Binaural beats or binaural tones are auditory processing artifacts, or apparent sounds, the perception of which arises in the brain independent of physical stimuli. This effect was discovered in 1839 by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove.

The brain produces a phenomenon resulting in low-frequency pulsations in the loudness of a perceived sound when two tones at slightly different frequencies are presented separately, one to each of a subject’s ears, using stereo headphones. A beating tone will be perceived, as if the two tones mixed naturally, out of the brain. The frequency of the tones must be below about 1,000 to 1,500 hertz for the beating to be heard. The difference between the two frequencies must be small, below about 30 Hz, for the effect to occur; otherwise, the two tones will be heard separately and no beat will be perceived.

Binaural beats are of interest to neurophysiologists investigating the sense of hearing. Second, binaural beats reportedly influence the brain in more subtle ways through the entrainment of brainwaves and can be used to produce relaxation and other health benefits such as pain relief.

The effects of binaural beats on consciousness were first examined by physicist Thomas Campbell and electrical engineer Dennis Mennerich, who under the direction of Robert Monroe sought to reproduce a subjective impression of 4Hz oscillation that they associated with out-of-body experience. On the strength of their findings, Monroe spawned the binaural self-development industry by forming The Monroe Institute, now a charitable binaural research and education organization.

In addition to lowering the brain frequency to relax the listener, there are other controversial, alleged uses for binaural beats. For example, that by using specific frequencies an individual can stimulate certain glands to produce desired hormones. Beta-endorphin has been modulated in studies using alpha-theta brain wave training, and dopamine with binaural beats. Among other alleged uses, there are reducing learning time and sleeping needs. Some use them for lucid dreaming and even for attempting out-of-body experiences, astral projection, telepathy and psychokinesis. Alpha-theta brainwave training has also been used successfully for the treatment of addictions and for the recovery of repressed memories.

An uncontrolled pilot study of Delta binaural beat technology over 60 days has shown positive effect on self-reported psychologic measures, especially anxiety. Another claimed effect for sound induced brain synchronization is enhanced learning ability. It was proposed in the 1970s that induced alpha brain waves enabled students to assimilate more information with greater long term retention. In more recent times has come more understanding of the role of theta brain waves in behavioural learning.

The Feldenkrais Method is an educational system centered on movement, aiming to expand and refine the use of the self through awareness. It holds that there is no separation between mind and body, and thus learning to move better can improve one’s overall well-being on many levels. It is intended for those wishing to reduce pain or limitations in movement, and many who want to improve their general well-being and personal development. Because it uses movement as the primary vehicle for gaining awareness, it is directly applicable to disorders that arise from restricted or habitually poor movement. But as a process for gaining awareness, the system claims to expand a person’s choices and responses to many aspects of life such as emotions, relationships, and intellectual tasks, and it applies at any level, from severe disorder to highly professional performance. 

The Feldenkrais Method is applied in two forms by practitioners, who generally receive more than 800 hours of formal training over the course of four years. In an Awareness Through Movement lesson, the teacher verbally directs students through movement sequences and various foci of attention. Usually this occurs in a group setting, although the lessons can also be given to individuals, or recorded. There are more than a thousand lessons available, most of them are organized around a specific movement function.

In a Functional Integration lesson, the practitioner uses his or her hands to guide the movement of the student, who may be sitting, lying or standing. The practitioner also uses a hands-on technique to help the student experience the connections among various parts of the body. Movements are developed from the habitual patterns of the student, thereby tailoring the lesson to the individual. This approach allows the student to feel comfortable, and to experience the movement in detail. Through precision of touch and movement, the student learns how to eliminate excess effort and thus move more freely and easily.

Feldenkrais taught that changes in the physical experience could be described as changes in the self image, which can be conceived as the mapping of the motor cortex to the body. Activity in the motor cortex plays a key role in the sense of body position. Feldenkrais taught that changes in our ability to move are inseparable from changes in our conscious perception of ourselves. He aimed to clarify and work therapeutically with this relationship, with instructions that involved both specific movement instructions and invitations to introspection.

Lessons may be very specific in addressing particular issues brought by the student, or can be more global in scope. Although the technique does not specifically aim to eliminate pain or cure physical complaints, such issues are treated as valuable information that may inform the lesson. Issues such as chronic muscle pain may naturally resolve themselves as the student learns a more relaxed approach to his or her physical experience, and a more integrated, freer, easier way to move.

A strange loop arises when, by moving up or down through a hierarchical system, one finds oneself back where one started. It is a hierarchy of levels, each of which is linked to at least one other by some type of relationship. A strange loop hierarchy, however, is “tangled” (Hofstadter refers to this a “heterarchy”), in that there is no well defined highest or lowest level; moving through the levels one eventually returns to the starting point, i.e., the original level. Examples of strange loops that Hofstadter offers include: many of the works of M. C. Escher, the information flow network between DNA and enzymes through protein synthesis and DNA replication, and self-referential Gödelian statements in formal systems.

In I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter defines strange loops as follows:

“ What I mean by “strange loop” is — here goes a first stab, anyway — not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.

Hofstadter claims a similar “flipping around of causality” happens in minds possessing self-consciousness. The mind perceives itself as the cause of certain feelings, (“I” am the source of my desires), while scientifically, feelings and desires are strictly caused by the interactions of neurons, and ultimately, the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics.

Thought is a mental process which allows an individual to model the world, and so to deal with it effectively according to their goals, plans, ends and desires. Words referring to similar concepts and processes include cognition, idea, and imagination. Thinking involves the cerebral manipulation of information, as when we form concepts, engage in problem solving, reasoning and making decisions. Thinking is a higher cognitive function and the analysis of thinking processes is part of cognitive psychology.

Memory is an organism’s ability to store, retain, and subsequently recall information. Although traditional studies of memory began in the realms of philosophy, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century put memory within the paradigms of cognitive psychology. In recent decades, it has become one of the principal pillars of a new branch of science called cognitive neuroscience, a marriage between cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

Imagination is accepted as the innate ability and process to invent partial or complete personal realms the mind derives from sense perceptions of the shared world. The term is technically used in psychology for the process of reviving in the mind percepts of objects formerly given in sense perception. Imagined images are seen with the “mind’s eye”. One hypothesis for the evolution of human imagination is that it allowed conscious beings to solve problems, and hence increase an individual’s fitness, by use of mental simulation.

Consciousness in mammals including humans, is an aspect of the mind generally thought to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, sentience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one’s environment. It is a subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Some philosophers divide consciousness into phenomenal consciousness, which is subjective experience itself, and access consciousness, which refers to the global availability of information to processing systems in the brain. Phenomenal consciousness has many different experienced qualities, often referred to as qualia.

Mind refers to the aspects of intellect and consciousness manifested as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including all of the brain’s conscious and unconscious cognitive processes. Mind is often used to refer especially to the thought processes of reason. Subjectively, mind manifests itself as a stream of consciousness.

There are many theories of the mind and its function. The earliest recorded works on the mind are by Zarathushtra, the Buddha, Plato, Aristotle and other ancient Greek, Indian and Islamic philosophers. Pre-scientific theories, based in theology, concentrated on the relationship between the mind and the soul, the supernatural, divine or god given essence of the person. Modern theories, based on scientific understanding of the brain, theorize that the mind is a product of the brain and has both conscious and unconscious aspects.

The question of which attributes make up the mind is also much debated. Some argue that only the “higher” intellectual functions constitute mind, particularly reason and memory. In this view the emotions love, hate, fear and joy, are more “primitive” or subjective in nature and should be seen as different from the mind. Others argue that the rational and the emotional sides of the human person cannot be separated, that they are of the same nature and origin, and that they should all be considered as part of the individual mind.

In popular usage mind is frequently synonymous with thought. It is that private conversation with ourselves that we carry on inside our heads. Thus we “make up our minds,” “change our minds” or are “of two minds” about something. One of the key attributes of the mind in this sense is that it is a private sphere to which no one but the owner has access. No one else can know our mind. They can only interpret what we consciously or unconsciously communicate.

Kets are a Siberian people who speak the Ket language. They are thought to be the only survivors of an ancient nomadic people believed to have originally lived throughout central southern Siberia. Today’s Kets are the descendants of the tribes of fishermen and hunters who have adopted some of the cultural ways of those original Ket-speaking tribes of South Siberia. The earlier tribes engaged in hunting, fishing, and reindeer breeding in the northern areas.

Shamanism was a living practice among the Kets into the 1930s, but by the 1960s almost no authentic shamans could be found. It shared characteristics with those of Turkic and Mongolic peoples. Additionally, there were several types of Ket shamans differing in function, power and associated animals. Also, there are examples of the use of skeleton symbolics. These have been interpreted as a symbol of rebirth, although they may symbolize the bones of the loon, the helper animal of the shaman, joining air and underwater world, just like the shaman who travelled both to the sky and the underworld. The skeleton-like overlay also represented shamanic rebirth among some other Siberian cultures.

The mythology of Kets has been compared with that of Uralic peoples, assuming that they are modelling semiotic systems in the compared mythologies. Among other comparisons, the mythologies of Ob-Ugric peoples and Samoyedic peoples are mentioned. Other authors have discussed analogies between similar folklore motifs, purely typological considerations, and certain binary pairs in symbolics. These may be related to a dualistic organization of society as some dualistic features can be found in comparisons with these peoples.

However, for Kets, neither dualistic organization of society nor cosmological dualism has been researched thoroughly. If such features existed at all, they have either weakened or remained largely undiscovered. There are some reports on a division into two exogamous patrilinear moieties, folklore on conflicts of mythological figures, and also on cooperation of two beings in the creation of the land, the motif of earth-diver. This motif is present in several cultures in different variants. In one example, the creator of the world is helped by a water fowl as the bird dives under the water and fetches earth so that the creator can make land out of it. In some cultures, the creator and the earth-fetching being, sometimes named as devil, or taking shape of a loon, compete with one another.

Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means “having no specific semantic content”.

All writing does not just contain semantic information. It also contains aesthetic information when seen as a shape or image, and emotional information such as a graphologist would analyze. Because it eliminates the semantic information, asemic writing brings the emotional and aesthetic content to the foreground.

By contrast, email is writing almost devoid of aesthetic and emotional content apart from what the words contain. Asemic works play with our minds, enticing us to attempt to read them. Some asemic works make the viewer hover between reading as a text and looking as a picture.

Illegible, invented, or primal scripts (cave paintings, doodles, children’s drawings, etc.) are all influences upon asemic writing. But instead of being thought of as mimicry of preliterate expression, asemic writing can be considered as a postliterate style of writing that uses all forms of creativity for inspiration.

Some asemic writing has pictograms or ideograms, which suggest a meaning through their shape. Other forms are shapeless and exist as pure conception.

Asemic writing has no verbal sense, though it may have clear textual sense. Through its formatting and structure, asemic writing may suggest a type of document and, thereby, suggest a meaning. The form of art is still writing, often calligraphic in form, and either depends on a reader’s sense and knowledge of writing systems for it to make sense, or can be understood through aesthetic intuition.

It can also be seen as a relative perception, whereby unknown languages and forgotten scripts provide templates and platforms for new modes of expression. Asemic writing occurs in avant-garde literature and art with strong roots in the earliest forms of writing.

Magnetoception is the ability to detect a magnetic field to perceive direction, altitude or location. This sense plays a role in the navigational abilities of several animal species and has been postulated as a method for animals to develop regional maps.

It is most commonly observed in birds, where sensing of the Earth’s magnetic field is important to the navigational abilities during migration. In pigeons and other birds, researchers have identified a small heavily innervated region of the upper beak which contains biological magnetite and is believed to be involved in magnetoception.

Evidence has also been found that the light-sensitive molecule cryptochrome in the photoreceptor cells of the eyes is involved in magnetoception. According to one model, cryptochrome when exposed to blue light gets activated and forms a pair of two radicals where the spins of the two unpaired electrons are correlated. The surrounding magnetic field affects the type of correlation (parallel or anti-parallel), and this in turn affects the length of time cryptochrome remains in its activated state. Activation of cryptochrome may affect the light-sensitivity of retinal neurons, with the overall result that the bird can “see” the magnetic field. Cryptochromes are also essential for the light-dependent ability of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to sense magnetic fields.

It is believed that birds use both the magnetite-based and the radical pair-based approach, with the radical pair mechanism in the eyes providing directional information and a magnetite-based mechanism in the upper beak providing information on position as component of the ‘map’.

In bees, it has been observed that magnetite is embedded across the cellular membrane of a small group of neurons. It is thought that when the magnetite aligns with the Earth’s magnetic field, induction causes a current to cross the membrane which depolarizes the cell.

Crocodiles are believed to have magnetoception, which allows them to find their native area even after being moved hundreds of miles away. Some have been strapped with magnets to disorient them and keep them out of residential areas.

In 2008, a researcher team led by Hynek Burda using Google Earth accidentally discovered that magnetic fields affect the body orientation of cows and deer during grazing or resting. In a followup study in 2009, Burda and Sabine Begall observed that magnetic fields generated by power lines disrupted the orientation of cows from the Earth’s magnetic field.

Humans have magnetite deposits in the bones of the nose, specifically the sphenoidal/ethmoid sinuses. Beginning in the late 1970s the group of Robin Baker at the University of Manchester began to conduct experiments that purported to exhibit magnetoception in humans. People were purposely disoriented and then asked about directions to a specific place. Their answers were more accurate if there was no magnet attached to their head. These results could not be reproduced by other groups and the evidence remains ambiguous. Recently, other evidence for human magnetoception has been put forward as low-frequency magnetic fields can produce an evoked response in the brains of human subjects.

Certain types of bacteria and fungi are also known to sense the magnetic flux direction. They have organelles known as magnetosomes containing magnetic crystals for this purpose.