Center for Consciousness Center . Tucson . Arizona

THE SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

April 25-30, 2016 - Tucson

Pre-Conference Workshop-optional fees

Monday, April 25, 9 am to 1 pm

Altered State Healing in the Amazon

Facilitators: Tania Re, Giuseppe Vitiello

of a thermal river in the Peruvian Amazon. The team analyzed 4 aspects of the ritual - water, shamanic music, ceremonial architecture and ingested plants (including ‘teacher plants’) on healing effects in plants, animals and humans. Realizations from these experiences are expressed in terms of ‘inside-out connectedness’, trance coherence, synchrony, regeneration, healing and musical brain interfaces.

Medicine and Physics
Link to Conference themes: Mechanism of Anesthesia and Psychoactive Drugs

The last 5-10 years have witnessed huge steps and the vast mobilization of multidisciplinary competences “Toward a Science of Consciousness”, as clearly illustrated in the recent international conference on that topic held in Stockholm under the patronage of the Center for Consciousness Studies of the University of Arizona and of the Perfjell Foundation, with the collaboration of the postdocs of the Karolinska Institute. At the same time that Science, and especially Medical Anthropology, Neuroscience and the Physics of Consciousness progresses, tools and new understanding have been developed that will allow for the transfer of much of that basic Science into clinical practice. This transfer doesn’t only concern the clinical practice exclusively with mental disease but also the regular clinical practice where a person or a patient, using his, or her mind, can influence the progression of disease, becoming what one could rightly call a therapeutic partner. This is an old issue in different cultures that uses different “states of consciousness” to foster the healing process. The need to establish connections between Medicine, especially in the therapeutic aspect (healing), and all the information already obtained from the mind-matter phenomenology has led to much experimentation and theorizing in this border and transcultural area. During the conference symposium an interdisciplinary and international group formed by anthropologist Re who have studied altered states of consciousness in different cultures, medical doctors who uses states of consciousness to treat patients with the support of quantum physics and molecular biologists will try to define a transcultural perspective on consciousness merging anthropology, medicine and physics.

Tania Re

Analysis of the material and immaterial elements in the healing places

Tania Re – Unesco Chair “Anthropology of Health Biosphere and Healing Systems”
The research project involves a multidisciplinary team of anthropologists, physicists, chemists, ethnobotanical, architects and medical doctors and its primary objective is the analysis of places of healing and the processes that have in place. In particular, in it was analyzed Mayantuyacu, a healing center located in the Peruvian Amazon where the ancient art of healing ashanika is set. Mayantuyacu is situated on the bank of a river with thermal water at 100 ° flowing in the middle of the forest. Around the central Maloca, where is the common life, were built to accommodate malocas other people who come to Mayantuyacu to know and to seek treatment from knowing millennial ashanika and properties of thousands of plants including plants teacher. Psychologist, Medical Anthropologist and expert in naturopathic medicine. She is founder member of the Unesco Chair “Health Anthropology, Biosphere and Healing systems” inside the University of Genoa (IT) and she is currently researcher by the Phytotherapy Centre in Tuscany named CERTIF (IT) with a project on Teaching Plants and States of Consciousness. She teaches Ethnomedicine and Medical Anthropology in the Integrative Medicine Master in the University of Florence.

Results

2. Water: we present preliminary results obtained by the study of the electrical conductivity
measurements on different samples

3. Music: we present preliminary results obtained by the study of the heart mechanical vibrations by means laser Doppler vibrometry. We compare the recorded signals for an individual in two different conditions: at rest and listening to the music of the South American shamans. An analysis of the shaman music is also realized, by using the decomposition method in time domain, in order to study
self-similar structures of the listened music.

Giuseppe Vitiello
On the unity of knowledge as implied by the undividable consciousness act

Giuseppe Vitiello is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Salerno, Department of Physics and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN). His research activity is focused on elementary particle physics and the physics of living matter and brain. He is author of about 140 research papers, many reports to International Conferences and of the books: Quantum Mechanics, co-authored with H. Umezawa (Bibliopolis, Napoli 1985 and, translated in Japanese, Nippon Hyoron Sha. Co.Ltd., Tokyo, Japan 2005), My Double unveiled (John Benjamins Publ. Co., Amsterdam 2001). Quantum field theory and its macroscopic manifestations, co-authored with Massimo Blasone and Petr Jizba (Imperial College Press, London 2011). Together with Gordon Globus e a Karl Pribram, he is editor of the book Brain and Being. At the boundary between science, philosophy, language and arts. (John Benjamins Publ. Co., Amsterdam, 2004). The formation of spatially extended domains of neuronal synchronized oscillations and their rapid sequencing in the form of phase transitions in the brain functional activity characterize the permanent, continual relation of the brain with the environment in which it is embedded. Brains dissipate metabolic energy at rates 10-fold greater than rates in other organs and the brain phase transitions between different dynamical regimes appear to be crucial in the engagement of the subject with the environment in the action-perception cycle. The study of the continual updating of the meanings of the information exchanged with the environment cannot be faced within one single discipline, such as neuroscience, biology, physics, anthropology, etc.. It requires the support of the methods and tools which are specific of each of these disciplines, but it is also crucial to adopt a unifying standpoint. Indeed, the unity of knowledge emerges from the very same brain activity, which proceeds from information to meanings as known and constructed by the brain itself, which we describe as its Double. The act of consciousness resides in the permanent dialog between the brain and its Double. Consciousness, and knowledge stemming from it, is in fact translational and transcultural with respect to the many different facets under which Nature, including the same brain, can be viewed and studied.

Optional - Pre-Conference Workshops

Workshops are held: Monday/Tuesday, April 25 - 26

Monday Morning 9-1: Monday Afternoon 2-6

Monday Evening 7-10 and Tuesday Morning 9-1

half day and evening Workshops

Early Workshop Fees:

TSC General Registrants $60 half day

TSC Student Registrants $40 half day

General Public - Workshop only $125 half day

General Public - Student - Workshop only $75 half day

Mission

People