Burundanga is a scary drug. (…) The scale of the problem in Latin America is not known, but a recent survey of emergency hospital admissions in Bogotá, Colombia, found that around 70 per cent of patients drugged with burundanga had also been robbed, and around three per cent sexually assaulted. “The most common symptoms are confusion and amnesia,” says Juliana Gomez, a Colombian psychiatrist. (…)

News reports allude to another, more sinister, effect: that the drug removes free will, effectively turning victims into suggestible human puppets. Although not fully understood by neuroscience, free will is seen as a highly complex neurological ability and one of the most cherished of human characteristics.

{ Wired UK | Continue reading }

Neuroscientists 
increasingly describe our behaviour as the result of a chain of
cause-and-effect, in which one physical brain state or pattern of
neural activity inexorably leads to the next, culminating in a
particular action or decision. With little space for free choice in
this chain of causation, the conscious, deliberating self seems to
be a fiction. From this perspective, all the real action is
occurring at the level of synapses and neurotransmitters.

For now most of us are content to believe that we have control over
our own lives, but what would happen if we lost our faith in free
will?

{ Susan Sayler | Continue reading }

oil on canvas { Aron Wiesenfeld, The Wedding Party }

controversy, ideas, neurosciences | May 16th, 2011