Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Not Fast Enough


That I am not "vegetative" anything is a big deal. What I have hasn't been a recoverable condition.

_________________________

"Their quantification of white matter reorganization shows long-distance rewiring in posterior medial cortices, possibly reflecting axonal sprouting or neurite outgrowth, maybe even related to neurogenesis " happens to be Steven Laureys describing a man who was MCS, but started talking nearly 20 years later. What he is saying is that tiny nerve fibers grew and rewired. This is most likely going on with me.

Now given my capacity for increased growth, this will happen fast in me. How fast is fast?

The above quote is based on a case that took about 20 years. 10 years for me sounds feasible.

That's half the time and can be seen as a huge increase. It is still years, though. It isn't readily picked up on. A form comes once a year in the mail asking if there have been any changes in the last 12 months. The answer is no. If it had asked if there were any changes in the last 10 years, the answer would be yes.

It isn't "Abracadabra, You are all better." This has been a process. Sure, I don't swallow yet, but what vegetative person can type all this out? I'm sorry that I'm not fast enough for you. (While I'm at it, how about some therapy for swallowing? It's called Speech. People are amazed that I talk without swallowing. I think I am articulating my vocalizations very well.)

What people want:




What people got:

PICTURES
https://www.flickr.com/photos/angelar70/albums/72157625839268830


What I believe that increased the recovery time will have to become an accepted condition (Savant Syndrome). This can then be studied. New medications and treatments can be developed for brain injury as well as other neurological diseases.

Friday, August 25, 2017

Angela Ronson: Part 4 Spiritual Survivor and Motivational Writer

I checked links. Some have expired. I still have Jason Snyder and Bradley Voytek on Twitter, but I am not highly active with them anymore. I have limited contact with Steven Laureys ("Tracking Recovery of Consciousness from Coma"), mostly on Facebook. I have considerably less contact with the DANA Foundation.

It was written after this piece. It has more to do with healing.

My intent has been to give survivors and loved ones the knowledge needed to survive and heal.      -Angela

Angela Ronson: Part 4 Spiritual Survivor and Motivational Writer

Spiritual Survivor
 
Angela returned to complete chaos.  Her home, her former life, everything was gone.  She had to re-unite with her children, navigate uncaring government bureaucracies, figure out how to financially survive, continue with her rehabilitation, and deal with issues as mundane as she couldn’t get reliable access to the Internet.  Despair and bitterness constantly beckoned to her as an easy way out.
 
She started to write.  First of her experiences and story, later to inspire and educate others.  Like so many survivors of the near death experience, she returned with the clear message that there is “no other side”.  This life is the spiritual life, is the only life we have.  Of course consciousness survives the death of the body, her own coma and recovery indicate that.  However, she realized that so many are unprepared for this life.  She returned with insight and wisdom, and wants to share it with others.
 
NOT SPIRITUAL ADVICE BUT PRACTICAL INFORMATION ON RECOVERY FROM BRAIN INJURIES: REHABILITATION, DEALING WITH GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
 
This Part Four of Angela’s story will be constantly updated.  It’s purpose is to compile in one place the practice advice Angela has for us on surviving brain injuries and resources in the community and on the Internet.
 
Angela’s Writing
1.  Angela Ronson’s Home Rehab Program:  She searched the literature and consulted with the experts to come up with this most excellent most based rehabilitation program for traumatic brain injured patients and stroke victims.  This is what she does at home.  Click here for link
2. Comment on AFO splints 
[It's angelar70 and you need an account.]
3. Blog on The Neuron Network: For Professionals.  Angela states her purpose is to speak for those who can’t. NeuroNetwork
[This is gone.]
4.  Angela writes on Neuroplasticity [This is gone.]
5.  Angela writes in University of West Georgia Aneurysm and AVM Support Site on rehabilitation.  [The website is gone, but the original post is the magazine article on p 9, What Kind of Vegetable Am I? ]
6. Angela gives invaluable advice on Medicaid: (click here:) (Angela knows Medicaid especially California Medicaid)
7.  Angela’s New Blog: The Thoughtful Vegetable.  Excellent writing   Click Here

Angela’s Favorite Articles
1. Alternative Therapies for Brain Disorders [link is gone]



Angela’s Favorite Links
1. She loves Posit Science and receives therapy through them. [They are now BrainHQ.]
2. A young researcher you haven’t heard of YET! Bradley Voytek
3.  A young researcher who will someday lead the spiritual  revolution.  He is the stealth bomber of the New Paradigm, low below the radar doing cutting edge Neurogenesis research at NIH  Yes, it’s the man embedded in God’s plan Jason Snyder: Functional Neurogenesis. [This blog was "archived."]

PRAISE FOR ANGELA
1.  Angela thank you for being my friend. You are a strong person especially with your struggle on your rehabilitation. Also for having all of your websites with information and spiritual guidance. We have similar goals which to help others which gives us the strength to continue with what we are doing. I believe that I was given a sign (seeing The White Light) to help and 
educate others which is what this group is for. You have passed very helpful information here. I applaud you for your knowledge of information and helping us.
God bless you Angela,
Joe  Martin

 
2. “Angela’s training as a therapist and Behavior Specialist gives her the knowledge to give us this update from the point of view of an Evaluation on this point of her recovery.  Vegetable? I think not”  Jim Craft University of West Georgia

Sunday, August 20, 2017

Angela Ronson Part 3: How Our Brain is Connected to the Universe

This is part 3 of what Dr Morse wrote on me.
A lot are looking for where it says I have an NDE, "While in coma, she had the equivalent of a near death experience.  Certainly Brodman’s area 7 was turned off!  She had massive damage to that area of her brain!  Her consciousness persisted even though her brain was not functioning except at a brain stem level."
As a side note, Dr Morse relates that Jonas Salk told him that aliens gave him the formula to the Salk vaccine. Later he states Salk had to have a right brain intuition that was so foreign that he just claimed aliens put it there.
There is a combination of neurology n philosophy here. He uses terms u most likely never heard. "Non-local" is one I often get. That is not in the body. Neurology concepts are local to the body. "Non-local" comes from philosophy.    -Angela

Angela Ronson Part 3: How Our Brain is Connected to the Universe

SO COULD IT REALLY BE TRUE THAT ANGELA’S CONSCIOUSNESS HEALED HER BRAIN?
Melvin L Morse MD (spiritualscientific.com)
YES!  In fact, the best scientific understanding of how consciousness works clearly validates the idea that Angela (her consciousness, her spirit, her gaseous vapor of a soul, whatever words you feel most comfortable with) healed her own brain from a vantage point outside of her body.
 
Wow Dr. Morse! Did they teach you that at Hopkins?  Or is that statement really the result of, shall we say, a bit too much extracurricular artificial brain enhancer use?
 
Although it is true that when I was a kid I did smoke marijuana once or twice (but like Bill Clinton, I never inhaled) I still maintain that my statement that the spirit or soul of Angela Ronson healed her own brain is in fact a scientific one.  Now why she did this, I have no idea.  It took seven long tedious incredibly difficult painstaking years, and she still hasn’t repaired the links between her brain and her body.  Virtually all other humans throughout history simply moved on to a new brain, and “rebooted time” as Robert Lanza MD likes to call the process of re-incarnation. (Lanza is arguably the world’s smartest medical scientist) Think of all those miles and miles of myelin sheath Ms. Ronson had to laboriously re-knit to heal and reconnect her severely damaged brain.

Most Simply Leave the Brain Behind Like This Girl Started To
I cheerfully admit, however, that my assertion that Angela Ronson’s consciousness healed her brain depends of two speculations: scientifically respectable speculations to be sure, but nevertheless speculations at this time.  They are

1.  That the timeless spaceless and conscious quantum non-locality that the theoretical physicists speak of is something that is both real and directly connected to the human brain and consciousness.
2.  Memories, in fact, all knowledge and information exists OUTSIDE the human brain and that we have the ability to access that universal source of memory.
 
THE GOD SPOT
It has been known for over 100 years that the human brain has a specific area in it that allows us to have the experience of communicating with a “god”.  For some odd reason, this area of the brain, the right temporal lobe (and associated hippocampal and other brain structures) was considered the source of “hallucinations” of god and religious ecstasy.  Huh?

1) We have a specific area of the brain, the occipital lobe, which we use to create the visual images we call “reality”.  I have never heard the same reasoning applied to the existence of the occipital lobe.  I have never heard anyone say that obviously this local visual reality is a hallucination because we have a huge portion of our brain dedicated to creating it.
2) Why would we have evolved nearly 1/3 of our brain and associated other pathways and structures involved to simply give us a hallucination of a non-existent “god”.  When books such as The  Basis of God Beliefs  (Persinger), Religious and Mystical States: A Neuro-psychological Model (D’Aquilli and Newberg), The God Area of Brain (Alpert) attempt to explain why we would evolve a hallucinatory god experience area of the brain, they go through such amazing mental contortions that I am surprised that they can write it without bursting into laughter at themselves.  For some bizarre reason, if its about god, then it’s just in the brain and not real.  Everything else that we experience and create in our brains is “real”.  Well GET REAL Persinger, Andrew Newburg, Michael Shermer, Mathew Alpert and the rest of you sloppy scientific thinkers, experiencing god is just as real as any other human experience.

Wilder Penfield





Areas associated with NDE-like Experiences
Wilder Penfield, the Father of Modern Neurosurgery, mapped out much of what we know about how the brain works by directly stimulating the brain in conscious patients undergoing Neuro-surgical procedures.  Since the brain itself doesn’t feel pain, patients can be awake during surgery.  When he would stimulate the motor areas of the brain, they might move their arms.  When he stimulated the areas of the brain in the top right picture, the deep right temporal lobe, patients said things such as “oh god, are you there?”, or “god, I am leaving my body (and coming to be with you”, or even more intriguing “I am out of my body, no, I am half in and half out”.  Penfield, of course, at the end of his career determined that the brain could not account for consciousness, and that consciousness must be independent of brain function.

(As a hilarious aside, I once debated a Skeptic from Michael Shermer’s Skeptic Organization, on NPR.  They are so dedicated to calling everything and everyone a “pseudo-scientist” that he ended up calling Wilder Penfield a “pseudo-scientist”!  Michael, this was really disappointing to me, although it did make me fall over laughing, as I love your book “Borderlands of Science”.  I simply expected better science from these knee jerk “if they disagree with me then they must be pseudo-scientists” thinkers, who must not have read Borderlands themselves.)


Area of brain responsible for our sense of self
  Decreased activity in Area 7 leads to increased frontal lobe activity and ultimately right temporal lobe experiences

It is my speculation that this area of the brain in fact permits us to interact and communicate with what physicists call “non local” reality.  This is a theoretical model of reality that states that all of the information in the Universe that ever was and ever will be is “non local” meaning that it exists independent of time and space.  This is the current theory of “reality”.  When the children who have had near death experiences ask me if what they experienced was “real”, this is the current scientific model of reality that I have to use to judge the reality of their experience.1
MARIO  BEAUREGARD: NO GOD SPOT (THE WHOLE BRAIN IS THE GOD SPOT!)
 
In Mario Beauregard’s brilliant book Spiritual Brain states that there is in fact no “god spot’.  This is simply because Dr. Beauregard who is a lot smarter than me, says that in fact the entire brain is the god spot!  I have learned a lot from Dr. Beauregard and he has helped me with a number of my studies.  I don’t see a significant difference between my limited idea of a god spot, and his conceptualization of a brain as the god spot, in terms of how Angela Ronson healed her own brain.
 
THE NEUROSCIENTISTS ARE SIMPLY LATE FOR THE PARTY! SCIENCE HAS THOUGHT THE UNIVERSE IS CONSCIOUS FOR A HUNDRED YEARS!
 
According to the theoretical physicists, this “non local” reality is conscious!  Conscious! You bet! As one of them famously said “if you are not totally blown away and astonished by quantum physics, then you don’t understand it”.  It seems just about every famous physicist has written in their off laboratory hours a book stating that reality  is conscious and that we routinely interact with it.  In fact, they go further! They claim that our interactions with reality actually change its fundamental nature! Henry Stapp,( Mindful Universe), is but one of many such thinkers.
 
So Speculation 1, that our brains are linked to a greater timeless space-less all knowing information containing reality turns out to not be so speculative after all.  In fact I had dinner with Amit Goswami (The Quantum Activist Physicist) and Peter Fenwick (Neuropsychiatrist and all around genius) a while back.  Peter Fenwick was kind enough to tell me that my theory that the right temporal lobe is our connection to the physicists Non-local reality was “a good first try”.  Then Drs. Fenwick and Goswami, within 2 hours, roughed out a coherent theory of exactly how our brains could be connected to quantum non-locality.  As Peter Fenwick concluded, “well its just a giant math problem now”.
 
Wow, we are just a giant math problem away from understanding exactly how Angela Ronson could have healed her own brain from the vantage point of being outside of her body, according to the some of the foremost scientific thinkers on Earth today.
 
BUT WHAT ABOUT MEMORIES EXISTING OUTSIDE OF THE BRAIN?
 
1) Fred Lashley, the Father of Modern Brain research, at the end of his career stated “If I didn’t know better, I would think memories were in fact stored outside the brain.
 
2) Alan Gauld in Irreducible Mind(The most recent and outstanding textbook of conscious and the brain) states that the concept that memory is stored IN the brain is simply a neuroscientific dogma, without any evidence to support it!  He calls it a myth!
3)  Frick, in his excellent book The Astonishing Hypothesis, dramatically concludes the book by demonstrating how sea slugs might have simple memories in their rudimentary brains! Not exactly compelling evidence that memory is in the brain.  Granted Frick’s book was written in 1994.  Well Scientific American’s Dictionary of Science, written in 2007 states that we are just learning about memory and brain function, without any other details!
(As another hilarious aside, I noticed that Frick worked for the Salk Institute in California.  I wonder what Frick would think if he knew that I interviewed Jonas Salk, several years before his death.  Jonas Salk was lucid and highly intelligent at the time of that interview.  He shared with me that aliens, during his sleep, gave him the secret to the Salk vaccine!  He then took that information to the lab and changed history!  So I don’t think people should be so arrogant and smug that they understand everything about how our brains might or might not be connected to the Universe.  Frick’s own boss when he wrote The Astonishing Hypothesis actually thought aliens implanted memories in his brain in his sleep.)
 
So, although my theory of how Angela Ronson healed her brain might be speculative, here is some evidence that no less an authority as Scientific American is moving towards my point of view!

Seattle Times Article From 1990s illustrating my theory


20 Years Later, Scientific American Agrees!

 I doubt the Editors of Scientific American would say that they agree with my theory of how our brain could connect to the Universe.  However, the two covers are remarkably similar.  The Scientific American article is on how memory can be downloaded from the brain.  They review the research of Boston memory researchers who have created a Mouse Earthquake memory and then downloaded and stored it in a computer.  Well give me a break SciAm, I know that you are the home of Skeptic Michael Shermer, but if we can download memories out of the brain, then it certainly is reasonable to speculate that we can upload memories into the brain as well.
 
In fact, when is Michael Shermer going to stop taking on easy targets such as people who invent telephones to talk to the Dead, and start addressing some of these issues?  I hesitate to say this too loudly, as I don’t want Sci Am to retaliate and cancel my subscription, but the premiere Skeptic of our time, a man who wrote the brilliant Borderlands of Science which is a blueprint of how a fringe science might become respectable, has a responsibility to take on more challenging subjects and help us to understand them.  Perhaps my theories and speculations are all wrong, but I am convinced that any sincere  process of discrediting them will help us to understand what is really going on!
 
Instead, Michael Shermer is content to let his Internet Science Fundamentalists viciously attack scientists such as Terrance Witt (he wrote Undiscovered Universe – an alternative explanation to Quantum Physics click here) by endlessly chanting “crack pot, crack pot” over and over again without any other critical comments.  No less an authority as Roger Penrose in The Road to Reality said that brilliant outsiders (such as Terrance Witt) might reinvent physics and that quantum physics may be flawed.
 
This is an important issue, as fundamental to understanding how Angela Ronson could have recovered from a seven year coma and semi-coma with her personality and memories intact is our fundamental understanding of what is real!  We must ultimately look to science to help us to understand what is real, while not neglecting that spiritual insight and intuitions are a second form of knowledge just as important.
 
Spiritual neuroscience is our first step at understanding what is “real”.  It is the scientific understanding of how the brain actually works, and how that might help us to understand our spiritual perceptions and rational understandings.
 
We, in fact, have two brains, with two independent consciousnesses, which work very differently.
1) The left brain is rational and logical and responsible for analysis and judgment.  This is essential for science.  It is also essential for our primary mission here in this reality: to learn our lessons of love.  Learning lessons involves judgment and analysis.  However, the left brain has a deep flaw, in that in its zeal to understand, it will simply make stuff up!  If it has no data to interpret, or is given inaccurate data, it will simply make things up to explain the data, or no data, and believe what it has made up to be true.  Just as true as an scientific deductions.
When I was a medical student, we would splash water on the hands of patients who could only perceive the world through their left brain.  The sensory input of the water would go to the areas of their right brain which no longer properly worked.  The patients would seamlessly tell us things such as they got wet because it was raining outside, or that they accidentally spilled water or even urinated on themselves.  No amount of showing them what really happened would shake their beliefs.
This is what has happened to Michael Shermer and his Skeptical colleagues.  They are brilliant left brain thinkers, but they have ignored or misinterpreted the raw data, and have made up a version of reality that they now believe to be true.  In controlled remote viewing, we call this process “making sand castles in the air”, which is the remote viewing equivalent of the left brain reaching completely wrong conclusions.
2) The right brain is often pure sensory and emotion input without any filter or rational analysis.  It will compile lists of information.  It can draw a picture with all the various parts of the picture, but has a hard time putting the various pieces of the picture in their proper location.  It is relatively non-verbal.  It operates primarily on intuition, symbols, pictures, and concrete images.  Right brain and Autistic writer Temple Grandin does an excellent job of describing how she doesn’t have an abstract concept of “dog” that most of us have, but rather a library of hundreds of pictures of individual dogs in her mind that she reviews whenever someone asks her about a dog.
 
The right brain can reach just as startling wrong conclusions as the left brain, but in a totally different manner.  Perhaps Jonas Salk did not receive the information about the Salk vaccine from aliens.  Perhaps in fact that was simply right brain knowledge that he obtained through intuition.  Without any left brain analysis or input, it would be easy to make a quick association “oh it must have been an alien who told me” and then never rationally examine that association again.
 
What Pauline and I have learned through the process of Controlled Remote Viewing, I would be inclined to think that Salk did in fact simply misinterpret a right brained event.  Certainly we have done the same many times in the process of learning remote viewing.
 
Regardless, as the German Kekule, the Father of Organic Chemistry said “Gentlemen, dream, dream, and then take your dreams to the laboratory and (see if they are true, if they stand up to scientific scrutiny).  Kekule had a famous dream of snakes eating each other, which gave him the insight as to the precise chemical nature of the Organic Ring.  However, it was by using both his right brain intuitions and then his left brain analysis that he changed modern chemistry forever.
 
IT TAKES COURAGE AND FAITH TO PROPERLY USE YOUR RIGHT TEMPORAL LOBE – Pauline Morse
 
In fact, inspired by Borderlands of Science, our research team is validating my initial intuition and speculations in the scientific arena.  Twenty years ago I did the first prospective clinical study of near death experiences.  It was also done in children.  It was published in the American Medical Associations Pediatric Journal.  This study was replicated by Pim van Lommel in adults, and he published his results in the Lancet.  Jim Whinnery MD has demonstrated that near death experiences can be replicated in the laboratory environment in fighter pilots exposed to high G forces.  There is no doubt now that science has documented that near death experiences are real, and occur to dying, dysfunctional, and let’s fact it, dead brains.
 
We have since then done studies documenting that energy healers can influence the electronic white noise created by semi-conductors at the same time that they can raise the white blood cell counts in severely ill patients.  We have shown that health care professionals can be taught intuition and can remotely determine if a plant has a virus or not, through non-ordinary perceptions.  We have or are in the process of again publishing in mainstream medical and scientific journals.  We use scientific protocols that other scientists can use to replicate or refute our findings.
 
RIGHT BRAIN PERCEPTIONS (IN THESE VIDEOS) CONFIRM THE EXISTENCE OF A QUANTUM NON-LOCALITY
LEFT BRAIN SCIENCE  WILL TEACH US HOW ANGELA HEALED HER OWN BRAIN
THIS IS HOW WE WILL MOVE FROM WOW TO HOW
 
My personal dream is that my theories and speculations are proven by other scientists to be completely wrong.  Because in that process, we will learn what is right.  However, the fundamental raw data, the knowledge that our consciousness can interact with a timeless space-less source of knowledge, and exist independent of our brain, is now a scientific fact, no longer speculation.
Quantum theory is simply a mathematical model.  However, these are people who have directly experienced the reality that Angela Ronson was in, when she tediously and laboriously undertook the task of healing her severely damaged brain.
 
Click on the title to watch these videos of Near Death Experiences

HERE IS HOW I THINK ANGELA RONSON HEALED HER BRAIN
While in coma, she had the equivalent of a near death experience.  Certainly Brodman’s area 7 was turned off!  She had massive damage to that area of her brain!  Her consciousness persisted even though her brain was not functioning except at a brain stem level.  We know this occurs, as one child told me of her experience with a dying dysfunctional brain “I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t dead at all. I was alive!”.  Or as another child that I had to inject into her heart adrenalin just to restart it told me “I was never so alive as that time that I was dead”.
 
Angela then entered into that realm of all knowledge, that quantum non-locality that theoretical physicists believe is real.  Instead of just doing the smart thing, waiting around for a new brain, or whatever the process is when consciousness “reboots”, Angela decided “what the heck, waste not want not.  I have a perfectly repairable brain.  I am in the realm of all knowledge, so the blueprints to my brain and how to repair it exist here.”  Maybe she channeled Jason Snyder as he will be 50 years from now and further perfected his research on functional neurogenesis!  Maybe then Jason talked her into it to prove his functional  neurogenesis theories are correct, in this timeless space-less all information realm. Maybe now she doesn’t want to tell Jason “thanks Bud for the heads-up on how to heal my brain” because he hasn’t done the basic research yet in this time dependent reality.   All of that IS silly  speculation on my part.
 
Probably,  since time doesn’t exist in this all knowledge state, Angela didn’t realize that it would be seven long excruciatingly difficult years to fix her brain from the original DNA blueprints.  One child told me of his NDE, “it could have been a minute, it could have been a hundred years”.  Let’s fact it, Angela, maybe you just blew it and didn’t realize how hard it would be. Just because it was a spiritual decision doesn’t mean it was a good decision!  Or maybe you just wanted to prove to the rest of us that it could be done.  Perhaps you wanted to inspire us, to shake us out of our materialistic slumber and help understand our connection with the divine.
 
Regardless Angela, welcome back.  We need you here, to help us to understand our connection with the divine.  You have helped so many with your inspiring story and your lessons of how to cope with disability, practical aspects of dealing with insurance companies, the government, and the grueling process of rehab: what works and what doesn’t.
 
As most of my readers know, Angela is an Investigative Reporter for Spiritualscientific, she has tackled silly topics such as the true meaning of the “Bacon Angel” to the most profound.  She recently reported to us that math is the glue of the Universe, and is the spiritual equivalent to the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit, in our lives. That is a profound statement of the scientific (math) spiritual (Holy Spirit) connection that we all need to understand better.
 
  Thank you Angela Ronson, for making the effort to fix your brain and returning to this life.
Well what about Angela’s rapid hair growth?  Is this a marker for recovery from stroke and severe brain damage?  Uh, well enough speculation and brain twisting for this blog, I will address that in a future blog.
 
Respectfully submitted
Melvin L Morse MD (www.spiritualscientific.com)

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

ANGELA RONSON PART 2: CONSCIOUSNESS HEALS THE BRAIN

This is the second installment Dr. Morse did on me.
"THINKING is healing the brain." Use it or lose it. That is common sense now if I say it this way. The stories he tells relate to me.
The 7-year coma will be 15 years in Dec 2017. I am not comatose. "Vegetative" is an open-eye coma. I am vegetative.       - Angela

 

ANGELA RONSON PART 2: CONSCIOUSNESS HEALS THE BRAIN

 


SPIRITUAL NEUROSCIENCE
Melvin L Morse MD (spiritualscientific.com)


There has a been a quiet brain revolution going on in neuroscience, in the past ten years, one that will change everything we know about spirituality and the brain.  While the general public still is mired in the “skeptic vrs believer debate” most prominently promoted by Michael Shermer (http://www.michaelshermer.com/), most people are completely unaware that science has already embraced spirituality.  In my opinion, spirituality can no longer be understood unless practitioners and the general public are willing to understand the new spiritual neuroscience.  As physician Robert Lanza stated  (http://www.robertlanza.com/) in American Scientist in 2007, time, space, and this material reality are simply tools of the brain to allow our conscious self to interact with this reality.  He states that the current scientific evidence states that time “reboots” after our brains die (and we then get a new brain to begin a new life).   Obviously science and spirituality has moved far beyond the tired “skeptic v believer debate” that seems to still play out in the Wall Street Journal and the major television networks.
 
THE CASE OF ANGELA RONSON: NOT YOUR FATHER'S NEUROSCIENCE



Angela Ronson
Angela Ronson suffered a major AVM bleed and stroke with massive injury to her entire brain.  She was in a coma, semi-coma, and ultimately the “locked in syndrome” for a total of 7 years.  Yet she has made a full neuro-psychiatric recovery, with her personality and memories basically the same as prior to her massive brain injury. She speaks, can use her arms and fingers, and  is even starting to walk.
 
How is this possible?  If we knew for sure, we would also know the answer to the great mystery of the near death experience, which is: how can patients with near death experiences have any memories or experiences at all! After all, their brains are dying or let’s face it, actually dead for a brief period of time.  If Robert Lanza is correct, then consciousness comes first, and somehow being brushed with the divine and the universal knowledge of cosmic consciousness (or the Mind of the All) permits the brain to rewire and heal itself.
 
When I went to medical school, I was taught that the brain creates consciousness.  Our personality and memories were thought to be entirely dependent on brain activity.  Furthermore, the brain was thought to not be able to regenerate new brain cells or heal itself in any ways.  We are ominously warned to never drink alcohol (which I don’t) as each glass of beer could kill off hundreds of brain cells that could never be replaced.
 
Then I took an elective with the great Dr. Montcastle who was removing half a patient’s brain in an operation that took a few hours.  He did this as a last resort to attempt to cure intractable seizures.  I asked him, “well, what about their personalities, their ability to walk, to talk?  Aren’t brain functions localized to specific areas of the brain?”  He laughed merrily and told me not to believe everything I learned in medical school.  Remember, he reminded me, “half of what you know isn’t true, but unfortunately we don’t know which half is wrong!”.  Dr. Montcastle was one of a now departed breed of Neurosurgeons who seemingly gleefully removed huge areas of the brain in an effort to cure it, in defiance of what Neurology textbooks claimed was true.  He would cheerfully laugh “hell, boy (that was me) what the F*&k do they (Neurologists) know?”.
 
Dr. Montcastle was correct.  As a medical student I took care of many patients who had an entire half of their brain removed.  They had the same personality, the same memories, and really lost very little function or skills from their pre-operative selves.  For the most part, you could only tell that they had half their brain removed by administering sophisticated neuro-psychiatric tests.  Anyone could spend a day with them and be unaware they had had half their brain removed.  Perhaps they walked with a slight limp.  Yet this operation took only a few hours, and astonishingly, somehow it had very little effect on them.
 
I later did an elective at the Solomon Snyder Department of Neuroscience, where much of modern functional neurogenesis was discovered.  Functional neurogenesis means that new brain cells grow deep within an area of the brain called the hippocampus, and then migrate to specific areas of the brain where they are needed.  These new brain cells then permit new functions or repair damaged functions in the brain.
 
I vividly remember one of the Professors telling us how disorienting and even scary this concept that the brain can change itself, was to him.  He said that under the old model, we had every reason to believe that our personality, beliefs, and memories would remain stable, as long as the brain remained stable.  But now, he said “we are discovering that thinking and experience can actually change the brain!  How unsettling.  It seems to invite chaos into our personalities, emotions, memories and our sense of self.”  As Jason Snyder PhD stated:http://www.functionalneurogenesis.com/blog/about-functional-neurogenesis/jason-snyder/ “what would the general public think if they knew that all human experience is capable of changing the brain?”.  [This blog has been archived.]
 
Dead brains having complex near death experiences and perceptions of other realities?  Human experience and thoughts alone actually changing the brain?  New brain cells mysteriously growing deep within the brain and knowing where to migrate to heal the brain?  And what about Angela Ronson?  Her entire brain wiped out by a stroke, and seven years later she regains consciousness and has her same personality and memories?  And why does her hair grow so fast, and what could that have to do with it?  What about researcher Bradley Voytek  (http://darb.ketyov.com/) who titles papers “Cognitive Processes and their effect on Prefrontal Damage”.  He means THINKING is healing the brain.  But wait a doggone minute.  I thought the brain caused us to think, how can thinking heal the brain?  

Yaaaaaaaaaaah.  This is not the Neuroscience that I was taught at Johns Hopkins. 
(To be continued)

Sunday, August 13, 2017

Angela Ronson Part 1: Not a Vegetable at All, but a White Crow

"WALLED IN ALIVE DISEASE" is extremely rare. It is also called Locked-In Syndrome. I really had this and never was vegetative. 11/9/2019

In the following, Dr. Morse introduces me. He does three more of these in his blog. The man is excited and surprised. After Dr. Morse wrote this, I still remained in a coma (vegetative). I am in a coma to this day, and I feel that diagnosis should have been changed years earlier. -Angela



Angela Ronson Part 1: Not a Vegetable at All, but a White Crow

Melvin L Morse MD (spiritualscientific.com)
William James, the great psychologist and spiritual researcher said his investigations were often the search for the “white crow” that proves that spiritual realities are real.  He meant that although conventional wisdom was that all crows are black, all it takes is one white crow to prove that other realities exist.  In spiritual research, the search for the “white crow” has come to mean the search for that one case that proves beyond a doubt that consciousness can exist beyond the brain and body.  The late great Ian Stevenson told me when I started as a young near death researcher, “Melvin, find that white crow that proves NDEs are real, and you will prove that consciousness survives the death of the body.

I have found my white crow.  She is a 40 year old woman named Angela Ronson.  She suffered a massive brain bleed from an AVM, in 2002.  She writes about her experience in the Journal Stroke Connection with the headline “What Kind of Vegetable Am I?”.  (Stroke Connection: American Heart Association Affiliated Journal July/August 2009: For link to Stroke Connection Website  Click here [page 9] For link to article Click here For seven years, Angela was in a coma, waxing and waning, often in a “semi-vegetative state”.

THE WALLED IN ALIVE DISEASE! (French term for locked-in syndrome)
Angela Ronson is living proof of functional neurogenesis

Angela Ronson
For two years, Angela suffered the “locked in syndrome”!  This is a horrifying condition in which the patient is conscious and yet has lost virtually all motor function.  Very few of these patients recover any motor function, much less walk, talk and basically function normally, as Angela does.  Some patients with locked-in syndrome have to communicate with the outside world by sniffing or blinking their eyes.  Angela is a regular and avid participant in Twitter! (angela70).  Yet she has bitter memories of hearing her family and physicians talking about her while she was in coma, describing her as likely to be a vegetable for the rest of her life.

Angela’s miraculous recovery and return to full health has been nothing less than heart breaking.  Prior to her stroke, she was a highly educated woman with a Master’s in Special Education and a Program Manager for Early Intervention  projects. Since she was not expected to survive, after she returned to complete consciousness, she discovered she had lost everything.  As in everything she owned, her personal possessions, her pictures, clothes, her home, her savings, every scrap of anything having to do with her former life.  She lost her children to Foster Care with the State, and her own sister had to fight for a year just to get custody of them, while Angela was in coma. 
After her coma, she had to start her entire life over again.  Her children, who are teenagers, could hardly remember her as a Mother as she was in coma for so long.  She currently lives independently and supports herself as a Professional Writer.  Yet she still only sees her children part-time, and feels she has lost them as well as everything else she lost.
There are only a hand-full of patients who have recovered from such prolonged comas.  Most of those, after awakening, oddly enough died soon afterwards.  Most of the rest were left with profound handicaps, unable to walk or even move their limbs.  They suffered the horrible consequences of not moving, being fed by a tube, and complete inactivity for years.  The great majority of these patients often wish that they had simply died and never recovered, as their life after years of coma is so limited and painful.
Yet Angela is an alert lively woman with a great sense of humor and determined positive outlook on life.  She is actively blogging and tweeting.  She primarily is helping others to have a positive outlook on brain injury and stroke.  Most of her blogs give  practical advice on rehabilitation and dealing with the government.  She has developed an impressive network of cutting edge brain researchers, and is particular well versed in functional neurogenesis.
 
Her extraordinary recovery and what she has done with her life after seven years of coma (and semi-coma) is one of the most inspirational stories I know. 
 
(To be continued)

Monday, August 7, 2017

Tube Out, Then What?


In Dec 2016 and Jan 2017, the govt cut off my food until I had a swallow study done. There was probably no thinking at all. It would have been done as a paperwork issue. In reality, it was reminiscent of Terri Schiavo days. How long can she go without food?

Fortunately, my daughter had been stock-piling food in case we had a Zombie Apocalypse. Who knew the govt was going to be a zombie?

I had made some YouTube videos where I was speaking. If you look though, I do not speak a majority of the time. Maybe this got them thinking that I was back as I used to be. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBvLu17OOm0zXTRB_FKf1SQ

Well, I didn't swallow for that test. It recently hit me that this was a good thing. What would they have done if I had swallowed? Would they have just cut my food off altogether and just left this tube in my stomach?

I am assuming that the tube just can't be left. As it is now, I have to see the GI Specialist every 6 months or sooner to have the tube replaced. It is held in place by a balloon filled with saline that can burst. It has. This is why I say sooner.

The tube can be taken out, but surgery has to close the hole. I just can't be left with a hole in my stomach.

When I did early intervention, there was a boy about 3 years old who still used a bottle to get his nutrition he was developmentally delayed. (I remembered the foster mother being told to use lollipops. This is where I get lollipops from.)



Years earlier while doing my MA, I worked in a group home for developmentally disabled children. There was a boy, around 15, who was learning to scoop and eat his own breakfast cereal. He could have easily been that 3-year-old boy. There's quite a few years from age 3 to age 15. I don't think eating comes so fast after swallowing.

I don't think my feeding tube can be instantly stopped. The plan of action should go something like the following and it can take years if need be:

1. Establish The Swallow (I do periodically swallow throughout the day, but it is not controlled.)
2. Slowly Switch To Drinking the Formula (A flavored formula is used.)
3. Remove the G-tube

It's been some years, but I attended only one feeding clinic session at a hospital as a social worker. I do remember something like this required coordination between professional, medical, and daily programming staff. A single entity could not make the decision.

I don't need any zombies. This can be a planned, coordinated thing.