when no one is there to perceive them and there is no furniture in my office when I leave and close the door. But the Brahman believer's unperceivable objects, lurking behind the scenes and supporting that which we can perceive, sound a lot like the material substances which he so emphatically rejects. The Brahman believer could argue that our ideas must exist in Brahman when not perceived by us. If our ideas exist in Brahman, then they presumably exist continuously. But Brahman cannot literally have our ideas. Our ideas are sensory ideas and Brahman can suffer nothing, nor be affected with any painful sensation, or indeed any sensation at all. Nor can our sensory ideas be copies of Brahman's non-sensory ones.Brahman from Scientific and Philosophical Point of ViewSuppose for the moment that science and belief in Brahman are actually compatible and they reach compatible conclusions. On the hypothesis that there is an unverifiable difference by principle of conception, it renders superfluous the more complicated language of the Brahman believer about reality. If there is really no difference between what things are like if a certain claim is true, and what they are like if it is not true, we can say that that claim has no meaning at all. If there is nothing which a putative assertion denies then there is nothing which it asserts either. Even though, by construction, Brahman's conception makes the same predictions as the hypothesis that common-sense reality, they are considerably less simple than the common-sense hypothesis. Inference to the best explanation, Abductive reasoning, is a cornerstone of scientific methodology. The common-sense hypothesis is better than the Brahman hypothesis. If a Brahman's Believer scientist, BB, makes the illusory universe object of scientific study, it will find that it behaves with the same complexity as the universe described by a scientist disbeliever of Brahman, a Common Sense scientist, CS. Thus what CS calls "the universe", the BB calls "illusions of Brahman". Presumably having made the case that the BB scientist is actually a CS scientist, make the same predictions, the CS scientist applies Occam's Razor, and suggests to the BB scientist to prefer the CS's standard “reality” language over something like a BB's "reality" language. This is because the standard "reality" of CS fits all the data available to the BB scientist, and on the hypothesis that there is an unverifiable predictable difference by principle of conception, it renders superfluous the more complicated language and explanation of BB about reality. But are science and belief in Brahman actually really compatible and they reach compatible conclusions? How could a CS philosopher-scientist think about the hypothetical Brahman and karma beliefs? The belief in rebirth is on the assumption that the universe is law-governed. Everyone is constrained so as to keep in view the accumulated karma. This requires that there exists something like a supernatural principle of cosmic order that arranges our genes, the family conditions we are born into, and the like to correspond to the moral responsibility worth of your past life deeds. Atoms combine to form such a world as individuals deserve because of their past life deeds. When accumulated merits and demerits become ready for fruition, they can impart motion to atoms. But from the scientific point of view, the laws of nature are no respecters of persons or morality, they are impersonal and natural in character.Physics calculations at the theoretical level suffice for the prediction of experimental results. The successful prediction of the results of observations is by far the most important goal of the physicist. The physicist should check most rigorously whether all our assertions, suppositions appear completely into a description of observed results. Any statement that falls beyond this limit, especially any attempt to express something about the “essence of physical things”, “Brahman”, must be eliminated and declared basically unverifiable and superfluous. There are no descriptions of “particles in themselves” or “waves in themselves.” Pictorial-level Interpretations of quantum mechanics between observations are to be excluded from physics. Why should physicians be required to superimpose mutually exclusive causal accounts and spatio-temporal descriptions upon quantum systems during intervals between observations? A series of highly abstract theories have been advanced recently to account for phenomena in the high-energy and short-time-interval domain. For example, M-theory features eleven space-time dimensions, and one version of string theory features twenty-six space-time dimensions. It no longer is plausible to require a high-level theory in physics that includes superimposed pictures of classical waves and particles. There are difficulties for an “explanation attribution implies causation” thesis, because whereas the behavior of an ensemble of particles may be explained satisfactorily, the behavior of an individual particle is not subject to explanation.If there is a supernatural karmic personal moral responsibility order of the sort postulated by the Indian traditions, it must be something radically different from the impersonal amoral natural order that science can discern and that governs the physical processes of the world. And yet the two orders must be intimately related, for it is precisely these natural amoral physical processes that are said to be disposed of by one’s supernatural personal moral responsibility karma. It is wholly implausible that two diverse systems of cosmic order such as this should arise from unrelated sources and come together accidentally; they must, then, have a supernatural common source. If the common source of the natural impersonal order and the supernatural personal karmic moral order is an impersonal amoral Brahman, we are still in need of some account of how and why it would be such as to produce the coordination of these two quite different sorts of order in the cosmos. Supernatural coordination would be much more readily explained if we postulate a personal supernatural coordination source between the impersonal natural order and the personal karmic moral order, as a supposed supernatural personal moral God, who desired that there be created moral persons, and who wished to provide a stable natural order within which they could live and exercise their varied powers, and not as supposed Brahman’s illusions of coordination, impersonal and amoral. It’s hard to see how there could be apparent karma and apparent meaning in an apparent physical universe governed by increasing apparent Entropy, if the universe is headed to apparent complete disorder. Physics’ long track record of apparent successes is the strongest argument for the exclusion of apparent karma from its account of apparent reality. The ultimate reality concept is unverifiable and superfluous.Most who believe in Brahman would argue that going beyond experience is the very essence of spirituality. However, self-reports from finite people of immediate acquaintance with a supposed transcendent thing don't afford a valid ground for inferring that this refers to Brahman's supposed nature beyond any properties and infinite. Neither would the fact that finite people were acquainted with a supposed eternal thing afford a valid ground for inferring that everything is Brahman. The Brahman's believer may say that just as one who can see may communicate new knowledge to the blind, so Brahman might perhaps communicate to us the transcendent existence of a spiritual world without properties. It is, indeed, conceivable that we might for example encounter animals or beings who tell us about a new sense. If these beings were for example to prove to us the Goldbach's conjecture or were to invent a new physical instrument or were to point out a hitherto unknown law of nature, then our knowledge would be increased with their help. For this sort of thing we can test, just the way even a blind man can understand and test the whole of physics and therewith any statement made by those who can see. But if a hypothetical Brahman encounter informs us something which we cannot verify independently of a specific faith, a belief without independent empirical evidence, then we do not know it for certain either. Therefore a meditation mystical experience of Brahman cannot give us knowledge beyond the empirical. The meaning of words is essentially inter-subjective. The contents of our own thoughts, and so of our very recognition of the words of others and the objects and events to which they refer, themselves depend on our sharing with others a pattern of interaction with the world. In describing his transcendence sensations the mystic does not give us any information about an independently shared reality but a dependent shared faith; he merely gives us indirect information about the condition of his own mind.The difficulty in considering for example the theories of meditation in Advaita, Krishnamurti, or Buddhism as objective theories of consciousness is the same difficulty in the origin of the scientific methodology of the Blind experiment: How to eliminate subjective, unrecognized Bias and Cognitive dissonance carried by an experiment's subjects and the conductors of scientific experiments? If the experiment subjects and the conductors of meditation experiments are the same people the problem is compounded. Justification of a theory consists in appealing to something independent: Meditation's experiences ground the beliefs implied by the meditator's sincere reports of such experiences, provided they can be said to cause those beliefs. But it may well be that the beliefs are part of the cause of the experience rather than the other way round.Mystical Experiences from The Scientific and Philosophical Point of ViewTo Krishnamurti thought was the stuff to avoid at all costs. The aim was to be totally uncontaminated by thought. Krishnamurti had many mystical experiences of a union. Some find the sometimes called "mystical experience" or "rapture," "ecstasy," or "bliss”, "enlightenment", "awakening", "savikalpa samadhi," "nirvikalpa samadhi," "satori", so compelling that they devote the rest of their lives to trying to get themselves back to that state again. But the specific teachings and practices of a specific metaphysical tradition, in this case perhaps Advaita like, may determine what kind of experience someone has, which means that mystical experience is not the proof of the teaching, Krishnamurti, Advaitin, Jew, Christian, Sufi, Buddhist, etc, but a result of the teaching.The same kinds of mystical experiences interpreted by people in theistic cultures as experiences of a comforting feel of the presence of God are interpreted by people in non-theistic cultures as experiences of something other than God. No Buddhist or Advaitin ever interprets such an experience as an experience of God, because Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta reject belief in God. Roman Catholics, as well as Orthodox Christians and Anglo Catholics, routinely report religious experiences in which they perceive the Virgin Mary's presence, whereas Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and Zoroastrians never report anything remotely like that. When someone perceives something they take to be God's presence, they obviously cannot perceive by his senses that this entity made the universe and knows everything, or take to be Brahman and experiment something infinite or that everything is Brahman. As mystical experiences contradict one another, it seems more reasonable to suppose that religious experiences should not be thought of in analogy with our sensory experiences: mystical experiences are not connections with some aspect of reality. Everything that can be said in favor of people's reports that they have experienced God or Brahman can equally well be said in favor of other people's reports that they have experienced abduction by space aliens.The lack of objective independent criteria in determining whether some experience of Jesus or Brahman in meditations and mystical experiences are veridical or illusory is the fatal weakness in testimony from an Advaita's meditation experience. If we accept the testimony of physicists concerning the truth of scientific theories, we do so not because of their authority, not because they say so, but because we believe that they can provide strong independent evidence in support of their positions. Is the Krishnamurti's or Teresa of Avila testimony able to provide strong independent evidence in support of Brahman or Jesus? The mystical experiences only seem profound and persuasive because the mind's critical faculties are relatively inactive during them.The words in which we report private sensations owe their meaning to their connections with the physical world. Without connections with the physical world, there aren't independent criteria for the re-identification of particular sensations. Without independent criteria, there aren't correct and wrong concepts, and therefore private sensations cannot be conceptualized. It is because checking our own impressions or memories to see if we are following private sensations concepts correctly without independent criteria it is like we correct our own school test, without external correction what seems correct is correct, there aren't wrong concepts, it is unverifiable coherence by us. If what exactly constitutes a supposed enlightenment awakening is in principle incapable of translation into ordinary language concepts, then the enlightened is unable to make sense of it for us and for himself too. If an enlightened can talk, we cannot understand him, and he himself, because understanding is only possible based on similar forms of life and the supposed radical difference between human and enlightened forms of life would therefore also preclude any correct or incorrect independent concepts for us and the enlightened. Theories of meditation need to be a matter of public empirical investigation.Is there really a need for the knowledge of Advaita, Buddhist or Krishnamurti doctrines to have meaningful and lasting effects on mystical experiences? Are meaningful and lasting effects mystical experiences validation of metaphysical religious doctrines? Some scholars have proposed that many of the qualities of a drug-induced mystical experience are indistinguishable from mystical experiences achieved through non-drug techniques, such as meditation. In 1962 the Marsh Chapel Experiment, which was run by Pahnke at the Harvard Divinity School, almost all of the graduate degree divinity student volunteers who received psilocybin reported profound Christian religious experiences. One of the participants was religious scholar Huston Smith, author of several textbooks on comparative religion; he later described his experience as "the most powerful cosmic homecoming I have ever experienced.” The study cast considerable doubt on the assertion that mystical experiences catalyzed by drugs are in any way inferior to non-drug mystical experiences in both their immediate content and long-term effects. A follow-up study conducted 14 months after the original psilocybin session confirmed that participants continued to attribute deep personal meaning to the experience. About two-thirds indicated that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction. In 2011, it was published the results of further studies. In a 14-month follow-up, the researchers found that 94% of the volunteers rated their experiences with psilocybin as one of the top five most spiritually significant of their lives. None of the 90 sessions that took place throughout the study were rated as decreasing well-being or life satisfaction. Moreover, 89% reported positive changes in their behaviors as a result of the experiences. (Wikipedia)Are meaningful and lasting effects mystical experiences from drugs different from enlightenment awakening experiences of religious doctrines? Total loss of ego. Feeling as the time becomes meaningless, out-of-body experiences and extrasensory perception type sensations. Merging with the universe. The actual universe, as normally perceived, ceases to exist. Experience of mystical death/rebirth. Connection to an "all-knowing presence" or a "universal knowledge", which many equate with God, Brahman, love, transcendent unity, or enlightenment. All this can be achieved with strong doses of vaporized DMT, very strong doses of psilocybin mushrooms, very strong doses of LSD, strong doses of salvinorin A, and high but sub-anesthetic doses of ketamine.Are the qualities of spontaneous mystical psychosis experiences different from religious enlightenment awakening? Mystical psychosis is a term coined by Arthur J. Deikman in the early 1970s to characterize first-person accounts of psychotic experiences that are strikingly similar to reports of mystical experiences. According to Deikman, psychotic experience need not be considered pathological, especially if consideration is given to the values and beliefs of the individual concerned. The mystical experience may be several causes: psychosis, substance abuse or withdrawal, and mood disorders.It does not matter that one cannot experience another's subjective meditative religious sensations. Unless the talk of such subjective experience is learned through public shared experience the actual content is irrelevant; all we can discuss is what is available in our public shared language. To know the meaning of a word is to know how to use it rightly; and where there can be no check on how a man uses a word there is no room to talk of "right" and "wrong" use. To understand the meaning of words like "mind," "thought," "love," "belief," "dream", "Brahman," "savikalpa samadhi," "nirvikalpa samadhi," "nirvana," and so forth, we must attend to how these words are actually publically learned and shared in the first place.Brahman and MoralityThe Brahman's believer faces two problems: He must characterize the phenomena he takes as basic, Brahman, and must explain how the fundamental phenomena, Brahman, make up the apparent non-basic phenomena, the "illusions". Without this characterization and explanation the Brahman's belief is like any other religious faith. Advaita/Buddhism denies that, ultimately, there are such things as people who could support moral properties as deserving. Why does the teaching of karma and rebirth, even if not strictly speaking true, give those who accept it an apparent prudential reason to be moral, if the apparent reward and punishment generated by apparent karma across lives could never be deserved in the absence of a real transmigrating self? Ultimately there is just a unique impersonal entity. After the apparent sun dies, some 5 billion years from now, there will be other apparent worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being and they will know nothing of a place once called apparent earth, now a mote of apparent dust suspended in an apparent sunbeam. Is there apparent karma and meaning in the apparent universe? What could be the point of the huge apparent superabundance of planets, especially given the fact that humanity will never know most of it? Why does Brahman precede humanity with apparent vast multitudes of life forms, most of which become extinct before human existence? Several apparent creatures evolved eyes and then lost them as they adapted to dark environments. Several apparent parasites, having begun their evolutionary careers as complex organisms, became simpler after taking up their parasitic lifestyles. If a world in which there is apparent evil, natural disasters, and disease in apparently good people, and apparent virtue is not always rewarded, they are not evidencing against the existence of karma and apparent meaning, why should we consider the apparent contrary conditions to be such evidence? Why does Buddha teach that each apparent action has its own specific apparent consequence for the apparent agent, the apparent hedonistic nature of which is determined by apparent causal laws, apparent karma, and in such a way as to require apparent rebirth as long as apparent action continues, if the karma and universe meaning really doesn't exist?Brahman lies beyond the illusions of good and evil. Therefore how can the Brahman concept demand of us any specific duty? If all are merely manifestations of illusory aspects of Brahman, should one person put their own interests before another, or the sentient ahead of the insentient, or the living ahead of the non-living? Believers who are concerned to preserve their individual free conscience must allow that there are non-Brahman minds. If non-Brahman minds are merely manifestations aspects of Brahman, then Brahman is the ultimate determinant of the actions of these minds. The illusion of the burden of moral responsibility for one's deeds is not thus to be borne by the individual. Therefore if Brahman is the sole constitution of everything, it is plagued with serious problems, because it cannot be that distinct minds jointly constitute a unique mind, for the preservation of individual free conscience, and Brahman is otherness, not a conscious mind. If Brahman were some type of all-embracing free conscience he would undermine the autonomous personhood free conscience of finite individuals, for one person cannot be the same of another. If Brahman is perfect and unchangeable, and we are unity, then illusions of finitude, multiplicity, and change cannot arise. If reincarnation and karma are illusions, then there must be someone whose illusions they are, and since by nature Brahman cannot be subject to illusion, there must be persons with a free conscience who are not identical to Brahman. A common mark of religions is the recognition that the human condition is unsatisfactory and their offer to overcome this state through a process of human transformation to some more elevated state. If Brahman is the universe and everything, can belief in Brahman respond to this? Something can only become merged with Brahman, or become Brahman, if it is now different from Brahman. Can belief in Brahman offer the believer hope for a better life if what is distinctive about Brahman is precisely the disavowal of any hope for personal immortality? Why don't impersonality and indiscernibility without qualities mean eternal death?Why is it necessary to assume the existence of a soul?When a patient afflicted with Alzheimer dies, what is it that survives, if precisely, most of his memories have already been lost? How does your mind have experiences similar to what you would have if you don't have an impaired brain? How is it possible that the mind can perceive without sensory organs? Our sensory organs seem to be involved in every activity we try to describe even though we have tried to imagine a mind existing without it. If souls are immaterial and have no spatial extension, how can they be separate from other souls? It would be far from clear what the soul exactly could be if it is not identical to the mind, and what the mind could be without a brain. Occam's razor requires that unless there is any compelling evidence, there is no need to assume the existence of a soul that uses the brain as its instrument. Neurology and psychology are perfectly explained if our minds are located with our bodies in particular, if our minds just are parts of our bodies, but it is much harder to explain if our minds are located somewhere beyond the confines of our universe, or at no place.If every person's soul is a reborn soul, how does rebirth account for the increasing human world population?Varieties of Karma ConceptionKarma refers to the principle of causality where the intent and actions of an individual influence the future of that individual. Good intent and good deed contribute to good karma and future happiness, while bad intent and bad deed contribute to bad karma and future suffering. With origins in ancient India, it is a key concept in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Taoism, Shintoism.Karma concept in Hinduism developed and evolved over centuries. Over time, various schools of Hinduism developed many different definitions of karma, some making karma appear quite deterministic, while others make room for free will and moral agents. For example, Vedanta school acknowledges karma-rebirth doctrine, but concludes it is a theory that is not derived from reality and cannot be proven, considers it invalid for its failure to explain evil/inequality/other observable facts about society, treats it as a convenient fiction to solve practical problems in 2700 years ago, and declares it irrelevant; in the Advaita Vedanta school, actions in current life have moral consequences and liberation is possible within one's life as a self-realized person. Yoga school considers karma from past lives to be secondary, one's behavior and psychology in the current life is what has consequences and leads to entanglements. Nyaya school of Hinduism considers karma and rebirth as central. Mimamsa school gives a negligible role to karma from past lives, disregards Samsara and Moksha. Each school has sub-schools in Hinduism, such as Vedanta school's non-dualism and dualism sub-schools. Furthermore, there are other schools of Hinduism such as the Carvaka, and the materialists Lokayata who denied the theory of karma-rebirth as well as the existence of God.It’s no good saying that karma shouldn’t be interpreted in this or that manner; there can be a Jain interpretation, a Hindu interpretation, a Buddhist interpretation, and so on, but in a system with no evidence to back it up, and available for anyone to co-opt for their own purposes, there can be no such thing as wrong interpretation. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them. All of us disagree with billions of people all of the time, particularly over matters of faith. Incredulous disagreement is normal in matters of imaginative speculation. How can the believer ever be confident that a particular revelation originates from the supernatural?Rebirths cannot have a soul, Karma doesn’t have an objectThe reward and punishment generated by karma across lives and rebirth could never exist in the absence of a transmigrating self. Karma to work, it is important that the person who is rewarded or punished is the same as the one who lived virtuously or lived sinfully. But the Buddhist perspective is that what we routinely call ego, self, soul, individual personality, are merely conventional terms that do not apply to anything real. Buddhism denies there is any such soul or self in a living being, but does assert that there is a cycle of transmigration consisting of rebirth and death as the fundamental nature of existence. It is no doubt quite difficult to believe that karma and rebirth exist in the form that the Buddha claims. Advaita describes knowing one's own soul as identical with Brahman as the path to nirvana. If one's own soul is identical to Brahman then karma and rebirth are illusions. It is said that Brahman’s existence can be confirmed by those who have developed mystical experience. But this is of little help to those not already convinced that mystical experience is a reliable means of knowledge. Disagreement among modern interpreters of the not-self doctrine attests to the difficulty of providing a definitive account of this core aspect of Buddhist philosophy. It is clear that the body ceases to exist at death. And given the Buddha's argument that mental states all originate in dependence on sense-object contact events, it seems no psychological constituent of the person can transmigrate either. Yet the Buddha claims that persons who have not yet achieved enlightenment will be reborn as sentient beings of some sort after they die. If there is no constituent whatever that moves from one life to the next, how could the being in the next life be the same person as the being in this life? This question becomes all the more pointed when it is added that rebirth is governed by karma, something that functions as a kind of cosmic justice: those born into fortunate circumstances do so as a result of good deeds in prior lives, while unpleasant births result from evil past deeds. Such a system of reward and punishment could be justified only if the recipient of pleasant or unpleasant karmic fruit is the same person as the agent of the good or evil action. It is incomprehensible how this could be so in the absence of a persisting self. The evidence that the Buddha himself accepted rebirth and karma seems quite strong. However, some Buddhists' doubts about non-self and rebirth have led to the rejection of not non-self but rebirth. The pedagogical teaching of karma and rebirth for householders, even if not strictly speaking true, would hypothetically give those who accept it a prudential reason to be moral. But this sort of noble lie justification for the Buddha teaching a doctrine he does not accept fails in the face of the evidence that he also taught it to quite advanced monastics. Buddha teaches the far stricter view that each action has its own specific consequence for the agent, the hedonic nature of which is determined by causal laws and in such a way as to require rebirth as long as the action continues. There is a conflict between the doctrine of non-self and the teaching of karma and rebirth, it is not to be resolved by weakening the Buddha's commitment to the latter.The Immorality of KarmaThis is an example of what Buddhist women, not only in Thailand but elsewhere, can hear over and over: A woman had a ten-year marriage with a husband who was an alcoholic. With immense suffering, she went to see a monk and ask for spiritual guidance. The monk said to her, “Be patient and keep making more merit so that one day the accumulated merit will help improve your life.” That same monk gave similar advice to another woman whose husband was having an affair with another woman. The monk said: “There is nothing you can do about it. Keep being nice to him. Do not ever challenge his behavior, because you have done bad karma to him in your previous life.”(See Objections to Karma and Rebirth, Ingrid Hansen Smythe, in The myth of an afterlife edited by Michael Martin 2015)How do you convince generations of people to muck out your sewers for you? Tell him that due to immoral acts committed in his past lives, it’s his own fault that they were born untouchables, it certainly has nothing to do with expedient social structures that almost seem calculated to benefit the people in the higher castes, who wield all the power. Convince someone that there’s absolutely no way out of his misery in this life, and that his only hope for a better life next time around is to fulfill the duties of his caste to the letter, and those duties just happen to include a lifetime underground covered in human waste. In other words, make someone believe in karma and rebirth and you’ve got yourself a docile workhorse who won’t even question his fate and will even raise his own sons to believe that they, too, must spend their lives covered in human waste in order to work off their bad karma.The concept of karma perfectly justifies the caste system based on birth. It favors the argument that people of lower castes have to blame themselves for their plight because of their bad karma in their past lives. Their pitiable plight is a stern warning to the rest of humanity that the wheel of dharma operates inexorably, sparing none and favoring none. This line of argument is found in many scriptures, including the Bhagavad Gita, according to which people of good merit and those who had developed detachment or dispassion were born in pious families. By combining the belief in karma with the caste system, the ancient lawmakers expected people to follow them sincerely as an integral part of their religious duty. Observing these duties without questioning them was an act of merit, which entitled them to progress on the path of dharma and obtain a better life in the next birth. Postulating rebirth is essential because, obviously, karma doesn’t deliver its promised rewards and punishments in just one.How could animals suffer as a form of punishment when they’ve not done anything wrong? If it is necessary to postulate regression to lower life-forms in order to account for animal suffering, then the number of humans who would have had to exist would be many orders of magnitude greater than the number that has actually existed, and it seems possible that we might all be trapped on the wheel of rebirth forever.To rebirth or karma to work, the person who is rewarded or punished needed to be the same as the one who lived virtuously or lived immorally. But how is it possible?If one person's mind is taken from his deteriorated body and placed into another healthy body, the resulting person has all of the anterior brain memories. Because the same set of memories had rewarded or punished needs to be distinct bodies, the view that persons are identified with their bodies must be false. If the soul is immaterial, not identical to the mind/brain/body, how can we be sure that a soul continues to be the same in an afterlife? If you do not remember being a baby or a soul in past lives, can you still surely claim to be the same soul as a baby/past soul if the soul is immaterial, not identical to the mind/brain/body? How someone could tell that one and only one soul has been associated with a body? We cannot observe a soul, the reason for thinking that a person has the same soul over time is just that the person's body appears to be the same over time. We can never know if our soul is the same as a previous life. There is no intelligible criterion for soul identity to remain the same over time.Might a past being be you if and only if you can now remember an experience you had then? Is memory the criterion of identity of souls? No. Suppose we want to know whether Abel, who exists now, is the same as Cain, whom we know to have existed at some time in the past. The memory criterion tells us that Abel is Cain just if Abel can now remember an experience Cain had at that past time. But Abel's seeming to remember one of Cain's experiences counts as genuine memory only if Abel actually is Cain. If God can recreate a being that has all the memories appropriate to someone, what would prevent God from creating more identical memories? If they all had the same memories, on this account they would all be the same and this contradicts what we mean by personal identity. So we should already have to know whether Abel is Cain before we could apply the principle that is supposed to tell us whether he is. Therefore you cannot know whether someone genuinely remembers a past experience without already knowing whether he is the one who had it. That makes it uninformative to say that you are the person whose experiences you can remember, that is, that memory continuity is sufficient for personal identity. It is uninformative because you cannot know whether someone genuinely remembers a past experience without already knowing whether he is the one who had it.Is a person x who exists at one time identical with someone y existing at another time if and only if x is, at the one time, psychologically continuous with y as it is at the other time? Suppose you are reborn in another body. Will you be the same if you perceive and feel the world with other sensory organs and physical capacity? Why will there be psychological continuity of souls? Psychological-continuity of souls views conflict with our belief that each of us was once a fetus. A 12-week-old fetus is something that will, if all goes well, be born, learn to speak, and eventually become an adult human person. Yet none of us is in any way psychologically the same 12-week-old fetus.Final WordsMystical experiences correlate to observable neurological events that can be independently confirmed, there is no need of recourse to the supernatural. Supernaturalists themselves will have to appeal to such explanations in the course of offering an account for most mystical experiences that they consider to be non-veridical. So the burden surely lies with them to show that some mystical experiences, those favored by them as veridical, are indeed produced by the supernatural. Once you appreciate the widespread tendency of people to arrive at mystical interpretations that derive from the religions with which the subjects are familiar, it is clear that none can maintain that he alone is privileged and rival interpretations are erroneous. Given also the correlations between religious experience, ingestion of drugs and observable clinical neurological events, trust in these experiences as routes to the transcendent are entirely unwarranted. A pure consciousness without concepts, reached by "mystical experience", can be a personal sense of certainty without independent critical objectivity. Mystical enlightening metaphysics and scientific paradigms are so different that almost nothing you can say in the language of religion makes any sense in the language of science; and vice-versa. The challenge is to express a hypothesis concerning the metaphysics of enlightening that makes sense in the independent language of science. Nobody can live permanently in mystical experience, if we have any independent idea of what anyone else means by these words. It seems like religious faith like any other.These and further considerations in DevasGuru's answer to What are the strongest arguments against religion?

What is oscillating? The electromagnetic field caused by (1) certain types of nerve cells(neurons) that can generate rhythmic firing/spiking on their own without any input or by (2) dynamically assembled groups of connected neurons that individually spike irregularly in response to input, but collectively generate an oscillating field due to synchronization mechanisms driven largely by their connectivity.[ 20 , 25 , 30, 37,38 , 40]Oscillations have been observed at different frequency ranges and have been given different names such as delta (1-4Hz), theta (4-8 Hz), alpha (8-12Hz), beta (12-30Hz), gamma (>30 Hz) etc. Figures 1 and 2 [30]Understanding these oscillatory patterns particularly by correlating with animal behavior, including humans, is serving as a valuable tool to reverse engineer mechanisms of brain function.[30]Several basic questions regarding oscillations remain unanswered requiring further study such as the details of their role, the neuronal mechanisms of their sources, how to interpret them, how to standardize measuring them etc.[44,46]What brain functions do these oscillations correlate with?Neurons fire in the backdrop of neighboring neurons, some of which may also be firing while the others listening, and they influence each other with excitatory and inhibitory connections. Figures 3,4 and 5. [20 , 25 ,30]The firing activity of neurons can be measured at different population scales - (1) individual neuron spiking, (2) activity of tens of thousands of neurons, (3) several millions and (4) the consolidated activity of multiple brain areas. The measurements can range from electric voltage recordings done inside neurons or outside in the space between them, to noninvasive measurement of the magnetic field registered outside the head. [ 26, 43]By measuring individual neuron firing spikes along with the background voltage oscillations in healthy/impaired humans and animals, oscillatory patterns with characteristic properties of frequency, modulation/coupling type etc. (Figure 6, 7 and 8) are beginning to emerge that correlate with different information/memory related activities such asCommunication across anatomically different regions of the brain.[7]Transient encoding, maintenance, and manipulation of memory (volatile/working memory, processing) [ 27, 35 ,42]Consolidating memory into long term storage (persistent memory) [41]Recall/Retrieval of memory from long term storage [41]What is an example of oscillations correlating with real life experience?Even though oscillations are present in all states of the brain, the example below highlights individual aspects where oscillations with different characteristics correlate with cognition,behavior, and memory.[14,7,8]Imagine the first time perception of a Ferrari sports car. The information about its color (red), the stimulus category (car) and its motion (moving fast) is processed in anatomically different regions in the brain, but simultaneously perceived together.These representations need to be linked by some mechanism to ensure that the brain assigns them to the same object. This binding function is made possible by communication across these different regions through coherent wave patterns.If this experience seemed so fantastic(novel experience), then we may also remember other details such as where we saw it (location) and even the minute detail of the aroma of a cheeseburger (smell) from a nearby restaurant as the Ferrari zips by.We may then immediately recall the experience internally (processing,working memory) reliving the experience or talk about it others.If the experience was so novel, the experience may be played in “fast forward” mode while we are asleep and consolidated into long term memory. Our recalling the experience to others over the course of next few days aids this consolidation and strengthening of this long term memory even further.A few months/years later, we may still recall that experience with all the minute detail including the aroma of cheeseburgers wafting in the air as the Ferrari zipped by.Of course, if one had little to no interest in cars, the memory would be transiently held, if at all it is, only to fade away soon or during the course of the day.Oscillations with characteristic properties of frequency, modulation and coupling type(multiple frequencies coupled in phase, amplitude etc.) correlate with each of the key aspects of this example – communication, processing,volatile memory, consolidation into persistent memory, and retrieval.What do we know so far about the role of oscillations?The firing of a neuron is driven by its input except for those special neurons that have intrinsic mechanisms to generate firing on their own.[30,37,38 ]Certain physical,electrical and chemical properties of a neuron dictate the time length of the sampling window of its input from other neurons, to be in the range of 10-30 msecs. A neuron will fire based on the input it samples in this time window. If an input spike to a neuron comes slightly later than this 10-30 msec time window, it will be sampled in the next time window - so it will be part of the next "event" as far as this neuron is concerned. Figure 2 [30, 34 ,45]Memory of events is encoded in the connection strengths between neurons. The altering of connection strengths between a pair of neurons also requires the participating neuron pair to be in certain activity states within a time window of 10-30 msecs.[30, 35 ,39]The 10-30 msec time constraint for the input sampling window and the same time constraint for the encoding of memory mandates a synchronization mechanism to make neurons fire in this short time window to constitute an event and to potentially store it, despite the individual irregular spiking behavior. [ 27, 32]For example, while information can be encoded quite sparsely in a small set of connected neurons for an aspect of sensory stimulus (e.g. the concept of a celebrity like Jennifer Aniston evoked by a photograph of her), it still requires sufficient number of neurons in this sparse set to fire synchronously to both constitute that information and subsequently recall that information. [ 17 , 18 , 21 , 35 , 41]This synchronous firing is made possible largely by the inhibitory actions of intermediate neurons that connect this sparse set, generating a local oscillating field. These inhibitory neurons help collectively time the spiking of these neurons to millisecond precision within certain phases of the oscillation field. Inhibitory neurons appear to also play a key role in containing the size of oscillating sparse group of neurons. This containment avoids an explosive growth in the group size of spiking neurons due to connectivity with other neurons Figure 11.[50, 20 ,40]The field oscillations that emerge from the synchronizing action of inhibitory neurons on the collective firing of the excitatory neurons satisfy the 10-30 msec constraint and hence have a frequency greater than 30 Hz ( 1000/30 = 33). Each oscillation conceptually frames spikes into time window slots with slot widths determined by the frequency. The spiking group of neurons that fire within a time slot may vary with each slot creating a temporal sequence of events [ 19] Figure 14The power in these high frequency oscillations ( > 30 Hz) is not much, given only a sparse set of neurons are typically involved. So these oscillations, on their own cannot transmit information across different anatomical regions of the brain, other than rare instances where direct wiring between distant regions have enabled synchronous oscillations across those regions Figure 13.[ 2 ,6 ,8]There are slower frequency oscillations involving larger number of neurons and hence with more power in their oscillations. The lower power high frequency oscillations that encapsulate information spikes "ride on" these higher power lower frequency oscillations by different modulation schemes. The longer time windows of these low frequency oscillations serve to nest and temporally serialize the higher frequency oscillations that encapsulate episodic events Figures 13 and 14.[11, 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 19 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 28 , 29 ,36 , 42,8]This appears to be the general mechanism behind communication of information between different parts of the brain. The saving of Ferrari sports car into persistent memory appears to be facilitated by similar coupling between higher and slower frequency oscillations. [ 43, 47, 48, 49 ,50]Humans and other mammals have a working memory store that is anatomically distinct from a long term memory store. While sleeping, a high frequency oscillating wave form ( ~ 200 Hz) has been observed in the working memory region that appears to perform a fast replay of memories encoded during the day and this replay is coordinated by a slower oscillation to consolidate some of those memories into the long term memory store. Figures 9,10 and 15. [31, 33 , 52 , 53]In the Ferrari car example, the simultaneous perception of different aspects of the car stored in different anatomical regions appear to be made possible by phase synchronized oscillations across these regions- communication through coherence. Figure 7 (image Ba) and Figure 12 [7, 13]FiguresFigure 1. Oscillatory classes in the cortex. State of the art Buzsaki Lab [Open]Figure 2. a, Location of the recording electrodes. b, c, Raster plots of 25 pyramidal cells that were active during a 1-s period of spatial exploration out of 68 simultaneously recorded neurons. b, Neurons are arranged in order of physical position in the CA1 pyramidal layer (colour-code refers to locations in a). Vertical lines indicate troughs of theta waves (bottom trace). Location-specific synchrony is not apparent in the population activity. c, The same spike rasters shown in b, reordered by stochastic search over all possible orderings to highlight synchrony between anatomically distributed populations. 'Cell assembly' organization is now visible, with repeatedly synchronous firing of some subpopulations (circled). Organization of cell assemblies in the hippocampus, Nature 2003Figure 3. Pacemaker neuron network that drives breathing. The top left figure shows a collection of pacemaker neurons in brainstem that drive breathing under normal conditions. The red and the blue circles are excitatory pacemaker neurons - the grey circles are the inhibitory non-pacemaker neurons.These red and blue pacemaker neurons generate spikes without any input. The figure to its right shows a red pacemaker neuron functioning alone under low oxygen conditions (hypoxia) generating the gasping response - the other pacemakers ( white circles labeled E) and inhibitory neurons (white circles labeled I) have gone silent. Pacemaker neurons and neuronal network: an integrative view, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2004Figure 4. Central pattern generators. (a) Early work suggested two hypotheses for the generation of rhythmic and alternating movements. In the reflex chain model (left) sensory neurons innervating a muscle fire and excite interneurons that activate motor neurons to the antagonist muscle. Right, in a central pattern generator (CPG) model a central circuit generates rhythmic patterns of activity in the motor neurons to antagonist muscles. (b) Fictive motor patterns resemble those recorded in vivo. Top left, picture of a lobster with electromyographic recording (EMG) wires implanted to measure stomach motor patterns in the behaving animal. Top right, EMG recordings showing that triphasic motor pattern generated by the LP, PY, and PD neurons. Modified from [34]. Bottom left, in vitro preparation, showing the dissected stomatogastric nervous system in a saline-filled dish with extracellular recording electrodes on the motor nerves and intracellular recordings from the somata of the stomatogastric ganglion motor neurons. Bottom right, unpublished recordings by V. Thirumalai made in vitro from the stomatogastric ganglion of the lobster, Homarus americanus. The top three traces are simultaneous intracellular recordings from the somata of the LP, PY, and PD neurons, and the bottom trace is an extracellular recording from the motor nerve that carries the axons of these neurons. Note the similarity of the in vivo recordings and the fictive motor patterns produced in vitro in the absence of sensory inputs. STG, stomatogastric ganglion; OG, esophageal ganglion; CoG, commissural ganglion; lvn, lateral ventricular nerve. Central pattern generators and the control of rhythmic movements, Cell 2001Figure 5. Cellular mechanisms underlying pattern generation. (a) Neurons have different intrinsic properties. Some neurons fire bursts of action potentials endogenously (panel 1). In some neurons depolarizing current pulses trigger plateau potentials that outlast the duration of the depolarization but that can be terminated by hyperpolarizing current pulses (panel 2). Some neurons respond to inhibition with rebound firing (panel 3), and others show spike frequency adaptation (panel 4). (b)Rhythms can be generated by endogenous bursters, or can be an emergent property of synaptic coupling between non-bursting neurons. In pacemaker driven networks a pacemaker neuron or neuron (red) can synaptically drive an antagonist (green) to fire in alternation. The simplest example of a network oscillator is one formed between two neurons that fire non-rhythmically in isolation, but fire in alternating bursts as a consequence of reciprocal inhibition.Central pattern generators and the control of rhythmic movements, Cell 2001Figure 6. Oscillatory coupling mechanisms. (a) Schematic view of the human brain showing hot spots of transient gamma oscillations (i–iv) andtheta oscillation in the hippocampus (HI); entorhinal cortex (EC). Oscillators of the same and different kind (e.g., theta, gamma) caninfluence each other in the same and different structures, thereby modulating the phase, amplitude, or both. (b) Phase-phase coupling ofgamma oscillations between two areas. Synthetic data used for illustration purposes. Coherence spectrum (or other, more specific,phase-specific measures) between the two signals can determine the strength of phase coupling. (c) Cross-frequency phase-amplitudecoupling. Although phase coupling between gamma waves is absent, the envelope of gamma waves at the two cortical sites is modulatedby the common theta rhythm. This can be revealed by the power-power correlation (comodugram; right). (d) Gamma phase-phasecoupling between two cortical sites, whose powers are modulated by the common theta rhythm. Both gamma coherence and gammapower-power coupling are high. (e) Cross-frequency phase-phase coupling. Phases of theta and gamma oscillations are correlated, asshown by the phase-phase plot of the two frequencies. (f) Hippocampal theta oscillation can modulate gamma power by its duty cycleat multiple neocortical areas so that the results of the local computations are returned to the hippocampus during the accrual(‘‘readiness’’) phase of the slow oscillation. Mechanisms of gamma oscillations, Annual review Neurosciance 2012 [Open]Figure 7.Putative functions of phase synchronization. A | Neural oscillations may show phase synchronization (left; stable phase relationships) or may show no phase synchronization (right; variable phase relationships). Methods for the quantification of phase synchronization have been described extensively elsewhere116, 142. B | Potential roles of phase synchronization in neural processing. Blue curves represent oscillations of neural assemblies in two brain regions, arrows denote interregional information transfer. Ba | Phase synchronization of neural assemblies coordinates the timing of synaptic inputs to a common target region. Coincident activity (indicated by the box surrounding two coinciding spikes) thus reliably induces action potentials. Bb | Phase synchronization between multiple brain regions allows for efficient information transfer (indicated by the arrows) during excitable periods (the box indicates the first such period). Bc | Precise timing of action potentials resulting from phase synchronization between two regions can induce spike timing-dependent plasticity of the synaptic connections (depicted on the right) between these regions. Consequently, communication is facilitated further (indicated by thicker arrows). Bd | The putative function of theta phase synchronization between two regions. The propensity of action potentials that are propagated from region 2 to region 1 (indicated by the arrows) to induce synaptic plasticity in region 1 depends on the theta phase in region 1 during which the action potentials arrive. Therefore, phase synchronization in the theta range may serve to recruit memory-related regions (for example, the hippocampus) during periods of high susceptibility to synaptic potentiation (solid arrows). LTD, long-term depression; LTP, long-term potentiation. The role of phase synchronization in memory processes, Nature reviews 2011Figure 8. Phase amplitude Cross Frequency Coupling (CFC) occurs between distinct brain rhythms, but varies as a function of cortical area and task demands... The functional role of cross-frequency coupling, Cell, 2010 [Open]Figure 9. Reactivation of spike sequences. This figure shows a schematic illustration of how CA1 pyramidal cells tend to fire in the same order during sleep as during a prior track running session [37,38]. Upper panel: firing probability of six hippocampal pyramidal cells A–F as a function of the location of the rat as it traverses the linear track.Bottom panels: spike times of the same cells during sleep before and after the track running. Note that in the first sleep (the sleep before track running), cells fire in an order that is unrelated to ensemble firing patterns during subsequent track running. However, in sleep after exploration, the order of cell firing during an SWR reflects the order in which the cells fired during track running.Play it again:reactivation of waking experience and memory, Cell 2010 [Open]Figure 10. Proposed roles of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in the formation and recall of remote memories. Initially, memories are encoded in hippocampal–neocortical networks (A, thick lines). At this early time point, the hippocampus is crucial for integrating information from distributed cortical modules, each representing individual components of a memory. However, over time direct projections from the hippocampus are thought to transfer a high-order representation of the memory to the PFC (B), which then uses this information to facilitate the transfer of information from the hippocampus to the neocortex, via the entorhinal and perirhinal cortices. As initially proposed for the hippocampus, the PFC may also use this version of the memory to strengthen the connections between the distributed cortical modules involved in the memory (thick lines), and to integrate the memory within related preexisting memories. Later, the PFC may also use this memory to identify and recall context-relevant information from remote memory stores. Finally, during recall of remote memories, the PFC appears to inhibit hippocampal activity (blue line), thereby preventing the encoding of redundant information. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Frankland & Bontempi, 2005. Hippocampal memory consolidation during sleep: a comparison of mammals and birds. biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 2011[Open]Figure 11. Segregation of cell assemblies by inhibition. A. A ring of pyramidal neurons (1–6), mutually innervating an interneuron (i). The synaptic strength between the interneuron and pyramidal cell 4 is stronger than between other pairs. When pyramidal cell one receives an input (arrow), cells 1 to 3 are activiated while 4 to 6 remain silent (segregated).... Neural syntax: cell assemblies, synapsembles, and Readers[Open]Figure 12. Individual subdural recording sites from the patients studied by Watrous et al.1 (blue, prefrontal; green, parietal; orange, precuneus; yellow, parahippocampal).The red oscillation (1–4 Hz) represents coherence between brain regions during spatial memory. The orange oscillation (7–10 Hz) represents coherence between these regions during temporal memory. Multiplexed memories:a view from human cortex, Nature Neuroscience 2013[Open]Figure 13. Power spectrum of EEG from the right temporal lobe in a sleeping human subject. Subdural recording. Note the near-linear decrease of log power with increasing log frequency from .5 to 100 Hz. Neuronal oscillations in cortical networks, Science 2004[Open]Figure 14. Schematic of a neural code. The ovals at top represent states of the same network during two gamma cycles (active cells are black and constitute the ensemble that codes for a particular item). Different ensembles are active in different gamma cycles. The Theta-Gamma Neural Code, Neuron 2013Figure 15. Three phenomena that occur during sleep have been linked to memory enhancement—slow-wave oscillations in brain electrical activity, reactivation of recent experiences, and changes in synaptic connectivity but the strength of the evidence (indicated by arrow thickness) varies. As shown in red, Yang et al. link both reactivation and slow-wave sleep to changes in synaptic connectivity that enhance learning. Memories-getting wired during sleep, Science 6, June 2014ReferencesSome of the references below require subscription for viewing while others have open access. The ones that have open access are marked "[Open]".State of the art, Buzsaki lab [Open]Neuronal oscillations in cortical networks - Science, 2004 [Open]Organization of cell assemblies in hippocampus, Nature 2003Pacemaker neurons and neuronal network: an integrative view, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2004Central pattern generators and the control of rhythmic movements, Cell 2001 [Open]Mechanisms of gamma oscillations, Annual review Neuroscience 2012 [Open]The role of phase synchronization in memory processes, Nature reviews 2011The functional role of cross-frequency coupling, Cell, 2010 [Open]Play it again:reactivation of waking experience and memory, Cell 2010 [Open]Hippocampal memory consolidation during sleep: a comparison of mammals and birds. biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 2011[Open]Membrane Resonance Enables Stable and Robust Gamma Oscillations,Cerebral cortex, 2012Multifaceted roles for low-frequency oscillations in bottom-up and top-down processing during navigation and memory, NeuroImage 2014Multiplexed memories: a view from human cortex, Nature Neuroscience 2013 [Open] This is a review of the paper cited below [14]. A hypothesis called the 'spectral fingerprint' proposes that frequency band-specific inter-regional coherence subserves many cognitive processes. This hypothesis does not state that information is being encoded in low frequency oscillations. Rather, the idea is that setting two or more regions in phase coherence facilitates information transfer in single-unit volleys by local adjustments in likelihood of spiking.Frequency-specific network connectivity increases underlie accurate spatiotemporal memory retrieval, Nature Neuroscience, 2013 [Open]Gamma Oscillatory Firing Reveals Distinct Populations of Pyramidal Cells in the CA1 Region of the Hippocampus, Journal of Neuroscience, 2008 [Open]Recognition memory and theta-gamma interactions in the hippocampus, Hippocampus 2013Modulation of theta phase sync during a recognition memory task, Cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, 2012[Open]Phase-dependent neuronal coding of objects in short-term memory, PNAS 2009 [Open]Segmentation of spatial experience by hippocampal theta sequences, Nature Neuroscience 2012 [Open] This paper suggests based on encoding of spatial paths in rats, a mechanism for cognitive chunking of experience. When a rat navigates its environment, ongoing experiences are compressed into theta sequences. The spatial paths represented by theta sequences extend ahead of the animal while accelerating and begin farther behind the animal during deceleration.Spontaneous synchronization in nature IEEE 1997 [ Open] Discusses the prevalence of mutual synchronization of oscillators in nature such as the synchronized flashing on an off by Southeast Asian fireflies. When they begin to congregate in the early hours of night, their flickerings are uncoordinated. But as the night goes on, they build up synchrony and eventually whole treefuls pulsate in silent concert. Steven Strogatz, the author of this paper also mentioned Winfree's work on the nonlinear dynamics of large systems of coupled oscillators. Coupled oscillators are one of models used to explain the the emergence of synchronized oscillations among neurons.Concept cells: the building blocks of declarative memory functions, Nature reviews 2012 [Open]The Theta-Gamma Neural Code, Neuron 2013. This paper proposes a “neural code” of information processing/memory storage in the brain of rats though it remains to be seen if this code or a variant of it is ubiquitous across speciesFast Global Oscillations in Networks of Integrate-and-Fire Neurons with Low Firing Rates, Neural computation 1999 [ Open]The theta/gamma discrete phase code occuring during the hippocampal phase precession may be a more general brain coding scheme, Hippocampus 2005Layer and frequency dependencies of phase response properties of pyramidal neurons in rat motor cortex, European Journal of Neuroscience 2007Local field potentials, BOLD and spiking activity - relationships and physiological mechanisms, Nature 2010Theta-alpha cross-frequency synchronization facilitates working memory control - a modeling study, SpringerPlus 2013Analytical Insights on Theta-Gamma Coupled Neural Oscillators, Journal of mathematicl Neuroscience, 2013The principle of coherence in multi-level brain information processing, Progress in Biophysics and molecular biology 2013Neurophysiological and computational principles of cortical rhythms in cognition, Physiol Rev 2010 [Open] This review paper discusses a framework that goes beyond the conventional theory of coupled oscillators to explain field oscillations and reconciles the apparent dichotomy between irregular single neuron activity and field potential oscillations.Why there are compliementary learning systems in the hippocampus and neocortex:Insights from the successes and failures of connectionist models of learning and memory,Pshcological review 1995 [Open]A Synaptically Controlled, Associative Signal for Hebbian Plasticity in Hippocampal Neurons, Science 1997Hippocampal-cortical interaction during periods of subcortical silence, Nature 2012Reliability of spike timing in neocortical neurons, Science 1995 [Open] This paper offers evidence for a possible role for spike timing in the processing of information. A constant stimulus to a neuron leads to spike trains which become imprecise over time, whereas stimuli with fluctuations resembling synaptic activity (constant input along with computer generated filtered Gaussian white noise) produces spike trains with timings reproducible to less than 1 millisecond. Even though this experiment has no physiological significance since it does not factor in actual delays present in real life scenario (such as synaptic transmission delays) it is consistent with theories of cortical information processing where spike timing is important.Oscillatory correlates of memory in non-human primates, NeuroImage 2014Theta oscillations orchestrate medial temporal lobe and neocortex in remembering autobiographical memories, NeuroImage 2014[ Open]Principles of rhythmic motor pattern generation Phys. Review 1996Central pattern generators for bipedal locomotion, J. Math. Biol 2006[Open]The spike timing dependence of plasticity, Neuron 2012[Open] This paper reviews the cellular mechanisms for spike time dependent plasticity. When neuron A spikes ~0 to 20 msecs before neuron B, which it connects to fires, long term potentiation (connection strengthening) occurs. If neuron B precedes the spiking of neuron A by ~0 to 20-100 msecs, long term depression (connection weakening) occurs.Phase locking control in the Circle Map, Nonlinear dynamics 2007 This paper discusses how phase-locking between two oscillators happens when the ratio of their frequencies become locked in a ratio of p/q of integer numbers over some finite domain of parameter values.Brain oscillations and memory, Current opinion in neurobiology 2010 [Open]Working memory and neural oscillations: alpha-gamma versus theta-gamma codes for distinct working memory information? Cell 2014[Open]Detection of n:m phase locking from noisy data: application to magnetoencephalography, Physical review letters, 1998 [Open]Assessment of cross-frequency coupling with confidence using generalized linear models, NeuroImage 2013 [Open]Role of experience and oscillations in transforming a rate code into a temporal code, Nature 2002[Open]A Method for Event-related Phase/Amplitude Coupling, NeuroImage 2013[Open] The first author of this paper, Bradley Voytek is here on Quora.A θ-γ Oscillation Code for Neuronal Coordination during Motor Behavior, Journal of Neuroscience 2013Phase-amplitude cross-frequency coupling in the human nucleus accumbens tracks action monitoring during cognitive control, Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2013[Open]Cross-Frequency Phase-Phase Coupling between Theta and Gamma Oscillations in the Hippocampus, Journal of Neuroscience, 2013[Open]Neural syntax: cell assemblies, synapsembles and readers, Neuron 2010[Open]High-order synchronization, transitions, and competition among Arnold tongues in a rotor using harmonic forcing, Physical Review 2008 [Open] Discusses the possibility of two or more coupled oscillators becoming synchronized when their autonomous frequencies are different but close, where the synchronization occurs as adjustment of those frequencies due to coupling. This form of coupling is in contrast to weak coupling where the frequencies of the individual oscillators do not change but oscillations still emerge due to coupling.Memories-getting wired during sleep, Science 6, June 2014Sleep promotes branch-specific formation of dendritic spines after learning Science, 6 June 2014Updated additional referencesA recent video lecture (Feb 2017) on the neuroscience of consciousness. Has references embedded in video related to oscillations. One particular mention of a paper (after 30 mins) examines how the brain perhaps reduces it prediction errors by adjusting its prediction in concert with sensory input - all within a single oscillatory cycle. The paper mentioned in video Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience - 28(9):1318 - Full Text (not open access)30 Sept 2019An informative talk on how the brain computes. It offers an explanation of how different sensory inputs (vision, auditory) that occur simultaneously can form associations when the inputs are projected randomly to a downstream region. This can happen not just across inputs but within a sensory stream. For instance, an experiment of former President Obama’s face shown along with an Eiffel tower makes a neuron that only fired for Eiffel tower later fires when shown just the face of the former President. Even if only a model, it is biologically grounded (for the most part) and the primitives for computation are fairly simple. The paper https://ccneuro.org/2019/proceedings/0000998.pdf