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 Post subject: 666? ;-) Interesting article on brain stimulation.
PostPosted: Sat Oct 13, 2012 11:20 pm 
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#12: The Remote-Controlled Bull
imageYale researcher Jose Delgado stood in the hot sun of a bullring in Cordova, Spain. With him in the ring was a large, angry bull. The animal noticed him and began to charge. It gathered speed. Delgado appeared defenseless, but when the bull was mere feet away, Delgado pressed a button on a remote control unit in his hand, sending a signal to a chip implanted in the bull's brain. Abruptly, the animal stopped in its tracks. It huffed and puffed a few times, and then walked docilely away.

Delgado's experience in the ring was an experimental demonstration of the ability of his "stimoceiver" to manipulate behavior. The stimoceiver was a computer chip, operated by a remote-control unit, that could be used to electrically stimulate different regions of an animal's brain. Such stimulation could produce a wide variety of effects, including the involuntary movement of limbs, the eliciting of emotions such as love or rage, or the inhibition of appetite. It could also be used, as Delgado showed, to stop a charging bull.

Delgado's experiment sounds so much like science fiction, that many people are surprised to learn it occurred back in 1963. During the 1970s and 80s, research into electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) languished, stigmatized by the perception that it represented an effort to control people's minds and thoughts. But more recently, ESB research has once again been flourishing, with reports of researchers creating remote-controlled rats, pigeons, and even sharks.


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 Post subject: I'm on a roll and ready to jump off!
PostPosted: Sat Oct 13, 2012 11:41 pm 
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#2: The Obedience Experiment
imageImagine that you've volunteered for an experiment, but when you show up at the lab you discover the researcher wants you to murder an innocent person. You protest, but the researcher firmly states, "The experiment requires that you do it." Would you acquiesce and kill the person?

When asked what they would do in such a situation, almost everyone replies that of course they would refuse to commit murder. But Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiment, conducted at Yale University in the early 1960s, revealed that this optimistic belief is wrong. If the request is presented in the right way, almost all of us quite obediently become killers.

Milgram told subjects they were participating in an experiment to determine the effect of punishment on learning. One volunteer (who was, in reality, an actor in cahoots with Milgram) would attempt to memorize a series of word pairs. The other volunteer (the real subject) would read out the word pairs and give the learner an electric shock every time he got an answer wrong. The shocks would increase in intensity by fifteen volts with each wrong answer.

The experiment began. The learner started getting some wrong answers, and pretty soon the shocks had reached 120 volts. At this point the learner started crying out, "Hey, this really hurts." At 150 volts the learner screamed in pain and demanded to be let out. Confused, the volunteers turned around and asked the researcher what they should do. He always calmly replied, "The experiment requires that you continue."

Milgram had no interest in the effect of punishment on learning. What he really wanted to see was how long people would keep pressing the shock button before they refused to participate any further. Would they remain obedient to the authority of the researcher up to the point of killing someone?

To Milgram's surprise, even though volunteers could plainly hear the agonized cries of the learner echoing through the walls of the lab from the neighboring room, two-thirds of them continued to press the shock button all the way up to the end of scale, 450 volts, by which time the learner had fallen into an eerie silence, apparently dead. Milgram's subjects sweated and shook, and some laughed hysterically, but they kept pressing the button. Even more disturbingly, when volunteers could neither see nor hear feedback from the learner, compliance with the order to give ever greater shocks was almost 100%.

Milgram later commented, "I would say, on the basis of having observed a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town."


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 Post subject: Re: 666? ;-) Interesting article on brain stimulation.
PostPosted: Sun Oct 14, 2012 7:55 am 
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I hope I'm not the lone dissenter here, but I don't buy it. I think we tend to "over spiritualize" things. The way I feel is if I am in Christ I don't need to fear 666 or anything else. I live the way Christ would want me to and I let God protect me. I will go and be with Jesus one way or another before the end comes

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 Post subject: Re: 666? ;-) Interesting article on brain stimulation.
PostPosted: Sun Oct 14, 2012 8:45 am 
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Yes, this is the frog in the pat of cold water eventually getting boiled. It happened in Nazi Germany. Just read a few 1st hand accounts of Hitler's rise to power.

Could it happen again? Sure. But this is why it's so important to teach our kids to THINK. If they think, they will know that harming other people is wrong. Let me give you some food for thought.
1. If harming others is wrong, do you support the death penalty? Isn't that jus an extreme version of the 2nd experiment?
2. Do you believe that Christians should submit to authority no matter what? That's definitely what was going on in experiment 2. So, if your gov't tells you a person/group/state/nation is evil, you should physically harm it? This one REALLY got the people of Nazi Germany.
3. Would you let a device that controls your will (like the chip in experiment 1 be put into you to help you get rid of weight or a bad habit?

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