Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

They shall not hunger nor thirst; neither shall the heat nor sun smite them: for he that hath mercy on them shall lead them, even by the springs of water shall he guide them

Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... er-say-die
Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.

Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.

Imagination and Immortality: Thinking of Me
http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~snichols/ ... alityF.pdf
It is quite impossible for a thinking being to imagine
nonbeing, a cessation of thought and life. In this sense
everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within
himself.
Attributed to Goethe

1. Intuitive immortality
In a delightful series of experiments, Jesse Bering and his colleagues have produced evidence that the belief in a psychological afterlife is intuitive – it’s the natural, default position of children (Bering 2002, Bering & Bjorklund 2004, Bering et al. 2005). They found that young children tended to appreciate that biological functions ended at death (e.g. the ears don’t work), but a majority of children thought that psychological functions (e.g., thinking and wanting)
would continue after death (Bering and Bjorklund 2004). Bering found a similar pattern in adults, and, more interestingly, he found that when adults did say that a psychological function ceased at death, they showed longer latency times than when they said that a biological function ceased at death (Bering 2002).

Revenge of the Lizard Brain
In functional terms, a human brain doesn’t behave like a series of separate “complexes,” but as a unified whole. Some neural networks do inhibit others – but the shapes of those networks have nothing to do with “reptilian” or “mammalian” layers.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/gue ... ard-brain/

http://www.aronlab.org/Pubs/aron2007ns.pdf
1) The basis of mental
development—the child’s cerebral cortex develops to suppress the powerful impulses of the deep-seated subcortical
ganglia; 2) The phenomenon of extinction in learning—
inhibition develops when the conditioned stimulus (e.g.,
tone) is no longer accompanied by the unconditioned
stimulus (e.g., food) with which it was originally paired;
and 3) The psychic repression of memory—unpleasant
experiences such as abuse are pushed out of the conscious
mind by an active mechanism of inhibition. To this day,
such ideas make up our folk psychology, as, for example,
when we say: “He became drunk and lost his inhibitions”
or “I must suppress my urge to eat chocolate.”

When You are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.