Soul / Spirit
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
Sheldrake's morphic resonance posits that "memory is inherent in nature"[2][15 and that "natural systems... inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind."[15] […] Sheldrake's A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance (1981) proposes that through morphic resonance, various perceived phenomena, particularly biological ones, become more probable the more often they occur, and that biological growth and behaviour thus become guided into patterns laid down by previous similar events. As a result, he suggests, newly acquired behaviours can be passed down to future generations—a biological proposition akin to the Lamarckian inheritance theory.
[...] While the theory that learning is recollection suggests that an essential basis for wisdom and virtue is innate, Socrates also reminds Meno that any such basis in nature would still require development through experience (89b).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoception
Interoception is the collection of senses providing information to the organism about the internal state of the body.[1] This can be both conscious and subconscious. It encompasses the brain's process of integrating signals relayed from the body into specific subregions—like the brainstem, thalamus, insula, somatosensory, and anterior cingulate cortex—allowing for a nuanced representation of the physiological state of the body.[2][3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy
In the late 1950s, Aaron T. Beck was conducting free association sessions in his psychoanalytic practice.[49][50] During these sessions, Beck noticed that thoughts were not as unconscious as Freud had previously theorized, and that certain types of thinking may be the culprits of emotional distress.[50] It was from this hypothesis that Beck developed cognitive therapy, and called these thoughts "automatic thoughts".[50]
KEY POINTS
Personality changes may occur following organ transplants.
In some cases, organ recipients report personality changes that parallel the personality of their donor.
Some organ recipients "remember" events from their donor's life.
Cellular memories stored outside the brain may transfer information from organ donors to recipients.
Additional articles:
https://theconversation.com/can-an-organ-transplant-really-change-someones-personality-228923
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/oncology/articles/10.3389/fonc.2022.846917/full
With advances in understanding the underlying bioelectric mechanisms of cancer and development of molecular tools to measure and control these electric fields, we are now able to better identify the role of bioelectric signaling in carcinogenesis.
https://news.mit.edu/2021/cancer-cells-waste-energy-0115
MIT biologists have now found a possible answer to this longstanding question. In a study appearing in Molecular Cell, they showed that this metabolic pathway, known as fermentation, helps cells to regenerate large quantities of a molecule called NAD+, which they need to synthesize DNA and other important molecules. Their findings also account for why other types of rapidly proliferating cells, such as immune cells, switch over to fermentation.
Additional resource:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsif.2020.0013
The more I dove into the science, the more I was led to connections that show that metabolism and mitochondria are related to mental illness. Once people understand the big picture and the detailed science which is based on decades of research, they will see that all of this has been hiding in plain sight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion
Although most of a eukaryotic cell's DNA is contained in the cell nucleus, the mitochondrion has its own genome ("mitogenome") that is substantially similar to bacterial genomes.[22]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis
Hypothesis
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When individuals make decisions, they must assess the incentive value of the choices available to them, using cognitive and emotional processes. When the individuals face complex and conflicting choices, they may be unable to decide using only cognitive processes, which may become overloaded. Emotions, consequently, are hypothesized to guide decision-making.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
Flow in positive psychology, also known colloquially as being in the zone or locked in, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.
https://www.authenticityassociates.com/emotions-are-energy/
The awareness of emotion as energy has had a significant impact on approaches to healing emotional wounds, stuck patterns, emotional reactivity, depression, anxiety, and trauma. This perspective emphasizes that understanding and managing our emotions involves tuning into the body’s energy states and addressing imbalances to promote greater health and happiness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(psychology)
Affect, in psychology, is the underlying experience of feeling, emotion, attachment, or mood.[1] It encompasses a wide range of emotional states and can be positive (e.g., happiness, joy, excitement) or negative (e.g., sadness, anger, fear, disgust). Affect is a fundamental aspect of human experience and plays a central role in many psychological theories and studies.
Another lesson learned from the study of fear and anxiety is that discrete emotion states cannot be explained by the activity in a single brain region or neuronal circuit. For a long time, the amygdala seemed a prime candidate to be both sufficient and necessary to produce fear. Indeed, the famous case study patient S.M. suffering from bilateral amygdala damage showed extreme deficits in processing and experiencing fear triggered by external factors or by observing other people's fearful faces (Feinstein et al. 2011). However, later studies showed that patient S.M., as well as other patients with similar lesions, still experienced fear and even panic when exposed to high concentrations of CO2 (Feinstein et al. 2013). These data suggest that the amygdala is not an essential neural substrate for the experience of fear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind-body_dualism
In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical,[1] or that the mind and body are distinct and separable.[2]
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2020/06/covid-grieving-life
It helps to ‘name and claim’ our grief
With almost the whole world confronting losses large and small, how can people cope as they mourn their pre-pandemic lives? For starters, mental health providers can help patients “name it and claim it,” Neimeyer says. “People often have a vague sense of anxiety or wordless suffering. We can help them wrap language around that,” he explains. “We can ask people to consider what they’re losing in the context of this pandemic, what they can do to strengthen those ties.” It’s not a fatalistic view, he says. Rather, it’s an organized way of taking action to help people cope with their losses, from jobs and relationships to sources of self-worth and self-efficacy.
Also:
https://sixtyandme.com/gratitude-boost-life/
There’s a concept in psychology that can be readily summed up with, “Name it and claim it.” In a nutshell, it says that once you figure out the emotion that lies beneath your frustration, pain or anger, as in “name it,” you can then deal directly with the emotion itself, as in “claim it.” In turn, this facilitates healing.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.704125/full
Individuals differ in their ability to create instances of emotion that are precise and context-specific. This skill – referred to as emotional granularity or emotion differentiation – is associated with positive mental health outcomes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constructed_emotion
The theory of constructed emotion (formerly the conceptual act model of emotion[1]) is a theory in affective science proposed by Lisa Feldman Barrett to explain the experience and perception of emotion.[2][3] The theory posits that instances of emotion are constructed predictively by the brain in the moment as needed. It draws from social construction, psychological construction, and neuroconstruction.[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constructed_emotion
In greater detail, instances of emotion are constructed throughout the entire brain by multiple brain networks in collaboration. Ingredients going into this construction include interoception, concepts, and social reality.[2] Interoceptive predictions provide information about the state of the body and ultimately produce basic, affective feelings of pleasure, displeasure, arousal, and calmness. Concepts are culturally embodied knowledge, including "emotion concepts". Social reality provides the collective agreement and language that make the perception of emotion possible among people who share a culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioelectricity
In developmental biology, bioelectricity refers to the regulation of cell, tissue, and organ-level patterning and behavior as the result of endogenous electrically mediated signalling.
Dr. Michael Levin says in this video (in part):
“If these bioelectrical signals are important for cancer, then four things should be true:
First of all, there should be some implication by molecular data of ion channels, pumps and proteins in cancer. Bioelectric signatures should be a viable diagnostic tool for detecting tumors early. We should be able to induce cancer-like phenotypes by disrupting proper membrane voltage (Vmem) gradients. And best of all, a cancer-like phenotype should be suppressible by the modulation of the membrane potential gradient.”
and:
“So the summary of everything I've said so far is that like in the brain, the mechanism that binds cells towards large-scale common purpose, meaning to upkeep, to create and upkeep against aging, against cancer, complex organs, are specifically bioelectrical networks. Modifying the information processed by these electrical networks offers some really high-level control, meaning creating new organs, fixing complex organ shapes and so on, growth and patterning without genomic editing.”
Dr. Michael Levin says in this video (in part):
“We're interested in how tissues and organs compute using electrical signals – storing pattern memories and regulating large-scale anatomical patterning. You can think about these groups of cells doing all the same things as a neural network, but everything goes at a much slower pace and is aimed at controlling cell behavior and anatomy, not muscles and body movement.”
and:
“We wanted to understand how can the informational content of these electrical networks be used to understand how developmental systems solve problems...we can link that to approaches in dynamical systems theory and connectionist kinds of things where you can ask how pattern completion works when when the network has forgotten half of the pattern how can it be recovered.”
Perplexity AI wrote:
The famous question "What is it like to be a bat?" comes from the 1974 paper of the same name by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, published in The Philosophical Review.
Here are the key details about this influential paper:
- Title: "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"
- Author: Thomas Nagel
- Published in: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4 (October 1974), pp. 435-450
- Later republished in Nagel's book Mortal Questions in 1979
In this paper, Nagel uses the example of a bat to argue against physicalist theories of mind which attempt to reduce consciousness to physical processes.[1][3] He contends that subjective conscious experiences have an essentially first-person, subjective character that cannot be fully captured by third-person objective descriptions.
Nagel famously states:
"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."[1][3]
This assertion that consciousness has an irreducible subjective "what-it's-like" aspect has become extremely influential in philosophy of mind and consciousness studies.[1][2]
So in summary, the question "What is it like to be a bat?" from Nagel's 1974 paper has become a widely referenced thought experiment illustrating the difficulties of accounting for subjective conscious experience within a purely physical framework.[1][2][3]
Citations:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaZbCctlll4
[3] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf
[4] https://academy4sc.org/video/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-bat-im-batman-kind-of/
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/41085b/thomas_nagels_what_is_it_like_to_be_a_bat/