(Imzaia.com) The human sense of sight is a huge translator of the perception of reality and is the most misleading human sense. If you just remember that although we call all objects of matter in our reality by the same names, in truth everyone literally sees something else which shows the scope of this illusion.
The first article beautifully explains this scientifically and it also delves into how the sense of sight can be used to control and deceive humanity - for instance via the Media. Two more articles are provided below about how science is discovering the way the mind works and how easily it is influenced from the outside.
I would like to connect this all to some of the Imzaia teachings and explore how we can use this knowingness to grow in our awareness, to more consciously navigate through reality and stick to our own choices, instead of getting caught in unconscious aspects.
Visual Perception System Unconsciously Affects
Our Preferences
When grabbing a coffee mug out of a cluttered cabinet or choosing a pen to quickly sign a document, what brain processes guide your choices?
New research from Carnegie Mellon University's Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) shows that the brain's visual perception system automatically and unconsciously guides decision-making through valence perception. Published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, the review hypothesizes that valence, which can be defined as the positive or negative information automatically perceived in the majority of visual information, integrates visual features and associations from experience with similar objects or features. In other words, it is the process that allows our brains to rapidly make choices between similar objects.
The findings offer important insights into consumer behavior in ways that traditional consumer marketing focus groups cannot address. For example, asking individuals to react to package designs, ads or logos is simply ineffective. Instead, companies can use this type of brain science to more effectively assess how unconscious visual valence perception contributes to consumer behavior.
To transfer the research's scientific application to the online video market, the CMU research team is in the process of founding the start-up company neonlabs through the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps).
"This basic research into how visual object recognition interacts with and is influenced by affect paints a much richer picture of how we see objects," said Michael J. Tarr, the George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and co-director of the CNBC. "What we now know is that common, household objects carry subtle positive or negative valences and that these valences have an impact on our day-to-day behavior."
Tarr added that the NSF I-Corps program has been instrumental in helping the neonlabs' team take this basic idea and teaching them how to turn it into a viable company. "The I-Corps program gave us unprecedented access to highly successful, experienced entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who provided incredibly valuable feedback throughout the development process," he said.
NSF established I-Corps for the sole purpose of assessing the readiness of transitioning new scientific opportunities into valuable products through a public-private partnership. The CMU team of Tarr, Sophie Lebrecht, a CNBC and Tepper School of Business postdoctoral fellow, Babs Carryer, an embedded entrepreneur at CMU's Project Olympus, and Thomas Kubilius, president of Pittsburgh-based Bright Innovation and adjunct professor of design at CMU, were awarded a $50,000, six-month grant to investigate how understanding valence perception could be used to make better consumer marketing decisions. They are launching neonlabs to apply their model of visual preference to increase click rates on online videos, by identifying the most visually appealing thumbnail from a stream of video. The web-based software product selects a thumbnail based on neuroimaging data on object perception and valence, crowd sourced behavioral data and proprietary computational analyses of large amounts of video streams.
"Everything you see, you automatically dislike or like, prefer or don't prefer, in part, because of valence perception," said Lebrecht, lead author of the study and the entrepreneurial lead for the I-Corps grant. "Valence links what we see in the world to how we make decisions."
Lebrecht continued, "Talking with companies such as YouTube and Hulu, we realized that they are looking for ways to keep users on their sites longer by clicking to watch more videos. Thumbnails are a huge problem for any online video publisher, and our research fits perfectly with this problem. Our approach streamlines the process and chooses the screenshot that is the most visually appealing based on science, which will in the end result in more user clicks."
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Wearing Two Different Hats:
Moral Decisions May Depend On the Situation
An individual's sense of right or wrong may change depending on their activities at the time -- and they may not be aware of their own shifting moral integrity -- according to a new study looking at why people make ethical or unethical decisions.
Focusing on dual-occupation professionals, the researchers found that engineers had one perspective on ethical issues, yet when those same individuals were in management roles, their moral compass shifted. Likewise, medic/soldiers in the U.S. Army had different views of civilian casualties depending on whether they most recently had been acting as soldiers or medics.
In the study, to be published in a future issue of The Academy of Management Journal, lead author Keith Leavitt of Oregon State University found that workers who tend to have dual roles in their jobs would change their moral judgments based on what they thought was expected of them at the moment.
"When people switch hats, they often switch moral compasses," Leavitt said. "People like to think they are inherently moral creatures -- you either have character or you don't. But our studies show that the same person may make a completely different decision based on what hat they may be wearing at the time, often without even realizing it."
Leavitt, an assistant professor of management in the College of Business at OSU, is an expert on non-conscious decision making and business ethics. He studies how people make decisions and moral judgments, often based on non-conscious cues.
He said recent high-profile business scandals, from the collapse of Enron to the Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff, have called into question the ethics of professionals. Leavitt said professional organizations, employers and academic institutions may want to train and prepare their members for practical moral tensions they may face when asked to serve in multiple roles.
"What we consider to be moral sometimes depends on what constituency we are answering to at that moment," Leavitt said. "For a physician, a human life is priceless. But if that same physician is a managed-care administrator, some degree of moral flexibility becomes necessary to meet their obligations to stockholders."
Leavitt said subtle cues -- such as signage and motivation materials around the office -- should be considered, along with more direct training that helps employees who juggle multiple roles that could conflict with one another.
"Organizations and businesses need to recognize that even very subtle images and icons can give employees non-conscious clues as to what the firm values," he said. "Whether they know it or not, people are often taking in messages about what their role is and what is expected of them, and this may conflict with what they know to be the moral or correct decision."
The researchers conducted three different studies with employees who had dual roles. In one case, 128 U.S. Army medics were asked to complete a series of problem-solving tests, which included subliminal cues that hinted they might be acting as either a medic or a soldier. No participant said the cues had any bearing on their behavior -- but apparently they did. A much larger percentage of those in the medic category than in the soldier category were unwilling to put a price on human life.
In another test, a group of engineer-managers were asked to write about a time they either behaved as a typical manager, engineer, or both. Then they were asked whether U.S. firms should engage in "gifting" to gain a foothold in a new market. Despite the fact such a practice would violate federal laws, more than 50 percent of those who fell into the "manager" category said such a practice might be acceptable, compared to 13 percent of those in the engineer category.
"We find that people tend to make decisions that may conflict with their morals when they are overwhelmed, or when they are just doing routine tasks without thinking of the consequences," Leavitt said. "We tend to play out a script as if our role has already been written. So the bottom line is, slow down and think about the consequences when making an ethical decision."
Focusing on dual-occupation professionals, the researchers found that engineers had one perspective on ethical issues, yet when those same individuals were in management roles, their moral compass shifted. Likewise, medic/soldiers in the U.S. Army had different views of civilian casualties depending on whether they most recently had been acting as soldiers or medics.
In the study, to be published in a future issue of The Academy of Management Journal, lead author Keith Leavitt of Oregon State University found that workers who tend to have dual roles in their jobs would change their moral judgments based on what they thought was expected of them at the moment.
"When people switch hats, they often switch moral compasses," Leavitt said. "People like to think they are inherently moral creatures -- you either have character or you don't. But our studies show that the same person may make a completely different decision based on what hat they may be wearing at the time, often without even realizing it."
Leavitt, an assistant professor of management in the College of Business at OSU, is an expert on non-conscious decision making and business ethics. He studies how people make decisions and moral judgments, often based on non-conscious cues.
He said recent high-profile business scandals, from the collapse of Enron to the Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff, have called into question the ethics of professionals. Leavitt said professional organizations, employers and academic institutions may want to train and prepare their members for practical moral tensions they may face when asked to serve in multiple roles.
"What we consider to be moral sometimes depends on what constituency we are answering to at that moment," Leavitt said. "For a physician, a human life is priceless. But if that same physician is a managed-care administrator, some degree of moral flexibility becomes necessary to meet their obligations to stockholders."
Leavitt said subtle cues -- such as signage and motivation materials around the office -- should be considered, along with more direct training that helps employees who juggle multiple roles that could conflict with one another.
"Organizations and businesses need to recognize that even very subtle images and icons can give employees non-conscious clues as to what the firm values," he said. "Whether they know it or not, people are often taking in messages about what their role is and what is expected of them, and this may conflict with what they know to be the moral or correct decision."
The researchers conducted three different studies with employees who had dual roles. In one case, 128 U.S. Army medics were asked to complete a series of problem-solving tests, which included subliminal cues that hinted they might be acting as either a medic or a soldier. No participant said the cues had any bearing on their behavior -- but apparently they did. A much larger percentage of those in the medic category than in the soldier category were unwilling to put a price on human life.
In another test, a group of engineer-managers were asked to write about a time they either behaved as a typical manager, engineer, or both. Then they were asked whether U.S. firms should engage in "gifting" to gain a foothold in a new market. Despite the fact such a practice would violate federal laws, more than 50 percent of those who fell into the "manager" category said such a practice might be acceptable, compared to 13 percent of those in the engineer category.
"We find that people tend to make decisions that may conflict with their morals when they are overwhelmed, or when they are just doing routine tasks without thinking of the consequences," Leavitt said. "We tend to play out a script as if our role has already been written. So the bottom line is, slow down and think about the consequences when making an ethical decision."
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Synchronized Brains: Feeling Strong Emotions
Makes People's Brains 'Tick Together'
Experiencing strong emotions synchronizes brain activity across individuals, a research team at Aalto University and Turku PET Centre in Finland has revealed.
Human emotions are highly contagious. Seeing others' emotional expressions such as smiles triggers often the corresponding emotional response in the observer. Such synchronization of emotional states across individuals may support social interaction: When all group members share a common emotional state, their brains and bodies process the environment in a similar fashion.
Researchers at Aalto University and Turku PET Centre have now found that feeling strong emotions makes different individuals' brain activity literally synchronous.
The results revealed that especially feeling strong unpleasant emotions synchronized brain's emotion processing networks in the frontal and midline regions. On the contrary, experiencing highly arousing events synchronized activity in the networks supporting vision, attention and sense of touch.
"Sharing others' emotional states provides the observers a somatosensory and neural framework that facilitates understanding others' intentions and actions and allows to 'tune in' or 'sync' with them. Such automatic tuning facilitates social interaction and group processes," says Adjunct Professor Lauri Nummenmaa from the Aalto University, Finland.
"The results have major implications for current neural models of human emotions and group behavior. It also deepens our understanding of mental disorders involving abnormal socioemotional processing," Nummenmaa says.
Participants' brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they were viewing short pleasant, neutral and unpleasant movies.
Source Articles: www.sciencedaily.com
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(Imzaia.com) These articles speak about the discovery of how the mind works and how it is being influenced or triggered from the outside. This understanding is a good thing because when we are aware of how we are being influenced we can make conscious choices instead. With this understanding, we can empower ourselves by exploring how we can create reality in a conscious and fun way rather than being unconsciously adrift in a reality that seems to be created for us and victimises us.
The likes and dislikes spoken about in the articles are in the Imzaia teachings connected to attributes.
We have been taught that upon arrival on Earth in our male or female bodies 50 % of our energy is taken away from us and is spread throughout our universe, our reality. This energy forms the attributes which most commonly are represented as likes and dislikes. These attributes determine the parameters of our personality and form our desires. Atrributes are not ours by definition but they do define us if we let them. We call these attributes in the world around us 'passive attributes'.
'Active attributes' are inside the mind and it is these active attributes that create different aspects of the personality. When we are not aware of how we are being influenced by both passive and active attributes, we happily follow every trigger and unconsciously play out these aspects. Whether that is experienced as desiring something or emotions such as fear, sadness, anger or happiness, the fact is that it is activated from the outside. This means that we are adrift, following impulses that are not ours.
Because they are not ours by definition we can choose to not let them define us into unconscious aspects that continually react to triggers.
We also have to remember that the different aspects keep shifting with other aspects coming into the foreground all the time. It is like a dance with reality in which the active aspects that are emitted in each moment go back into the passive nature of our external reality.
You can quickly change your reality by changing yourself. If you keep choosing to keep your conscious and ascending aspects in place, change will feel like an adventure and a chance to grow and expand. If you allow unconscious aspects presenting you with fear to come to the forefront, you will most likely see the negative part of change, all the things you are letting go of. In that case it might even feel like a loss and it can easily diffuse your path and create many detours.
So the more we focus on ascension and the more we keep our conscious and ascending aspects in place, the more these active attributes will flow into the passive attributes that form reality around us. Another way of saying it is: we are learning to navigate our reality by monitoring our own aspects and it simply is an evergoing exchange from our inner reality to our outer reality. And that our experience is in our control through our expression.
Also, let's not forget: all these attributes in your universe are all within your own Merkabaic field, which is about 1.5 meters around you. Then it all of a sudden seems very possible to navigate reality and then you realize your own creational power.
The last article speaks about how minds cluster together, especially when emitted through a strong emotional field. Eckart Tolle calls this the 'pain body'. Ekara calls this 'clustering of aspects' which happens very easily. When unconscious aspects cluster, a field of drama grows. Conversely, conscious aspects are inspiring and can empower others around you because their very consciousness uses the building blocks of love, joy, freedom, truth and life. A true smile opens hearts at once.
Although all of the Imzaia teachings are holographic and understanding grows from all of them, most of the information above is taken out of Ekara's channeling: Vibrational Misalignment. This is a teaching which is part of Imzaia's October 2011 seminar 'Life after Ascension of All Matter'.
Thank you, dear Ekara, for such a clear explanation. This understanding has helped me a lot and to such an extent that it often really feels like I am effectively navigating the aspects, which makes it much easier to choose again and again and again and consciously create the reality I wish to see.
