Our Brains Broadcast a Message We Don't Understand

hey 42 here about 2 300 years ago in syracuse sicily free old lady sat on a bench in the town square it was a warm mediterranean day and they chatted about this and that as old ladies on park benches do suddenly loud shouts of i've got it i've got it broke through the morning air the women looked across the square to see a young man running towards them at high speed as he got closer they realized he was stark naked you certainly have got it thought the first old lady to herself then she had a stroke the second old lady also had a stroke the third old lady almost had a stroke too but her arms were too short the crazy streaker who ran through town that day was archimedes the celebrated physicist mathematician astronomer inventor engineer and exhibitionist and the reason he was shouting eureka or i've got it was not because he wanted the world to know he had a large package but because he just solved a nagging physics problem only a few minutes before archimedes had been climbing into the bath as he did so he noticed a water level rising and had a sudden flash of insight or as it subsequently became known a eureka moment in that instant of clarity archimedes understood the principle of displacement and realized he'd found a way to measure the volume of a gold crown and by extension its density the crown in question belongs to the king of syracuse who suspecting his goldsmith of cheating him wanted archimedes to devise a way to test whether the crown had been made of solid gold as required or gold mixed with silver by dividing the mass of the crown by the volume of water displaced archimedes was able to determine the crown's density and since it was lower than it should have been proved the goldsmith was a lying you've probably had a few eureka moments yourself i know i have just yesterday i thought of a word that rhymes with orange i'll tell you another time even though they don't have bad hair or sing 80s norwegian pop eureka moments are also known as aha moments but regardless of what you may call them they have delivered some of humankind's most radical breakthroughs the theory of gravity dawned on isaac newton as he watched apples fall from a tree albert einstein finally distilled the theory of general relativity whilst riding on a tram august cooley saw the chemical structure of benzene as he nodded off in front of a fire arthur frye fought up the post-it note in church exactly how this process works has always been a bit of a mystery the eureka moment is similar to the type of divine inspiration artists yearn for it's unpredictable and can't be manufactured but neuroscientists studying inside have discovered that strokes of genius have a very clear signal in the brain and can be encouraged by creating just the right neurological conditions it all comes down to brain waves but before i get into the amazing science of brain waves i want to tell you another way you can release your inner genius by watching curiositystream who've kindly sponsored this video curiosity stream is home to thousands of incredible documentaries and other non-fiction films and tv shows with award-winning exclusives and original shows on everything from history to science technology travel food and much more whatever it is you want to learn about you'll find it it's smart tv for your smart tv and you can watch it on any device anywhere at any time i love learning and if you're like me you probably found the documentary and non-fiction offering on other streaming services disappointing i know i have so i was genuinely amazed to discover curiosity stream because now i know there's always something new for me to watch whenever i get the opportunity i particularly enjoy old architecture so i really enjoyed watching history's greatest homes especially the episode on hampton court palace one of my favorite historic residences click the link in the description and use code 40 to sign up today for just 14.99 for the whole year brain waves are the product of the brain's electrochemical function that big mass of grey matter in your skull contains billions of neurons nerve cells that receive and send electrical signals throughout the body on average each individual neuron connects to thousands of others and they communicate through small electrical currents that travel along the neurons and throughout enormous networks of brain circuits when neurons are activated and synchronized they produce electrical pulses and the rhythm of these pulses forms oscillations called brain waves and when many neurons interact in this way at the same time the activity is so strong that it can be detected even outside the brain by placing electrodes on the scalp the brain activity can be measured amplified and visualized this is electroencephalography or eeg it's what neuroscientists say when they mean brain graph like most waveforms brain waves are generally measured in terms of their amplitude or depth and their frequency which describes the number of oscillations in a given period of time to make things easier there are five main brainwave patterns categorized according to their frequency and then to make things more difficult again these patterns are named after letters of the greek alphabet gamma beta alpha theta and delta on its own that's about as interesting as saying there are seven colours of the rainbow but what really started to blow neuroscience's hair back as they studied these phenomena was the realization that different brain waves are connected with different brain states feeling calm and relaxed there's a brain wave for that or are you feeling alert and focused there's a brain wave for that too brain waves don't cause your state of mind but waves and states are correlated take gamma waves for example widely regarded as the fastest waves produced by the brain with a frequency of 26 to 100 hertz they're quite rare tend to have a high impact for a short amount of time and are associated with episodes of heightened perception insight and intuition mark beamon a neuroscientist at northwestern university and john cunios of drexel university pioneered research into the eureka moment using fmri and eeg machines with this technology they were able to study the brainwave patterns of people trying to solve puzzles and discovered that about a third of a second before a person has a sudden flash of understanding the brain sees a massive spike of gamma wave activity for archimedes that flash of insight was followed by a flash of his balls but it turns out that's an unusual reaction a beamon and cuneos also found a burst of slower alpha waves i'll tell you more about those in a minute over the right visual cortex an area of the brain that controls our sight just before the flash of gamma waves this may be because the brain is calming the neurons in that area to reduce the amount of visual data being taken in to free up more resources for the more important cognition tasks that's why you often close your eyes or look away when concentrating on a question before the answer pops into your head gamma waves disappear during anesthesia suggesting they have some sort of connection to consciousness itself this idea has been implied by other research too professor of psychology and psychiatry richard davidson has conducted extensive experiments with olympic level meditators such as buddhist monks who have an average lifetime experience of more than 34 000 meditation hours that's almost four years of solid meditation he found that rather than having brief and sudden experiences of gamma brainwaves like most people do these meditators had an almost permanent condition of prominent gamma wave activity davidson also discovered that when the test subjects were asked to meditate on certain things like compassion gamma wave levels jumped seven or eight hundred percent for mere mortals like you and i though gamma brain activity is likely to stay inconsistent reserved for moments of genius like the time i invented a new kind of sandwich with the bread on the inside what we are far more familiar with though is beta brainwaves occurring in the 13 to 32 hertz frequency range beta waves are associated with our normal waking state and suggest alertness and active thinking beta waves are present when we're focused on a task engaged in conversation trying to solve a problem or making a decision it's the brainwave pattern that's usually present when we're busy and thinking of a hundred different things you know normal life slightly slower than beta waves in the 8 to 13 hertz range we find alpha waves these were the first brain waves to be discovered and occur when we're physically or mentally relaxed they're often connected with higher levels of serotonin one of the feel good hormones and are frequently present during episodes of artistic creativity awareness and light meditation a step below alpha waves we start to enter slow brainwave territory feta waves are thought to be between four and eight hertz and naturally occur when we're daydreaming falling asleep or in rem sleep they're also found when people are in deep meditation or doing something that allows the brain to go into autopilot like brushing your teeth research has also shown a positive association between feta waves and memory creativity and psychological well-being finally the slowest waves conventionally recognized are delta waves found between 0.5 and 4 hertz they're strongest when we're in a deep dreamless sleep the time during the night that our brain and body are dedicated to rejuvenation your brain needs to spend time in this state to repair itself from social media the kardashians politics and all the other stuff you put it through on a daily basis but as this field of research expands some claim to have found fringe brainwave frequencies like epsilon waves that oscillate between half a cycle a second and as low as one quarter cycle every 10 seconds these super slow frequencies were theorized after studying yogi's and long time meditators and they're fought to accompany the controversial yogic state of suspended animation in which the practitioner has no discernible pulse or breathing so basically dead but apparently also not dead like a zombie things get weirder still when you look at lambda brainwaves these are extremely fast frequencies almost twice as fast as gamma waves at about 200 hertz so they're at the opposite end of the spectrum from the absurdly slow epsilon waves or are they apparently if you zoom in really really far into an epsilon wave you can see high frequency oscillations of lambda waves riding the epsilon wave so waves within waves like inception but whilst you're awake no wonder lambda waves are fought to be connected with transcendental states and out of body experiences just thinking about them melts my brain for now all this talk about epsilon and lambda is pretty meaningless they're extremely difficult to measure and unlike the five primary brainwave patterns there is very little scientific data to support any clear conclusions in fact you may be asking yourself what is the use of all this brainwave mumbo jumbo anyway why should i care what frequency my thoughts are surfing at well the science and technology used to measure brain waves can also be used to reverse engineer the brain states associated with those wave patterns remember those monks who achieved advanced mind states and showed almost constant gamma brain waves they achieved that through training their brains even though they had little interest in brainwaves and now neurofeedback tools are able to show people their brainwaves in real time helping them train their minds by changing their brainwave patterns and finding optimal states of consciousness technologies like binaural beats claim to use audio frequencies to stimulate certain brainwave patterns encouraging your mind to experience an associated state so for example listening to an alpha brainwave track might encourage your brain to synchronize with the alpha rhythm tricking your mind into thinking you're tanning on a beach in bali brain waves only reflect underlying mind states and behaviors they don't cause them but the thinking goes if we're able to influence our brainwave patterns we're influencing our mental states too possibly allowing us to choose which mental state we operate in the ability to change your mind state at will to meet the needs of whatever situation you're in would be a bit like having a superpower and the potential here goes beyond just you a growing body of research shows we can influence each other's mental states too one study conducted by the basque center on cognition brain and language reveals that the rhythms of brain waves between two people taking part in a conversation begin to match each other in separate research princeton university neuroscientist yuri hassan has shown that the stronger the connection between two people the more their brains click they literally get on the same wavelength another study in new york suggested that brains of people in the same group tend to all be in sync making them like each other more and further enjoy the experiences they share together of course someone had to come up with a name for all of this so they've decided to call it interactive social neuroscience it's a new field so there's still a lot to understand but it has the potential to show what happens neurologically when we behave a certain way or connect with other people with that information and a lot of practice who knows perhaps you could not only master your own mind but also the minds of others too basically you could become yoda only taller and that's pretty cool thanks for watching and thanks again to curiositystream for sponsoring this video

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 994,553

Rating: 4.9240413 out of 5

Keywords: mind control, mind, psychic, brainwaves

Id: GHuxLIpmxYg

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021