brain machine

Brain machines are a little-explored side-alley off the technology main-road.

It is claimed that they are the digital equivalent of acid.

The brain is supposed to have the following 'frequencies'
1. beta - you are awake,conscious, active, 'external focus'
2. alpha - dreamy state, passive , receptive
3. theta - subconscious creativity, deep relaxation
4. delta - deep unconscious, intuition & insight
5. gamma - no one knows much, but apparently connected to anxiety.

complete article on Make blog

They actually sell a kit for this.

more about memes

susan blackmore's talk on memes. she wants to turn your mind inside out.she does.
the basic theory is that memes propogate themselves. humans are their symbiotic partners/hosts/vectors. so is all technology. e.g, the printing press came about to store memes. its success made people create more and more of them. and more . and means to get the output of these across. hence roads and trains and then planes etc etc.

listen

I was fairly groping in the dark and horribly off-topic in my previous post about 'meditation as meme weeding'.
What I wanted to say was that zen meditation seeks to eradicate memes.
Considering that memes are defined as 'that which is copied', and that these create and sustain human colonies for their maintenance and transfer, humans seeking enlightenment would appear to our meme-lords something akin to our computers seeking
to be free of computing.
welcome to the matrix it is, then

ps: do memes cash in on human beings' weakness for habit ? if yes, it means that : things we do things without thinking , we have a tendency to do them more .
If this is true, is it possible for meditation to help re-awaken perception so that we see things as if for the first time (beginner's mind) and hence have no habits ?

factory drone = bad, skilled artisan = good : from ranprieur.com

-excerpt-
Here's a post summarizing it, The Economic Benefits of Localization. If I were to make the same argument, I would start with the Luddites. The word has come to mean knee-jerk opposition to technology, but the original Luddites had a position so sophisticated that modern industrialized people would have trouble understanding it. They opposed a specific technology that replaced skilled artisans, working autonomously at home and making good money, with unskilled workers making poverty wages in oppressive factories. This is the kind of change that the industrial revolution brought everywhere: the people who did the work lost skill, money, participation in power, and quality of life, while the owners of the machines gained wealth and power in obscene and corrupting quantities.
-excerpt-
site from which i copied this is here

Sounds sophisticated enough for me.

Noam Chomsky , at this link, claims that education serves to make you an 'unskilled worker making poverty wages'
for the capitalist oppressive factories. That the capitalists setup consciously destroys liberties of the working class so that they never have the time /money to learn anything other than to do 'unskilled work for poverty wages' , and remain addicted to the machine.
I have seen the vicious cycle bear down on me even as a corporate drone.
They say leisure is the true measure of wealth. Ancient Greeks.

brain matter grey

nature is beneficial for the brain. Lack of it ( read cities ) impairs it.
so if you're a city dweller, chances are you are an orc.