A posthuman or post-human is, according to the transhumanist thinkers, a hypothetical future being "whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards."^[1]

The difference between the posthuman and other hypothetical sophisticated non-humans is that a posthuman was once a human, either in its lifetime or in the lifetimes of some or all of its direct ancestors. As such, a prerequisite for a posthuman is a transhuman, the point at which the human being begins surpassing his or her own limitations, but is still recognisable as a human person or similar.^[1]

Many science fiction writers, such as Greg Egan, Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear, Charles Stross and Ken MacLeod, have written works set in posthuman futures.

Further information: Human enhancement

Posthumans could be a symbiosis of human and artificial intelligence, or uploaded consciousnesses, or the result of making many smaller but cumulatively profound technological augmentations to a biological human, i.e. a cyborg. Some examples of the latter are redesigning the human organism using advanced nanotechnology or radical enhancement using some combination of technologies such as genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, life extension therapies, neural interfaces, advanced information management tools, memory enhancing drugs, wearable or implanted computers, and cognitive techniques.^[1]

At what point does a human become posthuman? Steven Pinker, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of How the Mind Works, poses the following hypothetical, which is an example of the Ship of Theseus paradox:

Surgeons replace one of your neurons with a microchip that duplicates its input-output functions. You feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until more and more of your brain becomes silicon. Since each microchip does exactly what the neuron did, your behavior and memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like dying? Is some other conscious entity moving in with you?^[2]

In this sense, the transition between human and posthuman may be viewed as a continuum rather than an all-or-nothing event.
A variation on the posthuman theme is the notion of the "Posthuman God"; the idea that posthumans, being no longer confined to the parameters of "humanness", might grow physically and mentally so powerful as to appear possibly god-like by human standards. This notion should not be interpreted as being related to the idea portrayed in some soft science fiction that a sufficiently advanced species may "ascend" to a superior plane of existence - rather, it merely means that some posthuman being may become so exceedingly intelligent and technologically sophisticated that its behaviour would not possibly be comprehensible to modern humans, purely by reason of their limited intelligence and imagination. The difference here is that the latter stays within the bounds of the laws of the material universe, while the former exceeds them by going beyond it.
As used in this article, "posthuman" does not necessarily refer to a conjectured future where humans are extinct or otherwise absent from the Earth. As with other species who speciate from one another, both humans and posthumans could continue to exist. However, the apocalyptic scenario appears to be a viewpoint shared among a minority of transhumanists such as Marvin Minsky and Hans Moravec, who could be considered misanthropes, at least in regards to humanity in its current state. Alternatively, others such as Kevin Warwick argue for the likelihood that both humans and posthumans will continue to exist but the latter will predominate in society over the former because of their abilities.^[3]

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In the world's shamanic cultures, the shaman plays a priest-like role; however, there is an essential difference between the two, as Joseph Campbell describes:

"The priest is the socially initiated, ceremonially inducted member of a recognized religious organization, where he holds a certain rank and functions as the tenant of an office that was held by others before him, while the shaman is one who, as a consequence of a personal psychological crisis, has gained a certain power of his own." (1969, p. 231)

A shaman may be initiated via a serious illness, by being struck by lightning and dreaming of thunder to become a Heyoka, or by a near-death experience (e.g., the shaman Black Elk), or one might follow a "calling" to become a shaman. There is usually a set of cultural imagery expected to be experienced during shamanic initiation regardless of the method of induction. According to Mircea Eliade, such imagery often includes being transported to the spirit world and interacting with beings inhabiting the distant world of spirits, meeting a spiritual guide, being devoured by some being and emerging transformed, and/or being "dismantled" and "reassembled" again, often with implanted amulets such as magical crystals. The imagery of initiation generally speaks of transformation and the granting powers to transcend death and rebirth.

In some societies shamanic powers are considered to be inherited, whereas in other places of the world shaman are considered to have been "called" and require lengthy training. Among the Siberian Chukchis one may behave in ways that "Western" bio-medical clinicians would perhaps characterize as psychotic, but which Siberian peoples may interpret as possession by a spirit who demands that one assume the shamanic vocation. Among the South American Tapirape shaman are called in their dreams. In other societies shaman choose their career. In North America, First Nations peoples would seek communion with spirits through a "vision quest"; whereas South American Shuar, seeking the power to defend their family against enemies, apprentice themselves to accomplished shaman. Similarly the Urarina of Peruvian Amazonia have an elaborate cosmological system predicated on the ritual consumption of ayahuasca. Coupled with millenarian impulses, Urarina ayahuasca shamanism is a key feature of this poorly documented society.

Putatively customary shamanic "traditions" can also be noted among indigenous Kuna peoples of Panama, who rely on shamanic powers and sacred talismans to heal. As such, they enjoy a popular position among local peoples.

Note: Some feel that the Lakota tradition (which includes the Heyoka and Black Elk, mentioned above) are not really shamanic. There is a big difference between the Lakota culture and shamanic cultures. In many South American shamanic cultures there is the use of psycho-active substances (peyote, fly agaric, psilocybin, etc.)^[2][23] In the Lakota culture pain is often used instead of psychoactive plants. While a Siberian shaman would use fly agaric, a Lakota medicine man would do a sun dance. The Lakota medicine people have some bias against the use of psychoactive plants. The majority of shamanic cultures use repetitive sound to enter the shamanic state versus the use of psycho-active plants or pain.
Shamanic illness, also called shamanistic inititatory crisis, is a psycho-spiritual crisis, usually involuntary, or a rite of passage, observed among those becoming shaman. The episode often marks the beginning of a time-limited episode of confusion or disturbing behavior where the shamanic initiate might sing or dance in an unconventional fashion, or have an experience of being "disturbed by spirits". The symptoms are usually not considered to be signs of mental illness by interpreters in the shamanic culture; rather, they are interpreted as introductory signposts for the individual who is meant to take the office of shaman (Lukoff et.al, 1992). Similarities of some shamanic illness symptoms to the kundalini process have been often noted [1]. The significant role of initiatory illnesses in the calling of a shaman can be found in the detailed case history of Chuonnasuan, the last master shaman among the Tungus peoples in Northeast China.^[62]

The shaman plays the role of healer in shamanic societies; shamans gain knowledge and power by traversing the axis mundi and bringing back knowledge from the heavens. Even in western society, this ancient practice of healing is referenced by the use of the caduceus as the symbol of medicine. Often the shaman has, or acquires, one or more familiar helping entities in the spirit world; these are often spirits in animal form, spirits of healing plants, or (sometimes) those of departed shamans. In many shamanic societies, magic, magical force, and knowledge are all denoted by one word, such as the Quechua term "yachay".

While the causes of disease are considered to lie in the spiritual realm, being effected by malicious spirits or witchcraft, both spiritual and physical methods are used to heal. Commonly, a shaman will "enter the body" of the patient to confront the spirit making the patient sick, and heal the patient by banishing the infectious spirit. Many shamans have expert knowledge of the plant life in their area, and an herbal regimen is often prescribed as treatment. In many places shamans claim to learn directly from the plants, and to be capable of harnessing their effects and healing properties only after obtaining permission from its abiding or patron spirit. In South America, individual spirits are summoned by the singing of songs called icaros; before a spirit can be summoned the spirit must teach the shaman its song.^[2] The use of totem items such as rocks is common; these items are believed to have special powers and an animating spirit. Such practices are presumably very ancient; in about 368 BCE, Plato wrote in the Phaedrus that the "first prophecies were the words of an oak", and that everyone who lived at that time found it rewarding enough to "listen to an oak or a stone, so long as it was telling the truth".

The belief in witchcraft and sorcery, known as brujeria in South America, is prevalent in many shamanic societies. Some societies distinguish shamans who cure from sorcerers who harm; others believe that all shamans have the power to both cure and kill; that is, shamans are in some societies also thought of as being capable of harm. The shaman usually enjoys great power and prestige in the community, and is renowned for their powers and knowledge; but they may also be suspected of harming others and thus feared.

By engaging in this work, the shaman exposes himself to significant personal risk, from the spirit world, from any enemy shamans, as well as from the means employed to alter his state of consciousness. Certain of the plant materials used can be fatal, and the failure to return from an out-of-body journey can lead to physical death. Spells are commonly used to protect against these dangers, and the use of more dangerous plants is usually very highly ritualized.

Generally, the shaman traverses the axis mundi and enters the spirit world by effecting a transition of consciousness, entering into an ecstatic trance, either autohypnotically or through the use of entheogens. The methods employed are diverse, and are often used together. Some of the methods for effecting such trances:

• Tobacco (improves concentration, but is not psychotrophic)
• Drumming
• Dancing
• Singing
• Listening to music
• Icaros / Medicine Songs^[2]
• Vigils
• Fasting
• Sweat lodge
• Vision quests
• Mariri
• Swordfighting / Bladesmithing
• "Power" or "master" plants used as incense or consumed to heal or attain altered states (please do very thorough research before using them, and always consider using it with guidance from an experienced person):
• Psychedelic mushrooms - alluded to euphemistically as holy children by Mazatec shamans such as María Sabina.
• Cannabis
• San Pedro cactus - named after (St. Peter), guardian and holding the keys to the gates of heaven, by the Andean peoples; Quechua name: Huachuma
• Peyote[23]
• Ayahuasca - Quechua for Vine of the Dead; also called yage[2]
• Cedar
• Datura
• Deadly nightshade
• Fly agaric
• Iboga
• Morning glory
• Sweetgrass
• Sage
• Salvia divinorum - sometimes called Diviners' sage

Drum is used by shamans of several peoples in Siberia; same holds for many Eskimo groups,^[67] although its usage for shamanistic seances may be lacking among the Inuit of Canada.^[68]

The beating of the drum allows the shaman to achieve an altered state of consciousness or to travel on a journey. The drum is for example referred to as, “‘horse’ or ‘rainbow-bridge’ between the physical and spiritual worlds”.^[69] The journey mentioned is one in which the shaman establishes a connection with one or two of the spirit worlds. With the beating of the drum come neurophysiological effects. Much fascination surround the role that the acoustics of the drum play to the shaman. Siberian shamans' drums are generally constructed of an animal-skin stretched over a bent wooden hoop, with a handle across the hoop.

There are two different worlds, the upper and the lower. In the upper world, images such as “climbing a mountain, tree, cliff, rainbow, or ladder; ascending into the sky on smoke; flying on an animal, carpet, or broom and meeting a teacher or guide”,^[70] are typically seen. The lower world consists of images including, “entering into the earth through a cave, hollow tree stump, a water hole, a tunnel, or a tube”.^[71] By being able to interact with a different world at an altered and aware state, the Shaman can then exchange information between the world in which he lives and that in which he has traveled to.
Feather

These feathers have been seen used as a kind of spiritual scalpel.[2]

Rattle

Found mostly among South American[72] and African peoples. Also used in ceremonies among the Navajo and in traditional ways in their blessings and ceremonies.

Gong

Often found through South East Asia, Far Eastern peoples.

Didgeridoo and clap stick

Found mainly among the various aboriginal peoples of Australia.

While some cultures have had higher numbers of male shamans, others such as native Korean cultures have had a preference for females. Recent archaeological evidence suggests that the earliest known shamans—dating to the Upper Paleolithic era in what is now the Czech Republic—were women.^[73]

In some societies, shamans exhibit a two-spirit identity, assuming the dress, attributes, role or function of the opposite sex, gender fluidity and/or same-sex sexual orientation. This practice is common, and found among the Chukchi, Sea Dayak, Patagonians, Araucanians, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Navajo, Pawnee, Lakota, and Ute, as well as many other Native American tribes. Indeed, these two spirited shamans were so widespread as to suggest a very ancient origin of the practice. See, for example, Joseph Campbell's map in his The Historical Atlas of World Mythology [Vol I: The Way of the Animal Powers: Part 2: pg 174] Such two-spirit shamans are thought to be especially powerful, and Shamanism so important to ancestral populations that it may have contributed to the maintenance of genes for transgendered individuals in breeding populations over evolutionary time through the mechanism of "kin selection." [see final chapter of E.O. Wilson's "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis] They are highly respected and sought out in their tribes, as they will bring high status to their mates.

Duality and bisexuality are also found in the shamans of the Dogon people of Mali (Africa). References to this can be found in several works of Malidoma Somé, a writer who was born and initiated there.

In some cultures, the border between the shaman and the lay person is not sharp:

The difference is that the shaman knows more myths and understands their meaning better, but the majority of adult men knows many myths, too.^[74]

Similar can be observed among some Eskimo peoples. Many laic people have felt experiences that are usually attributed to the shamans of those Eskimo groups: experiencing daydreaming, reverie, trance is not restricted to shamans.^[75] It is the control over helping spirits that is characteristic mainly to shamans, the laic people use amulets, spells, formulae, songs.^[76][77] In Greenland among some Inuit, there are laic people who may have the capability to have closer relationships with beings of the belief system than others. These people are apprentice shamans who failed to accomplish their learning process.^[78]

The assistant of an Oroqen shaman (called jardalanin, or "second spirit") knows many things about the associated beliefs: he/she accompanies the rituals, interprets the behavior of the shaman.^[79] In spite of this, the jardalanin is not a shaman. For his/her interpretative, accompanying role, it would be even unwelcome to fall into trance.^[80]

The way shamans get sustenance and take part in everyday life varies among cultures. In many Eskimo groups, they provide services for the community and get a “due payment” (some cultures believe the payment is given to the helping spirits^[81]), but these goods are only “welcome addenda.” They are not enough to enable shamanizing as a full-time activity. Shamans live like any other member of the group, as hunter or housewife.^[81][82]

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• The animistic belief that all things have a spirit, a blueprint, or creative force, which animates them, and their own consciousness, which can be communicated with;
• Everything consists of energy which can be moved and transformed;
• In the web of life, all things are interconnected and affect one other, and should be respected;
• All dis-ease has spiritual origins, so by identifying the problem, and putting right the flow of energy, healing can be facilitated.

All modern forms of healing have originated from this knowledge.

In indigenous cultures the shaman is the doctor, counsellor, herbalist, and oracle for the tribe, getting guidance about where to hunt or to find food, or water, and talking to the plant spirits about how to use them for medicine. The shaman conducts ceremonies for birth, death, weddings, and rites of passage; space clearing for buildings and land; helps the souls of the dead, stuck in this dimension, to pass over; reads signs, omens, and the cycles of nature to choose auspicious timings; and interprets dreams for guidance. The fact that shamanic methods are still in use after many thousands of years is testimony to their effectiveness – they produce practical results.

Shamanic techniques all over the world are based on a few basic practices, and modern ‘core shamanism’ brings together these key elements, without any particular cultural slant, although many practitioners still use ethnic techniques. Shamanism carries no dogma, requires no religious belief, and is non-judgmental.  The most common practice is the shamanic journey, in which the shaman uses a monotonous drum beat, rattle, or chant, to enter a trance state, and travels into the realms of spirit to consult with guides for healing or divination.  These invisible realms are what the Celts referred to as the Otherworld, Aborigines the Dreamtime, the Norse Nine Worlds, the pagan Summerlands.  Many traditions talk of three worlds, connected by the World Tree, – the Lower world, a beautiful, earthy dimension, where one connects with power animals; the Upper world, an ethereal, bright place where one connects with guides in human or angelic form; and the Middle world, the spiritual dimension of our physical world, with all its beauty, trickery, and indeed, strangeness and horror. 

The journey is a controlled visionary experience, which can be learned by anyone, to meet with their guides and power animals, for guidance and healing. The imagination, often dismissed in our culture as unimportant, even problematic, is the tool – in truth it is our greatest asset, allowing us to see into the invisible realms, to work with helping spirits and energies, to heal the past and create the future.  A power animal is the spirit of an animal, which protects and guides us through life – and we all have at least one.  Spirit guides, usually first encountered in the upper world, are teachers in human form, angels, deities, historical figures, or ancestors.  The shaman has a strong relationship with his or her animal and spirit guides, who do the healing work and give guidance on journeys.

A shamanic healer typically uses a repertoire of healing methods, such as energy healing, body work, crystals, and sound, as well as healings done using the shamanic journey, which most commonly include power and soul retrieval, and extraction. The healer must also work on healing themselves, to become like a ‘hollow bone’, free from ego and projections, so that they can give their complete attention and be fully present with the client, without becoming judgmental or energetically drained.  This is an important and ongoing part of the shamanic training.

Soul retrieval is a powerful healing for those needing a quantum leap along their life’s path, it is a healing that requires genuine commitment, and should not be undertaken lightly.  Soul loss can happen at any time, when traumatic life events occur, for example at birth, emotional or physical abuse, bullying, accident, bereavement, surgery, extreme stress, or relationship difficulties, and can stem from past life traumas too.  A part of the soul’s essence splits off and goes away, to preserve itself – in the meantime, the full life force is not present or able to function, causing symptoms and problems.  In psychology this is known as dissociation, and people live with the effects for years without really understanding what has happened, or that anything can be done.  In shamanic cultures, looking after each individual is understood to be vital to maintaining the balance of the community, and the problem is addressed more quickly.  Symptoms of soul loss include, among others:

A feeling of not being ‘all there’
Depression
Physical or mental illness
Disempowerment and struggle, out of touch with creativity
Relationship difficulties
Lack of confidence – general, or in some particular area
Fears and phobias
Inability to focus
Addiction

Soul retrieval typically takes two healing sessions.  In the first, the shaman journeys to bring back the missing soul part(s), to be returned.  Sometimes the client may be guided to journey for themselves, but this depends on the circumstances – some come for shamanic healing after quite obviously working towards it, making changes in their lives and dealing with issues, so that the soul retrieval is a completion of their process – it’s as if the soul part is very near, waiting to come back in.  Others can be too fearful, emotional, stressed, desperate, or resistant to manage their own journey, so the healer will journey for them. 
A healing begins with a smudging ceremony, using burning sage to cleanse and create sacred space, and the shamanic healer connects with their spirit allies through prayer or meditation.  The healer then uses a drum beat for the ten or fifteen minute journeying process, during which the client simply relaxes, and is receptive to whatever may happen.  The healer returns with the soul part, and blows it into the client’s energy system, usually through the heart and the crown chakras, before telling the client the story of the journey, and any guidance received.
Memories, emotions and dreams often arise as part of the healing and clearing process, as the newly returned soul part integrates, and it is important to remember that the original trauma which caused the soul part to leave is NOT being returned.  The shamanic healer may support the client through this time with extra sessions, or simply being available for reassurance.

The second session, around a week later, aids this integration by helping the client find ways to welcome the soul part, find its active role, and to bring it fully into life once more.  For example, if the soul part returned was a little child who had left because of the fear and low self esteem caused by bullying, then the client might imagine themselves, as a kind protective adult, asking the little child how it needs to be looked after, and what it would like to do. Sometimes the answers to these questions are great fun!  After integrating, this soul part could be expected to bring qualities back to the person, such as courage and self esteem, and the ability to play and create.
The effects of soul retrieval can cause rapid and profound shifts, often more apparent when looked at in hindsight, over the following weeks or months. 
 
Power retrieval, or restoring part of the client’s personal power in the form of their power animal, which they have lost their connection to, is similar, and can generally be achieved with one healing session.  Shamanic cultures say that we are born with a power animal, whether we are aware of it or not, and this connection is very important to our wellbeing.  Symptoms of power loss can include a series of unfortunate events, minor accidents and illnesses, or just being unable to ‘get it together’, so this healing can result in significant improvements in a person’s confidence and abilities, and connects them with a guide whom they can consult whenever necessary.

Extraction healing involves the healer journeying to remove and transmute what is really just energy caught in the wrong place.  When we are not truly full of our own power, blockages and intrusions occur in our energy system, caused by our own beliefs and attitudes (imagine a ‘bee in your bonnet’, a ‘chip on your shoulder’, a ‘rod for your own back’), the thoughts and actions of others (‘stabbed in the back’), or picked up accidentally as we walk through life’s sea of constantly moving energy (‘caught in the cross-fire’).  Symptoms of these intrusions are very often physically painful.

The shamanic healer checks which aspects of a client’s spiritual health need attention for each healing - very often more than one type of shamanic healing is needed, in combination with work on the energy bodies and chakras, and there are many techniques besides journeying which could also be used. Every healing is completely unique.

Shamanism is practical, and adapts to the changing needs of society, the methods can also be applied to animals, places, and the spirits of the land.  People finding that they are surrounded by urbanisation and technology (which, incidentally, also have spirits!) are adopting shamanic practices into their lives, as they seek to connect with nature, and their own souls.  The old ways embodied in modern core shamanism are easily learned, and infinitely usable in any situation.  We owe it to ourselves to become free from the effects of old, abusive relationships, guilt, and stuck situations, and because journeying is a process of direct revelation, it is possible to seek shamanic help for absolutely any issue. Shamanism can go directly to the roots of a problem and is always uniquely tailored to the needs of the individual.  Whether you need one or two sessions, or an ongoing, supportive process, this can be guided by your own feelings and intuition.

From www.shamanism-wales.co.uk

Through late 14th century Old French magique, the word "magic" derives via Latin magicus from the Greek adjective magikos (μαγικός) used in reference to the "magical" arts — in particular divination — of the Magians (Greek: magoi, singular mágos, μάγος), the Zoroastrian astrologer priests. Greek mágos is first attested in Heraclitus (6th century BC, apud. Clement Protrepticus 12) who curses the Magians and others for their "impious rites." Greek magikos is attested from the 1st century Plutarch, typically appearing in the feminine, in μαγική τέχνη (magike techne, Latin ars magica) "magical art."

Likewise, sorcery was taken in ca. 1300 from Old French sorcerie, which is from Vulgar Latin *sortiarius, from sors "fate", apparently meaning "one who influences fate." Sorceress appears also in the late 14th century, while sorcerer is attested only from 1526.

The prototypical "magicians" were a class of priests, the Magi of Zoroastrianism, and their reputation together with that of Ancient Egypt shaped the hermeticism of Hellenistic religion.^{[citation needed]} The Greek mystery religions had strongly magical components, and in Egypt, a large number of magical papyri, in Greek, Coptic, and Demotic, have been recovered. These sources contain early instances of much of the magical lore that later became part of Western cultural expectations about the practice of magic, especially ceremonial magic.^{[citation needed]} They contain early instances of:

• the use of "magic words" said to have the power to command spirits;
• the use of wands and other ritual tools;
• the use of a magic circle to defend the magician against the spirits he is invoking or evoking; and
• the use of mysterious symbols or sigils thought useful to invoke or evoke spirits.^[1]

The use of spirit mediums is also documented in these texts; many of the spells call for a child to be brought to the magic circle to act as a conduit for messages from the spirits.^{[citation needed]} The time of the Emperor Julian of Rome, marked by a reaction against the influence of Christianity, saw a revival of magical practices associated with neo-Platonism under the guise of theurgy.^{[citation needed]}

Several medieval scholars were credited as magicians in popular legend, notably Gerbert d'Aurillac and Albertus Magnus: both men were active in scientific research of their day as well as in ecclesiastical matters, which was enough to attach to them a nimbus of the occult.

Magic practice was actively discouraged by the church, but remained widespread in folk religion throughout the medieval period. Magical thinking became syncretized with Christian dogma, expressing itself in practices like the judicial duel and relic veneration. The relics had become amulets, and various churches strove to purchase scarce or valuable examples, hoping to become places of pilgrimage. As in any other economic endeavour, demand gave rise to supply.^[2][clarify] Tales of the miracle-working relics of the saints were compiled later into quite popular collections like the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine or the Dialogus miraculorum of Caesar of Heisterbach.

From the 13th century, the Jewish Kabbalah exerts influence on Christian occultism, giving rise to the first grimoires and the scholarly occultism that would develop into Renaissance magic. The demonology and angelology contained in the earliest grimoires assume a life surrounded by Christian implements and sacred rituals. The underlying theology in these works of Christian demonology encourages the magician to fortify himself with fasting, prayers, and sacraments, so that by using the holy names of God in the sacred languages, he could use divine power to coerce demons into appearing and serving his usually lustful or avaricious magical goals.^[3]

13th century astrologers include Johannes de Sacrobosco and Guido Bonatti.

Renaissance humanism saw resurgence in hermeticism and Neo-Platonic varieties of ceremonial magic. The Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, on the other hand, saw the rise of scientism, in such forms as the substitution of chemistry for alchemy, the dethronement of the Ptolemaic theory of the universe assumed by astrology, the development of the germ theory of disease, that restricted the scope of applied magic and threatened the belief systems it relied on.^[2]

The seven artes magicae or artes prohibitae, arts prohibited by canon law, as expounded by Johannes Hartlieb in 1456, their sevenfold partition reflecting that of the artes liberales and artes mechanicae, were:

1. nigromancy ("black magic", "demonology", linked by popular etymology with necromancy)
2. geomancy
3. hydromancy
4. aeromancy
5. pyromancy
6. chiromancy
7. scapulimancy

Both bourgeoisie and nobility in the 15th and 16th century showed great fascination with these arts, which exerted an exotic charm by their ascription to Arabic, Jewish, Gypsy and Egyptian sources. There was great uncertainty in distinguishing practices of vain superstition, blasphemous occultism, and perfectly sound scholarly knowledge or pious ritual. The intellectual and spiritual tensions erupted in the Early Modern witch craze, further reinforced by the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation, especially in Germany, England, and Scotland.^[2]

Study of the occult arts remained intellectually respectable well into the 17th century, and only gradually divides into the modern categories of natural science vs. occultism or superstition. The 17th century sees the gradual rise of the "age of reason", while belief in witchcraft and sorcery, and consequently the irrational surge of Early Modern witch trials, receded, a process only completed at the end of the Baroque period or circa the 1730s. Christian Thomasius still met opposition as he argued in his 1701 Dissertatio de crimine magiae that it was meaningless to make dealing with the devil a criminal offence, since it was impossible to really commit the crime in the first place. In Britain, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 established that people could not be punished for consorting with spirits, while would-be magicians pretending to be able to invoke spirits could still be fined as con artists.

Psionic Abilities may be categorized into three types:

First Person Psionics [I] - This type of Psionic ability is personal, as in it is useful only to the user:

• Psycho-metabolic abilities ("mind over body")
  • Resistance to Pain
  • Personal Shielding - To resist assault or external injury
  • Accelerated/Guided healing
  • Lessening mental instabilities
• Extrasensory Perception ("third eye")
  • Precognition (seeing the future)
  • Postcognition/Retrocognition (seeing the past)
  • Remote Viewing(seeing beyond one's own surroundings)
  • Spiritual Perception (seeing beyond the planes of this reality)

Second Person Psionics [You] - This type of Psionic ability can be interpersonal, as in useful or effectual against more than one person:

• Telepathy: Communication without the use of physical senses. ("mind speak")
  • Thought Communications
    • Discourse Projection (saying conversation without mouth)
    • Discourse Reception (hearing conversation without ears)
  • Image Projection (transmitting images into another's mind)
• Mental Persuasion ("brainwashing")
  • Mind Control
  • Mind Reading
  • Memory Alteration
  • Induced Hallucination
• Clairperception (perceiving the truth in an object or person similar to an extra sensory perception)
  • Clairvoyance (perceiving the truth in an object or person through sight)
  • Clairsentience (perceiving the truth in an object or person through feeling/touching)
  • Clairaudience (perceiving the truth in an object or person through hearing/listening)
  • Clairalience (perceiving the truth in an object or person through smelling)
  • Claircognizance (perceiving the truth in an object or person through knowing)
  • Clairgustance (perceiving the truth in an object or person through tasting)
• Therapeutic Uses ("mental healing")
  • Lessening mental instability in another
  • Third-party mediation of internal conflicts

Third Person Psionics [Them] - This type of Psionic ability can be confrontational, as in useful or effectual against more than one aggressive person, or may affect target objects:

• Psychokinesis ("mind over matter")
  • Telekinesis (Manipulating/Creating kinetic Energy with the Mind)
  • Pyrokinesis/Cryokinesis (Manipulating/Creating Heat Energy with the Mind [to burn or freeze targets])
  • Electrokinesis (Manipulating/Creating Electrical Energy with the Mind)

[These and other concepts such as geokinesis (earth manipulation) and hydrokinesis (water manipulation), are generally seen as variations of telekinesis overall.]

• Physical Sensory Projection (The ability to create images or even tangible objects in the physical world)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Psychology studies thought and perception, with broad areas such as language, cognition, memory, group psychology and abnormal psychology. Neuroeconomics is the subset that focuses on thought about our choices, especially the cognition that happens when we understand our options and then choose one.

Neuroeconomics findings tend to confirm that emotions (among them hope and fear) are important factors in many economic choices.

In a typical behavioral economics experiment, a subject is asked to make a series of economic decisions. For example, a subject may be asked whether they prefer to have 45 cents or a gamble with a 50% chance of one dollar and 50% chance of nothing. The experimenter will then measure different variables in order to determine what is going on in the subject's brain as they make the decision. The simplest experiments record the subject's decision over various different design parameters (what about 42 cents?), and use the data to generate formal models that predict performance. Neuroeconomics extends the approach of behavioral economics by adding observation of the nervous system to the set of explanatory variables.

In neuroeconomic experiments, full brain scans will be performed using fMRI or PET in order to compare the roles of the different brain areas that contribute to economic decision-making. Other experiments measure ERP (event-related potentials, which are closely related to EEG), and MEG (magnetoencephalograms) to measure the timecourses of different brain events that contribute to economic decision making.

The most complicated experiments involve direct recordings of neurons (and sometimes neurotransmitter concentrations) in monkeys and humans.

Some consider that neuroeconomics could be a new source of manipulative tools for advertisers to influence buying decisions, and that consumers should be taught to identify them.

• Neuromarketing
• Social neuroscience
• Behavioral economics
• Colin Camerer
• David Laibson
• Kevin McCabe
• Ernst Fehr
• Paul J. Zak

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In science, a process that is not reversible is called irreversible. This concept arises most frequently in thermodynamics, as applied to processes. Irreversibility is also used in economics to refer to investment or expenditures that involve large sunk costs.^[1]

From a thermodynamics perspective, all natural processes are irreversible. The phenomenon of irreversibility results from the fact that if a thermodynamic system of interacting molecules is brought from one thermodynamic state to another, the configuration or arrangement of the atoms and molecules in the system will change as a result. A certain amount of "transformation energy" will be used as the molecules of the "working body" do work on each other when they change from one state to another. During this transformation, there will be a certain amount of heat energy loss or dissipation due to intermolecular friction and collisions; energy that will not be recoverable if the process is reversed.
Thermodynamics defines the statistical behaviour of large numbers of entities, whose exact behavior is given by more specific laws. Since the fundamental laws of physics are all time-reversible,^[2] it can be argued that the irreversibility of thermodynamics must be statistical in nature, that is, that it must be merely highly unlikely, but not impossible, that a system will lower in entropy.
The difference between reversible and irreversible events has particular explanatory value in complex systems (such as living organisms, or ecosystems). According to the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, living organisms are characterized by autopoiesis, which enables their continued existence. More primitive forms of self-organizing systems have been described by the physicist and chemist Ilya Prigogine. In the context of complex systems, events which lead to the end of certain self-organising processes, like death, extinction of a species or the collapse of a meteorological system can be considered as irreversible. Even if a clone with the same organizational principle (e.g. identical DNA-structure) could be developed, this would not mean that the former distinct system comes back into being. Events to which the self-organizing capacities of organisms, species or other complex systems can adapt, like minor injuries or changes in the physical environment are reversible. However, adaptation depends on import of negentropy into the organism, thereby increasing irreversible processes in its environment. Ecological principles, like those of sustainability and the precautionary principle can be defined with reference to the concept of reversibility.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Adolf Zeising, whose main interests were mathematics and philosophy, found the golden ratio expressed in the arrangement of branches along the stems of plants and of veins in leaves. He extended his research to the skeletons of animals and the branchings of their veins and nerves, to the proportions of chemical compounds and the geometry of crystals, even to the use of proportion in artistic endeavors. In these phenomena he saw the golden ratio operating as a universal law.^[37] Zeising wrote in 1854:

In mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio between the sum of those quantities and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller. The golden ratio is approximately 1.6180339887.^[1]

At least since the Renaissance, many artists and architects have proportioned their works to approximate the golden ratio—especially in the form of the golden rectangle, in which the ratio of the longer side to the shorter is the golden ratio—believing this proportion to be aesthetically pleasing. Mathematicians have studied the golden ratio because of its unique and interesting properties.

The golden ratio can be expressed as a mathematical constant, usually denoted by the Greek letter (phi). The figure of a golden section illustrates the geometric relationship that defines this constant. Expressed algebraically:

This equation has as its unique positive solution the algebraic irrational number

^[1]

Other names frequently used for or closely related to the golden ratio are golden section (Latin: sectio aurea), golden mean, golden number, and the Greek letter phi ().^[2][3][4] Other terms encountered include extreme and mean ratio, medial section, divine proportion, divine section (Latin: sectio divina), golden proportion, golden cut,^[5] and mean of Phidias.^[6][7][8]

The golden ratio has fascinated intellectuals of diverse interests for at least 2,400 years:

Some of the greatest mathematical minds of all ages, from Pythagoras and Euclid in ancient Greece, through the medieval Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) and the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, to present-day scientific figures such as Oxford physicist Roger Penrose, have spent endless hours over this simple ratio and its properties. But the fascination with the Golden Ratio is not confined just to mathematicians. Biologists, artists, musicians, historians, architects, psychologists, and even mystics have pondered and debated the basis of its ubiquity and appeal. In fact, it is probably fair to say that the Golden Ratio has inspired thinkers of all disciplines like no other number in the history of mathematics.

—Mario Livio, The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, The World's Most Astonishing Number

Ancient Greek mathematicians first studied what we now call the golden ratio because of its frequent appearance in geometry. The ratio is important in the geometry of regular pentagrams and pentagons. The Greeks usually attributed discovery of the ratio to Pythagoras or his followers. The regular pentagram, which has a regular pentagon inscribed within it, was the Pythagoreans' symbol.

Euclid's Elements (Greek: Στοιχεῖα) provides the first known written definition of what is now called the golden ratio: "A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the less."^[9] Euclid explains a construction for cutting (sectioning) a line "in extreme and mean ratio", i.e. the golden ratio.^[10] Throughout the Elements, several propositions (theorems in modern terminology) and their proofs employ the golden ratio.^[11] Some of these propositions show that the golden ratio is an irrational number.

The name "extreme and mean ratio" was the principal term used from the 3rd century BC^[9] until about the 18th century.

The modern history of the golden ratio starts with Luca Pacioli's Divina Proportione of 1509, which captured the imagination of artists, architects, scientists, and mystics with the properties, mathematical and otherwise, of the golden ratio.

The first known approximation of the (inverse) golden ratio by a decimal fraction, stated as "about 0.6180340," was written in 1597 by Prof. Michael Maestlin of the University of Tübingen in a letter to his former student Johannes Kepler.^[12]

Since the twentieth century, the golden ratio has been represented by the Greek letter (phi, after Phidias, a sculptor who is said to have employed it) or less commonly by τ (tau, the first letter of the ancient Greek root τομή—meaning cut).

Beginning in the Renaissance, a body of literature on the aesthetics of the golden ratio has developed. As a result, architects, artists, book designers, and others have been encouraged to use the golden ratio in the dimensional relationships of their works.

The first and most influential of these was De Divina Proportione by Luca Pacioli, a three-volume work published in 1509. Pacioli, a Franciscan friar, was known mostly as a mathematician, but he was also trained and keenly interested in art. De Divina Proportione explored the mathematics of the golden ratio. Though it is often said that Pacioli advocated the golden ratio's application to yield pleasing, harmonious proportions, Livio points out that that interpretation has been traced to an error in 1799, and that Pacioli actually advocated the Vitruvian system of rational proportions.^[2] Pacioli also saw Catholic religious significance in the ratio, which led to his work's title. Containing illustrations of regular solids by Leonardo Da Vinci, Pacioli's longtime friend and collaborator, De Divina Proportione was a major influence on generations of artists and architects alike.

Some studies of the Acropolis, including the Parthenon, conclude that many of its proportions approximate the golden ratio. The Parthenon's facade as well as elements of its facade and elsewhere can be circumscribed by golden rectangles.^[17] To the extent that classical buildings or their elements are proportioned according to the golden ratio, this might indicate that their architects were aware of the golden ratio and consciously employed it in their designs. Alternatively, it is possible that the architects used their own sense of good proportion, and that this led to some proportions that closely approximate the golden ratio. On the other hand, such retrospective analyses can always be questioned on the ground that the investigator chooses the points from which measurements are made or where to superimpose golden rectangles, and that these choices affect the proportions observed.

Some scholars deny that the Greeks had any aesthetic association with golden ratio. For example, Midhat J. Gazalé says, "It was not until Euclid, however, that the golden ratio's mathematical properties were studied. In the Elements (308 B.C.) the Greek mathematician merely regarded that number as an interesting irrational number, in connection with the middle and extreme ratios. Its occurrence in regular pentagons and decagons was duly observed, as well as in the dodecahedron (a regular polyhedron whose twelve faces are regular pentagons). It is indeed exemplary that the great Euclid, contrary to generations of mystics who followed, would soberly treat that number for what it is, without attaching to it other than its factual properties."^[18] And Keith Devlin says, "Certainly, the oft repeated assertion that the Parthenon in Athens is based on the golden ratio is not supported by actual measurements. In fact, the entire story about the Greeks and golden ratio seems to be without foundation. The one thing we know for sure is that Euclid, in his famous textbook Elements, written around 300 B.C., showed how to calculate its value."^[19] Near-contemporary sources like Vitruvius exclusively discuss proportions that can be expressed in whole numbers, i.e. commensurate as opposed to irrational proportions.

A geometrical analysis of the Great Mosque of Kairouan reveals a consistent application of the golden ratio throughout the design, according to Boussora and Mazouz.^[20] It is found in the overall proportion of the plan and in the dimensioning of the prayer space, the court, and the minaret. Boussora and Mazouz also examined earlier archaeological theories about the mosque, and demonstrate the geometric constructions based on the golden ratio by applying these constructions to the plan of the mosque to test their hypothesis.

The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, famous for his contributions to the modern international style, centered his design philosophy on systems of harmony and proportion. Le Corbusier's faith in the mathematical order of the universe was closely bound to the golden ratio and the Fibonacci series, which he described as "rhythms apparent to the eye and clear in their relations with one another. And these rhythms are at the very root of human activities. They resound in man by an organic inevitability, the same fine inevitability which causes the tracing out of the Golden Section by children, old men, savages and the learned."^[21]

Le Corbusier explicitly used the golden ratio in his Modulor system for the scale of architectural proportion. He saw this system as a continuation of the long tradition of Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man", the work of Leon Battista Alberti, and others who used the proportions of the human body to improve the appearance and function of architecture. In addition to the golden ratio, Le Corbusier based the system on human measurements, Fibonacci numbers, and the double unit. He took Leonardo's suggestion of the golden ratio in human proportions to an extreme: he sectioned his model human body's height at the navel with the two sections in golden ratio, then subdivided those sections in golden ratio at the knees and throat; he used these golden ratio proportions in the Modulor system. Le Corbusier's 1927 Villa Stein in Garches exemplified the Modulor system's application. The villa's rectangular ground plan, elevation, and inner structure closely approximate golden rectangles.^[22]

Another Swiss architect, Mario Botta, bases many of his designs on geometric figures. Several private houses he designed in Switzerland are composed of squares and circles, cubes and cylinders. In a house he designed in Origlio, the golden ratio is the proportion between the central section and the side sections of the house.^[23]

Leonardo da Vinci's illustrations in De Divina Proportione (On the Divine Proportion) and his views that some bodily proportions exhibit the golden ratio have led some scholars to speculate that he incorporated the golden ratio in his own paintings. Some suggest that his Mona Lisa, for example, employs the golden ratio in its geometric equivalents.^[24] Whether Leonardo proportioned his paintings according to the golden ratio has been the subject of intense debate. The secretive Leonardo seldom disclosed the bases of his art, and retrospective analysis of the proportions in his paintings can never be conclusive^{[citation needed]}.

Salvador Dalí explicitly used the golden ratio in his masterpiece, The Sacrament of the Last Supper. The dimensions of the canvas are a golden rectangle. A huge dodecahedron, with edges in golden ratio to one another, is suspended above and behind Jesus and dominates the composition.^[25][2]

Mondrian used the golden section extensively in his geometrical paintings.^[26]

Side Note: Interestingly, a statistical study on 565 works of art of different great painters, performed in 1999, found that these artists had not used the golden ratio in the size of their canvases. The study concluded that the average ratio of the two sides of the paintings studied is 1.34, with averages for individual artists ranging from 1.04 (Goya) to 1.46 (Bellini).^[27]

Leonardo Da Vinci's illustration from De Divina Proportione applies geometric proportions to the human face.

Adolf Zeising, whose main interests were mathematics and philosophy, found the golden ratio expressed in the arrangement of branches along the stems of plants and of veins in leaves. He extended his research to the skeletons of animals and the branchings of their veins and nerves, to the proportions of chemical compounds and the geometry of crystals, even to the use of proportion in artistic endeavors. In these phenomena he saw the golden ratio operating as a universal law.^[37] Zeising wrote in 1854:

The golden section is a line segment sectioned into two according to the golden ratio. The total length a+b is to the longer segment a as a is to the shorter segment b.

Construction of a golden rectangle:
1. Construct a unit square (red).
2. Draw a line from the midpoint of one side to an opposite corner.
3. Use that line as the radius to draw an arc that defines the long dimension of the rectangle.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In its original application, "nocebo" had a very specific meaning in the medical domains of pharmacology, and nosology, and etiology.

It was a subject-oriented adjective that was used to label the harmful, unpleasant, or undesirable reactions (or responses) that a subject manifested (thus, "nocebo reactions" or "nocebo responses") as a result of administering an inert dummy drug, where these responses had not been chemically generated, and were entirely due to the subject's pessimistic belief and expectation that the inert drug would produce harmful, injurious, unpleasant, or undesirable consequences.

In these cases, there is no "real" drug involved, but the actual harmful, unpleasant or undesirable biochemical, physiological, behavioural, emotional, and/or cognitive consequences of the administration of the inert drug are very real.

W.R.Houston may have been the first to have spoken of a doctor's deliberate application of harmful "placebo" procedures, as distinct from the other, harmless sort of "placebo" procedures a doctor might apply and whose "usefulness was in direct proportion to the faith that the doctor had and the faith that he was able to inspire in his patients". Houston (1938,p.1418) wrote:

... [and while the efficacy of the placebo procedure] is believed in by the doctor, [the placebo procedure itself] is no longer harmless but harmful, sometimes very dangerous. It would seem peculiarly contradictory to speak of the painful and dangerous placebo, yet men are so constituted that they feel the need in dire extremity of resorting to dread measures. Nervous patients in particular, feel that a certain standing and sanction is bestowed upon their maladies when violent therapeutic measures are used."

Houston spoke of three significantly different categories of placebo (pp.1417-1418):

• the drug that the physician knows to be inert, but which the subject believes to be potent.
• the drug which is believed to be potent by both subject and physician, but which later investigation proves to have been totally inert.
• the drug which is believed to be potent by both subject and physician, but is actually harmful and dangerous, rather than being inert and harmless.

The term "nocebo response" originally only meant an unpredictable unintentional belief-generated injurious response to an inert procedure, but there is an emerging practice of labelling drugs that produce unpleasant consequences as "nocebo drugs" meaning that the term "nocebo response" may be used to label an intentional, entirely pharmacologically-generated and quite predictably injurious outcome that has ensued from the administration of an active (nocebo) drug.^{[citation needed]}

Anthropologists use the term "nocebo ritual" to describe a procedure, treatment, or ritual that has been performed (or a herbal remedy or medication that has been administered) with malicious intent, by contrast with a placebo procedure or treatment or ritual that is performed with a benevolent intent.

An example of nocebo effect is someone who dies of fright after being bitten by a non-poisonous snake.

In the strictest sense, a nocebo response occurs when a drug-trial's subject's symptoms are worsened by the administration of an inert, sham,^[1] or dummy (simulator) treatment, called a placebo.

According to current pharmacological knowledge and the current understanding of cause and effect, a placebo contains no chemical (or any other agent) that could possibly cause any of the observed worsening in the subject's symptoms. Thus, any change for the worse must be due to some subject-internal factor.

The worsening of the subject's symptoms is a direct consequence of their exposure to the placebo, but those symptoms have not been chemically generated by the placebo. Because this generation of symptoms entails a complex of "subject-internal" activities, in the strictest sense, we can never speak in terms of simulator-centred "nocebo effects", but only in terms of subject-centred "nocebo responses".

Although some attribute nocebo responses (or placebo responses) to a subject's gullibility, there is no evidence that an individual who manifests a nocebo/placebo response to one treatment will manifest a nocebo/placebo response to any other treatment; i.e., there is no fixed nocebo/placebo-responding trait or propensity.

McGlashan, Evans & Orne (1969, p.319) found no evidence of what they termed a "placebo personality". Also, in a carefully designed study, Lasagna, Mosteller, von Felsinger & Beecher (1954), found that there was no way that any observer could determine, by testing or by interview, which subject would manifest a placebo reaction and which would not.

Experiments have shown that no relationship exists between an individual's measured hypnotic susceptibility and his/her manifestation of nocebo or placebo responses.^[2]

The term "nocebo response" was coined in 1961 by Walter Kennedy (he actually spoke of a "nocebo reaction").

He had observed that another, entirely different and unrelated, and far more recent meaning of the term placebo was emerging into far more common usage in the technical literature (see homonym); namely that a "placebo response" (or "placebo reaction") was a "pleasant" response to a real or sham/dummy treatment (this new and entirely different usage was based on the Latin meaning of the word placebo, "I shall please").

Kennedy chose the Latin word nocebo ("I shall harm") because it was the opposite of the Latin word placebo ("I shall please"), and used it to denote the counterpart of the placebo response: namely, an "unpleasant" response to the application of real or sham treatment.

Kennedy very strongly emphasized that his specific usage of the term nocebo did not refer to "the iatrogenic action of drugs":^[3] in other words, according to Kennedy, there was no such thing as a "nocebo effect", there was only a "nocebo response".

He insisted that a nocebo reaction was subject-centred, and he was emphatic that the term nocebo reaction specifically referred to "a quality inherent in the patient rather than in the remedy".^[3]

Even more significantly, Kennedy also stated that whilst "nocebo reactions do occur [they should never be confused] with true pharmaceutical effects, such as the ringing in the ears caused by quinine".^[3]

This is strong, clear and very persuasive evidence that Kennedy was precisely speaking of an outcome that had been totally generated by a subject's negative expectation of a drug or ritual's administration; which was the exact counterpart of a placebo response that would have been generated by a subject's positive expectation.

And, finally, and most definitely, Kennedy was not speaking of an active drug's unwanted, but pharmacologically predictable negative side-effects (something for which the term nocebo is being increasingly used in current literature).

In an important recent paper,^[4] Stewart-Williams and Podd argue that using the contrasting terms "placebo" and "nocebo" to label inert agents that produce pleasant, health-improving or desirable outcomes, or unpleasant, health-diminishing, or undesirable outcomes (respectively), is extremely counterproductive.

For example, precisely the same inert agents can produce analgesia and hyperalgesia, the first of which, from this definition, would be a placebo, and the second a nocebo.

A second problem is that precisely the same effect, such as immunosuppression, may be quite desirable for a subject with an autoimmune disorder, but be quite undesirable for most other subjects. Thus, in the first case, the effect would be a placebo, and in the second, a nocebo.

A third problem is that the prescriber does not know whether the relevant subjects consider the effects that they experience to be subjectively desirable or undesirable until some time after the drugs have actually been administered.

A fourth problem is that, in cases such as this, precisely the same phenomena are being generated in all of the subjects, and these are being generated by precisely the same drug, which is acting in all of the subjects through precisely the same mechanism. Yet, just because the phenomena in question have been subjectively considered to be desirable to one group, but not the other, the phenomena are now being labelled in two mutually exclusive ways (i.e., placebo and nocebo); and this is giving the false impression that the drug in question has produced two entirely different phenomena.

These sorts of argument produce a strong case that — despite the fact that, in some of its applications, the term "placebo" is used to denote something that pleases (compared with it denoting an inert simulator) — the desirability (placeboic nature) or undesirability (noceboic nature) of the phenomena that have been manifested by a subject, after a drug has been administered, should never be part of the definition of what constitutes either "a placebo" or "a placebo response".

Some people maintain that belief kills (e.g., "voodoo death": Cannon (1942) describes a number of "voodoo deaths" from a variety of different cultures) and belief heals (e.g., faith healing).

A "self-willed" death (due to voodoo hex, evil eye, pointing the bone procedure,^[5] etc.) is an extreme form of a culture-specific syndrome or sociogenic illness, that produces a particular form of psychosomatic or psychophysiological disorder, which results in a psychogenic death.

There are many recorded instances of self-willed psychogenic death. For example, the death of Ananias, as recorded in Acts 5:1-6; see Ananias and Sapphira.

Rubel (1964) spoke of "culture bound" syndromes, which were those "from which members of a particular group claim to suffer and for which their culture provides an etiology, diagnosis, preventive measures, and regimens of healing” (p.268).

It is important to distinguish these "self-willed deaths" from other "self-imposed" sorts of death, such as:

• the "self-inflicted deaths" of suicide, voluntary euthanasia, or the refusal of life-extending treatment;
• the "heroic" "self-inflicted death" of a soldier who throws himself on a hand grenade to save his mates, or that of the Antarctic explorer Captain Lawrence Oates (“I am just going outside and may be some time”); or
• the "religious self-inflicted death"' of the self-immolating suttee, or the mors voluntaria religiosa (= "voluntary religious death") of the aged person, who religious elders have permitted to voluntarily, peacefully, and slowly die by fasting.

Certain anthropologists, such as Robert Hahn and Arthur Kleinman have extended the placebo/nocebo distinction into this realm in order to allow a distinction to be made between rituals, like faith healing, that are performed in order to heal, cure, or bring benefit (placebo rituals) and others, like "pointing the bone", that are performed in order to kill, injure or bring harm (nocebo rituals).

As the meaning of the two inter-related and opposing terms has extended, we now find anthropologists speaking, in various contexts, of nocebo or placebo (harmful or helpful) rituals:-

• that might entail nocebo or placebo (unpleasant or pleasant) procedures,
• about which subjects might have nocebo or placebo (harmful or beneficial) beliefs,
• that are delivered by operators that might have nocebo or placebo (pathogenic, disease-generating or salutogenic, health-promoting) expectations,
• that are delivered to subjects that might have nocebo or placebo (negative, fearful, despairing or positive, hopeful, confident) expectations about the ritual,
• which are delivered by operators who might have nocebo or placebo (malevolent or benevolent) intentions, in the hope that the rituals will generate nocebo or placebo (lethal, injurious, harmful or restorative, curative, healthy) outcomes;

and, that all of this depends upon the operator's overall beliefs in the harmful nature of the nocebo ritual or the beneficial nature of the placebo ritual.

Yet, it may become even more terminologically complex; for, as Hahn and Kleinman indicate, there can also be cases where there are paradoxical nocebo outcomes from placebo rituals (e.g. the TGN1412 drug trial [1] [2]), as well as paradoxical placebo outcomes from nocebo rituals (see also unintended consequences).

Writing from his extensive experience of treating cancer (including more than 1,000 melanoma cases) at Sydney Hospital, Milton (1973) warned of the impact of the delivery of a prognosis, and how many of his patients, upon receiving their prognosis, simply turned their face to the wall and died an extremely premature death: "... there is a small group of patients in whom the realisation of impending death is a blow so terrible that they are quite unable to adjust to it, and they die rapidly before the malignancy seems to have developed enough to cause death. This problem of self-willed death is in some ways analogous to the death produced in primitive peoples by witchcraft (“Pointing the bone”)." (p.1435)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Placebo is a substance or procedure a patient accepts as medicine or therapy, but which has no specific therapeutic activity. Any therapeutic effect is thought to be based on the power of suggestion.

Placebo controlled trials are those trials where some participants take a placebo as a control and the others take the drug being investigated. Here the placebo is an inactive substance designed to resemble the drug being tested. It is used as a control to rule out any psychological effects which may show during testing. Most well-designed studies include a control group which is unwittingly taking a placebo.

The placebo effect or placebo response is a therapeutic or healing effect of an inert medicine or ineffective therapy,^[1] or more generally is the psychosocial aspect of every medical treatment.^[2] Sometimes known as a non-specific effect or subject-expectancy effect, the placebo effect (or its counterpart, the nocebo effect), occurs when a patient's symptoms are altered in some way (i.e., alleviated or exacerbated) by a treatment, due to the individual expecting or believing that it will work. The placebo effect occurs when a patient is treated in conjunction with the suggestion from an authority figure or from acquired information that the treatment will aid in healing and the patient’s condition improves. This effect has been observed since the early 20th century.

The word placebo has been used in with various meanings; see below.

The word placebo is Latin for I will please. It is in Latin text in the Bible (Psalm 114:1–9, Vulgate version), from where it became familiar to the public via the Office of the Dead church service. From that, a singer of placebo became associated with someone who falsely claimed a connection to the deceased to get a share of the funeral meal, and hence a flatterer.

Whenever a placebo is requested in a medical prescription it may imply a statement by the prescribing doctor that "this patient has come to me pleading for a treatment which does not exist or which I cannot or will not supply; I will please him by giving him something ineffectual and claiming that it is effectual." It could also indicate a belief that the effect was due to a subconscious desire of the patient to please the doctor. Since the placebo effect is in the patient not the doctor this may be more self-consistent. Early usage of the term does not indicate why it was chosen.

The word Obecalp, "placebo" spelled backwards was coined by an Australian doctor in 1998 when he recognised the need for a freely available placebo.^[3] The word is sometimes used to make the use or prescription of fake medicine less obvious to the patient.^[4]

Although placebos are generally characterized as pharmacologically inert substances or formulations, sham treatments, or inactive procedures, they are only inert, sham, ineffective, or inactive in the particular sense that their cause and effect is poorly understood with respect to any of the pre-designated, biochemical, physiological, behavioural, emotional and/or cognitive outcomes of the pharmacologically active and known-to-be-efficacious intervention that might have otherwise been applied (see below).

Placebos are inactive treatments or formulations; however a patient may experience either a positive or negative clinical effect while taking one. When a placebo is administered to mimic a previously administered drug, it may also incur the same side effects as the prior authentic drug. (See Pavlov.) Most of these effects are thought to be a psychological triggering of a physical response. Not all forms of placebo administration are equally effective, and some disease states are entirely resistant to the placebo effect. A placebo that involves ingestion, injection, or incision is often more powerful than a non-invasive technique. Placebos administered by authority figures such as shamans, general practitioners and other trusted figures may also be more powerful than when the psychological or spiritual authority figure is absent. One can see this clearly in the reaction of children to the administration of care by their mothers. The bandaide does, in fact, make the pain go away.

Placebos are, therefore, not inert, sham, or inactive in any other manner of speaking; and they may well, in and of themselves, generate considerable change within any given subject, at any given time, under any given circumstances.

An example of the placebo effect is the improved performances of runners who were led to believe they were drinking oxygenated water, whereas in reality, the runners were drinking regular tap water. The runners performed better because they thought what they were drinking would enhance their performance.

This is true as well for the "sugar pill." People who believe they are sick but do not have an observable cause of the problem can actually develop the symptoms of the illness. Some doctors have given such patients a basic sugar cube disguised as a regular tablet of medicine. The patient assumed what they were taking would make them feel better and it did.

Studies published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences using advances in neuroscience (PET scans) have shown that placebos can noticeably reduce pain in humans. Researchers at Columbia and Michigan University have shown that the brains of volunteers who believed that what they were taking was pain medication were shown to be spontaneously releasing opioids, or natural pain relief. (Donaldson James 2007) According to that ABC report the Food and Drug Administration contends that as many as 75 percent of patients have had responses to sugar pills. It pointed out that all major clinical trials use placebo groups because the effect is significant and to be expected.

This effect has been known since the early 20th century. Generally, one third of a control group taking a placebo shows improvement, and Harvard’s Herbert Benson says that the placebo effect yields beneficial clinical results in 60–90% of diseases, including angina pectoris, bronchial asthma, herpes simplex, and duodenal ulcers. (Benson & Friedman 1996)

The following are some of the issues pointing to a fundamental problem:

• Ever since Beecher's 1955 study appeared (Beecher 1955), it has been claimed that about one third of the therapeutic effect observed in a typical trial is attributable to the placebo effect. But this is not what Beecher showed at all. In the "meta-analytic" section of his paper he gave the proportion of subjects across 15 trials deemed to have "been satisfactorily relieved by placebo" as 35.2% +/- 2.2%. This, if anything, is an estimate of the frequency of 'placebo-responders' in the aggregate trial group, but says nothing about the magnitude of the effect.
• Beecher, intentionally or otherwise, gave currency to the idea that the placebo effects were roughly constant at around 35%, and that the term could be usefully applied to all those variables otherwise called "non-specific" contributors to therapeutic outcomes – the natural (and unknowable) course of diseases, regression to the mean, expectation effects, changes in effect and other unquantifiable psycho-somatic features of illness, beliefs and therapeutic communication, etc. If anything is clear from subsequent studies, it is that the placebo effect is not constant, but strikingly variable. Placebo response rates all the way from zero to 100% have been reported in virtually every clinical condition studied (the variation in Beecher's own series was 15–58%). The so-called effect appears to be both universal and utterly unpredictable.
• Beecher, who was concerned to promote the use of Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in clinical research, made an unjustified assumption which is almost certainly false - that placebo effects in the intervention and control arms of a trial will be identical, or nearly so, and independent of the therapeutic effects. In the rationalization of RCTs which followed, this claim has never been rigorously defended, and in specific instances, can be easily refuted.^[6]
• The original 1955 article of Beecher "The Powerful Placebo" claimed a 35% placebo effect in 15 studies. The original article was in 1997 re-analysed and "no evidence was found of any placebo effect in any of the studies" used by Beecher. (Kienle & Kiene 1997) The claimed "effects" were produced by spontaneous improvement, fluctuation of symptoms, regression to the mean, additional treatment, conditional switching of placebo treatment, scaling bias, irrelevant response variables, answers of politeness, experimental subordination, conditioned answers, neurotic or psychotic misjudgment, psychosomatic phenomena, misquotation, etc.
• Kaptchuk (1998a; 1998b) has shown that both the name and the concept of placebo were transferred from at least 200 years of use in clinical practice, in the decade following the second world war, to a new role required by the methodology of what was then the new discipline of 'clinical research'. Earlier usage corresponded to its Latin etymology – a harmless pill or potion given knowingly to patients who were either hard to please or hard to cure. The first clear example cited in the OED is from 1811. But during the post-war therapeutic revolution, it became the trashcan into which all the confounding factors that disturb therapeutic assessments were tipped. In Beecher's terms, it became a powerful if enigmatic distraction to researchers, whose results would be contaminated without rigorous procedures for its exclusion. Its modern use is therefore quite recent, and closely related to the adoption of the RCT as the methodological gold standard for trials of therapy.
• A considerable body of work has attempted to elucidate the 'mechanism' of the placebo effect – but without much success. Proposals ranging from 'suggestibility' and various other psychological hypotheses, to neuro-endocrine studies, and attribution of the effect to statistical artefacts, have turned out to be flawed in various ways, so that clinical researchers have no more idea of what is really going on in the control arms of their trials than did Hippocrates. It seems unlikely that this deeply unsatisfactory situation will be resolved by a new attempt to answer the old question; instead, as has been suggested by some of the most thoughtful students, we should expect to find that some part of the conceptual landscape in which this problematic entity resides must be reconstructed before it will come into focus. This view commends itself specially to those scholars who bring to the problem a perspective from outside the clinic – from medical anthropology, history of medicine, philosophy, and statistics.^[7]

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chromotherapy, sometimes called color therapy or colorology, is an alternative medicine method. It is claimed that a therapist trained in chromotherapy can use color and light to balance energy wherever a person's body be lacking, be it physical, emotional, spiritual, or mental.

Chromotherapists claim a scientific basis for their practice,^{[citation needed]} proposing that colors bring about emotional reactions in people, but is labelled pseudoscience by its critics. A standard method of diagnosis is the use of "Luscher’s color test", developed by Max Luscher (*1923) in the early 1900s. When performing chromotherapy, color and light is applied to specific areas and acupoints on the body. Because colors get associated with both positive and negative effects in color therapy, specific colors and accurate amounts of color are deemed to be critical in healing. Some of the tools used for applying colors are gemstones, candles, wands, prisms, colored fabrics, bath treatments, and colored glasses or lenses. Therapeutic color can be administered in a number of ways, but is often combined with hydrotherapy and aromatherapy in an attempt to heighten the therapeutic effect.

Several findings indicate that color and light have been used for health treatments since the beginning of recorded time. Color therapy is possibly rooted in Ayurveda, an ancient form of medicine practiced in India for thousands of years. Other historic roots are attributed to Chinese and ancient Egyptian culture. In traditional Chinese medicine, each organ is associated with a color. Ancient Egyptians built solarium-type rooms, which could be fitted with colored panes of glass. The sun would shine through the glass and flood the patient with color. As late as the nineteenth century, European smallpox victims and their sickrooms were draped with red cloth to draw the disease away from the body.^[1]

Avicenna (980-1037), who viewed color to be of vital importance in diagnosis and treatment, made significant contributions to chromotherapy in The Canon of Medicine. He wrote that "Color is an observable symptom of disease" and also developed a chart that related colour to the temperature and physical condition of the body. His view was that red moved the blood, blue or white cooled it, and yellow reduced muscular pain and inflammation. He further discussed the properties of colors for healing and was "the first to establish that the wrong color suggested for therapy would elicit no response in specific diseases." As an example, "he observed that a person with a nosebleed should not gaze at things of a brilliant red color and should not be exposed to red light because this would stimulate the sanguineous humor, whereas blue would soothe it and reduce blood flow."^[2]
Dr. Peter Mandel, a German acupuncturist, developed a system to apply color and light to acupuncture points on the body. This so called colorpuncture is now being taught in many countries.^{[citation needed]}

There are seven of these chakras and each is associated with a particular organ or system in the body. Each chakra has a dominant color, but these colors may become imbalanced. If this happens it can cause disease and other physical ramifications.^[3] By introducing the appropriate color, these maladies can be fixed. Below is a description of each chakra and its corresponding color.

• Red: First Chakra: Located at the base of the spine.
• Orange: Second Chakra: pelvis area
• Yellow: Third Chakra: solar plexus
• Green: Fourth Chakra: heart
• Blue: Fifth Chakra: throat
• Indigo: Sixth Chakra: lower part of the forehead
• Violet: Seventh Chakra: top of the head

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Naturopathic medicine (also known as naturopathy, or natural medicine) is a complementary and alternative medicine which emphasizes the body's intrinsic ability to heal and maintain itself. Naturopaths prefer to use natural remedies such as herbs and foods rather than surgery or synthetic drugs. Naturopathic practice includes many different modalities. Practitioners emphasize a holistic approach to patient care, and may recommend patients use conventional medicine alongside their treatments.

Naturopathy has its origins in the Nature Cure movement of Europe^[1][2]. It is practiced in many countries but subject to different standards of regulation and levels of acceptance.

The philosophy of naturopathy is often described by six core values.^[8] Multiple versions exist in the form of the naturopathic doctor's oath^[9], various mission statements published by schools^[10] or professional associations, and ethical conduct guidelines published by regulatory bodies^[11]:

1. First, do no harm; provide the most effective health care available with the least risk to patients at all times (Primum Non Nocere).
2. Recognize, respect and promote the self-healing power of nature inherent in each individual human being. (Vis Medicatrix Naturae).
3. Identify and remove the causes of illness, rather than eliminate or suppress symptoms (Tolle Causum).
4. Educate, inspire rational hope and encourage self-responsibility for health (Doctor as Teacher).
5. Treat each person by considering all individual health factors and influences. (Treat the Whole Person).
6. Emphasize the condition of health to promote well-being and to prevent diseases for the individual, each community and our world. (Health Promotion, the Best Prevention)

Naturopathy's focus is upon its philosophy of natural health rather than specific methods and so practitioners use a wide variety of treatment modalities. The core set of interventions defined by the Council on Naturopathic Medical Education and taught at all seven accredited schools in North America includes:^[12]

• acupuncture and oriental medicine
• botanical medicine
• homeopathy
• nutrition (examples include vegetarian and wholefood diet^[13], fasting^[13], and abstention^[13] from alcohol and sugar)
• physical medicine (includes naturopathic, osseous and soft tissue manipulative therapy, physiotherapy, sports medicine, exercise and hydrotherapy)
• nature cure - a range of therapies based upon exposure to natural elements such as sunshine and fresh air
• psychological counseling (examples include meditation, relaxation and other methods of stress management^[13])

The CNME also provides for the inclusion of optional modalities including minor surgery, natural childbirth and intravenous therapy. These modalities require additional training and may not be within the scope of practice in all jurisdictions.

In addition to the standard modalities used by naturopathic doctors listed above, individual naturopaths may incorporate practices from other disciplines:

• color therapy^[14]
• iridology^[14]
• kinesiology^[14]
• public health measures and hygiene^[8]
• reflexology^[14]

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia