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Allegory of the Cave - Legion

Beautifully done analogy of Plato's, "Allegory of the Cave" depicted in the modern world in the FX show - Legion. No spoilers for the greater arc of the show.
Pivotal mental states

We highlight how certain natural inducers of stress such as social isolation, starvation, atypical breathing, sleep deprivation, extreme body temperature and pain can be intentionally manipulated for the purposes of personal and/or spiritual development, presumably by promoting endogenous psychedelic-like signaling and we review several cross-cultural, historical and modern examples of such manipulation.


This paper has proposed that certain traumatic, spiritual, psychedelic and psychosis-relevant experiences can be viewed as examples of what we call PiMSs: transient, intense hyper-plastic states of mind and brain that have the potential to mediate rapid, major and potentially enduring psychological change.


Before the relatively recent advent of secular psychology, religious traditions provided useful resources to prepare and guide individuals through PiMSs, for example, for purposes of self-transformation and growth. Note, in this regard, religions have excellent narrative and infrastructural resources for dealing with ‘psychological rebirth’ .
In modern secular environments, we presently lack the same quality of integrated support, shared values and unified vision. Thinking towards the future, consideration could be given to the value of creating humanistic contexts supportive of positive self-transformation.

Article

Psychology of Intelligence Analysis



A basic finding of cognitive psychology is that people have no conscious experience of most of what happens in the human mind. Many functions associated with perception, memory, and information processing are conducted prior to and independently of any conscious direction.

What appears spontaneously in consciousness is the result of thinking, not the process of thinking.

Weaknesses and biases inherent in human thinking processes can be demonstrated through carefully designed experiments. They can be alleviated by conscious application of tools and techniques that should be in the analytical tradecraft toolkit of all intelligence analysts.

Article
Gut microbiome linked to poor sleep via metabolite production

A new study out of Japan’s University of Tsukuba is shining yet more light on this relationship, describing how depleted diversity of microbes in the gut can led to disrupted sleep in mice.

Article
Researchers Discover How SARS-CoV-2 Reaches the Brain of COVID-19 Patients

“We also found SARS-CoV-2 in areas of the brain which control vital functions, such as breathing. It cannot be ruled out that, in patients with severe COVID-19, presence of the virus in these areas of the brain will have an exacerbating impact on respiratory function, adding to breathing problems due to SARS-CoV-2 infection of the lungs. Similar problems might arise in relation to cardiovascular function.”

Article