Thursday, April 4, 2013

Obama's brain-mapping initiative


What with war threatening to erupt in Korea and unemployment rising, many were probably left scratching their heads Tuesday at President Obama's brain-mapping initiative:

President Obama unveiled a decades-long project Tuesday designed to map the inner workings of the brain, seeking answers to such challenges as epilepsy, autism and Alzheimer's disease. "There's this enormous mystery, awaiting to be unlocked," Obama said during remarks at the White House. (USA Today)

It seemed to play to the stereotype of Democrats as being both frivolous and irrelevant.  Such a strange initiative. But I was reminded of something else. In "Seth Speaks," Seth predicts that during what is generally referred to as the "awakening of consciousness" in this century, "new areas will be activated in the brain to physically take care of them [expansions of consciousness]. Physically then, brain mappings will be possible in which past-life memories are evoked." The term "brain mapping" is both highly specific and evocative, and as far as I know, there has been no organized initiative to "map" the brain (beyond various neurological studies to identify specific parts of the brain and what physical effects are associated with them). Certainly this was not common scientific currency in the 1960s, when "Seth Speaks" was published.

So, what on the surface might appear to be another frivolous waste of government money, might actually have portent. Science is doing something now that, on an organized level, has never been attempted on a large scale: mapping the brain. A small blip on the media screen today, but twenty or thirty years hence, what will be the result?

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