Reprint and Commentary: Our Multidimensional Brain

Another friend of the blog forwarded this mind-blowing article to me. Thank you, friend! This reprinted article suggests that neurons in the brain do their computations in up to 11 dimensions with the aid of distributed "black holes" of unknown dimensionality. Using computer modeling and algebraic topology, scientists have discovered that emerging neurons arrange themselves in "cliques" that quickly form multi-dimensional structures and, just as quickly, dissolve them. The more neurons that crowd around the "black hole," the higher the dimensionality of the transitory object.

Here's the reprint. Go to the end to hear my Gnostic Explanation of this phenomenon.

Scientists Reveal a Multidimensional Universe Inside the Brain

Scientists have found the Human Brain can create structures in up to 11 dimensions

Image Credit: Blue Brain Project.

A study published in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience has revealed that the human brain’s structures operate in up to 11 dimensions.

Conducted by the Blue Brain Project, scientists discovered fascinating new details about the complexity of the human brain.

“We found a world that we had never imagined,” explained

neuroscientist Henry Markram, director of Blue Brain Project and professor at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland.

A universe of multidimensional structures inside the brain

The image attempts to illustrate something that cannot be imaged — a universe of multi-dimensional structures and spaces. On the left is a digital copy of a part of the neocortex, the most evolved part of the brain. On the right are shapes of different sizes and geometries in an attempt to represent structures ranging from 1 dimension to 7 dimensions and beyond. The “black-hole” in the middle is used to symbolize a complex of multi-dimensional spaces, or cavities. Researchers at Blue Brain Project report groups of neurons bound into such cavities provide the missing link between neural structure and function, in their new study published in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. Image Credit: Blue Brain Project.

“There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions,” Markram added.

By studying the human brain, researchers discovered that traditional mathematical views were not applicable and ineffective.

“The mathematics usually applied to study networks cannot detect the high-dimensional structures and spaces that we now see clearly,” Markram revealed.

Instead, scientists decided to give algebraic topology a go.

Algebraic topology is a branch of mathematics that uses tools from abstract algebra to study topological spaces.

Scientists from the Blue Brain Project were assisted by mathematicians Kathryn Hess from EPFL and Ran Levi from Aberdeen University in applying this discipline in their new study.

“Algebraic topology is like a telescope and microscope at the same time. It can zoom into networks to find hidden structures – the trees in the forest – and see the empty spaces – the clearings – all at the same time,” explained professor Hess.

The Human Brain can create structures in up to 11 dimensions

The scientists discovered that the structures inside the brain are created when a group of neurons – cells that transmit signals in the brain – form something referred to as a clique. Each neuron is connected to every other neuron in the group in a unique way, creating a new object. The more neurons there are in a clique, the higher the ‘dimension’ of the object.

Algebraic topography allowed the scientists to model the structures within a virtual brain, created with the help of computers. They then carried out experiments on real brain tissue, in order to verify their results.

By adding stimuli into the virtual brain, the researchers found that cliques of progressively HIGHER dimensions assembled. Furthermore, in between the cliques, scientists discovered cavities.

“The appearance of high-dimensional cavities when the brain is processing information means that the neurons in the network react to stimuli in an extremely organized manner,” explained Levi.

“It is as if the brain reacts to a stimulus by building then razing a tower of multi-dimensional blocks, starting with rods (1D), then planks (2D), then cubes (3D), and then more complex geometries with 4D, 5D, etc.”

“The progression of activity through the brain resembles a multi-dimensional sandcastle that materializes out of the sand and then disintegrates,” he added.

The new data about the human brain offers unprecedented insight into how the human brain processes information.

However, the scientists have said that it still remains unclear as to how the cliques and cavities form in their highly specific ways.

The new study may eventually help scientists uncover one of the greatest mysteries of neuroscience: where does the brain ‘store’ its memories.

“They may be ‘hiding’ in high-dimensional cavities,” Markram concluded.

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Holy moley! My Gnostic mind tells me this multi-dimensionality is our natural, true state of existence. Our perception of a 3 or 4-D world is a "flattened" representation of our larger multi-dimensionality. So, while we may perceive things around us in a relatively simplified state, in order for our minds to process and make full use of the information it must dip into the black hole well of multi-dimensionality. We are unaware of this because when the information comes back out to us it again reverts to ordinary perception. It is this return to the ordinary world that collapses the multi-dimensional structure, as observed by the model. 

Upon further reflection and discussions, the findings are no surprise, because the arrangement of neurons into transitory multi-dimensional structures reflects their true aeonic nature. In terms of my interpretation of the Gnostic Gospel, the aeons live within a tight, hierarchical structure with a jelly-like consistency, kind of like a glorious precursor to slime mold. These aeons are expressions of the Son's diversity, and they dwell in the metaversal matrix outside our time-space continuum. The aeons of the Pleroma share one mind, one vision, and one intention. This glorious mind is known as the Holy Spirit.

According to the Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, all creatures on this planet, from single-celled bacteria through every living creature and plant, are the offspring of these aeons, sent down to material form as we find ourselves now, in an attempt to clean up a cosmic accident known as The Fall.

You can read all about it by visiting my other blog, A New Gnostic Gospel.

The Aeons of the Pleroma dreaming of Earth

As to where the brain stores its memories, it doesn't. According to the Simple Explanation, memories are stored in the collective unconscious I call the "memeosphere." The purpose of the neurons is no more than that of a tuned antenna, tuned to read that portion of the collective unconscious. This is the same collective unconscious referred to as the transpersonal space, the Akashic record, and so on. All creatures on earth are a part of the dreaming place of the transpersonal space. The Simple Explanation would say these thoughts are part of the thoughts of the Universal Unit of Consciousness (the Universal UC).

According to the Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, the multi-dimensional region  that the transitory structures pointed out in the article are communicating with are the aeons of the pleroma. This is possibly what is meant by Biblical references to angels keeping watch--these aeons are the multi-dimensional intelligences at the other end of the wire. We are their fruit.

Thoughts? 

Reprint: Possible Detection of an Impossibly Large Black Hole

A friend of the Simple Explanation blog sent me this article, which I am sharing with you. It is yet another example that proves, if nothing else, that scientists do not really understand the universe. Couple this article with the previous article published on this blog, and you and you can see that science is flailing about, trying to write a narrative of the universe that will keep up with their latest measurements. The Simple Explanation of black holes becomes increasingly plausible, as I predicted it would.

Possible Detection of a Black Hole So Big It ‘Should Not Exist’

Black hole physicists have been excitedly discussing reports that the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors recently picked up the signal of an unexpectedly enormous black hole, one with a mass that was thought to be physically impossible.

“The prediction is no black holes, not even a few” in this mass range, wrote Stan Woosley, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in an email. “But of course we know nature often finds a way.”

Seven experts contacted by Quanta said they’d heard that among the 22 flurries of gravitational waves detected by LIGO and Virgo since April, one of the signals came from a collision involving a black hole of unanticipated heft — purportedly as heavy as 100 suns. LIGO/Virgo team members would neither confirm nor deny the rumored detection.

Chris Belczynski, an astrophysicist at Warsaw University, previously felt so sure that such a large specimen wouldn’t be seen that in 2017 he placed a bet with colleagues. “I think we are about to lose the bet,” Belczynski said, “and for the good of science!”

Belczynski’s former confidence came from the fact that such a big black hole can’t form in the usual way.

Black holes — dense, paradox-ridden spheres whose gravity traps everything, even light — form from the contracting cores of fuel-spent stars. But in 1967, three physicists at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem realized that when the core of a dying star is very heavy, it won’t gravitationally collapse into a black hole. Instead, the star will undergo a “pair-instability supernova,” an explosion that totally annihilates it in a matter of seconds, leaving nothing behind. “The star is completely dispersed into space,” the three physicists wrote.

A pair-instability supernova happens when the core grows so hot that light begins to spontaneously convert into electron-positron pairs. The light’s radiation pressure had kept the star’s core intact; when the light transforms into matter, the resulting pressure drop causes the core to rapidly shrink and become even hotter, further accelerating pair production and causing a runaway effect. Eventually the core gets so hot that oxygen ignites. This fully reverses the core’s implosion, so that it explodes instead. For cores with a mass between about 65 and 130 times that of our sun (according to current estimates), the star is completely obliterated. Cores between about 50 and 65 solar masses pulsate, shedding mass in a series of explosions until they drop below the range where pair instability occurs. Thus there should be no black holes with masses in the 50-to-130-solar-mass range.

“The prediction comes from straightforward calculations,” said Woosley, whose 2002 study of this “pair-instability mass gap” is considered definitive.

Black holes can exist on the other side of the mass gap, weighing in at more than 130 solar masses, because the runaway implosion of such heavy stellar cores can’t be stopped, even by oxygen fusion; instead, they continue to collapse and form black holes. But because stars shed mass throughout their lives, a star would need to be born weighing at least 300 suns in order to end up as a 130-solar-mass core, and such behemoths are rare. For this reason, most experts assumed black holes detected by LIGO and Virgo should top out at around 50 solar masses, the lower end of the mass gap. (The million- and billion-solar-mass supermassive black holes that anchor galaxies’ centers formed differently, and rather mysteriously, in the early universe. LIGO and Virgo are not mechanically capable of detecting the collisions of supermassive black holes.)

That said, a few experts did boldly predict that black holes in the mass gap would be seen — hence the 2017 bet.

At a meeting that February at the Aspen Center for Physics, Belczynski and Daniel Holz of the University of Chicago wagered that “black holes should not exist in the mass range between 55 and 130 solar masses because of pair instability,” and thus that none would be detected among LIGO/Virgo’s first 100 signals. Woosley later co-signed with Belczynski and Holz.

But Carl Rodriguez of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Sourav Chatterjee of the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India, later joined by Fred Rasio of Northwestern University, bet against them, wagering that a black hole would indeed be detected in the mass gap, because there’s a roundabout way for these plus-size black holes to form.

Whereas most of the colliding black holes that wiggle LIGO and Virgo’s instruments probably originated as pairs of isolated stars (binary star systems being common in the cosmos), Rodriguez and his co-signers argue that a fraction of the detected collisions occur in dense stellar environments such as globular clusters. The black holes swing around in one another’s gravity, and sometimes they catch each other and merge, like big fish swallowing smaller ones in a pond.

Inside a globular cluster, a 50-solar-mass black hole could merge with a 30-solar-mass one, for instance, and then the resulting giant could merge again. This second-generation merger is what LIGO/Virgo might have detected — a lucky catch of the big fish in the pond. “This can really only happen in clusters,” Rodriguez said. If the rumor is true, he, Chatterjee and Rasio will each receive a $100 bottle of wine from Belczynski, Holz and Woosley.

But there are other possible origin stories for the putative big black hole. Perhaps it started out in an isolated binary star system. After the first star collapsed into a black hole, it might have grown by stripping matter from its companion star. Later, the second star would have collapsed as well, then eventually the two would have collided and merged, sending gravitational waves cascading through the fabric of space-time.

The LIGO/Virgo team quickly announces every potential gravitational-wave event and the region of sky from which it originated, so that other telescopes can swivel in that direction. But the tight-lipped team has yet to publish detailed information about any event from the current observing run that began in April, such as the inferred sizes of the colliding objects. The team plans to reveal all by the spring of 2020 at the latest. If the oversize black hole is among the results, the analysis should also reveal how fast the hole and its companion were spinning when they collided; this information will help favor one origin story or the other, or neither.

The rumor is “pushing us to alternative formation mechanisms,” said Chris Fryer, an astrophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who has studied binary black hole formation and the mass gap. “In any event it will be an exciting event — if it’s true.”

As for Woosley, he still feels certain the mass gap exists, despite possible exceptions. “A likely outcome will be that when we have hundreds of black holes, we will indeed see a cliff at around 50,” he said, “but with a few events in the gap because nature abhors a vacuum.”

This article was reprinted on TheAtlantic.com.

Scientists are starting to catch up to the toroidal universe model

Here's a very good article describing one scientist's realization that black holes are actually dark energy stars. This is what the Simple Explanation has proposed for the past many years now. Jump to the end of this reprint to read my Gnostic take on dark energy. Meanwhile, here's the reprint:

Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars?

Why one physicist believes our whole understanding of black holes is wrong.

Nautilus|

• Jesse Stone

Black Hole vs. Dark Energy Star: When viewed from the top down, a dark energy star has a central opening, the donut hole. Chapline believes that matter and energy rotating around the central opening (forming the “ring of fire”) is the source of the astrophysical jets observed by astronomers in the vicinity of what most believe to be black holes.

George Chapline believes that the Event Horizon Telescope will offer evidence that black holes are really dark energy stars. Photo by NASA.

What does the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way look like? Early next year, we might find out. The Event Horizon Telescope—really a virtual telescope with an effective diameter of the Earth—has been pointing at Sagittarius A* for the last several years. Most researchers in the astrophysics community expect that its images, taken from telescopes all over the Earth, will show the telltale signs of a black hole: a bright swirl of light, produced by a disc of gases trapped in the black hole’s orbit, surrounding a black shadow at the center—the event horizon. This encloses the region of space where the black-hole singularity’s gravitational pull is too strong for light to escape.

But George Chapline, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, doesn’t expect to see a black hole. He doesn’t believe they’re real. In 2005, he told Nature that “it’s a near certainty that black holes don’t exist” and—building on previous work he’d done with physics Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin—introduced an alternative model that he dubbed “dark energy stars.” Dark energy is a term physicists use to describe a peculiar kind of energy that appears to permeate the entire universe. It expands the fabric of spacetime itself, even as gravity attempts to bring objects closer together. Chapline believes that the immense energies in a collapsing star cause its protons and neutrons to decay into a gas of photons and other elementary particles, along with what he refers to as “droplets of vacuum energy.” These form a “condensed” phase of spacetime—much like a gas under enough pressure transitions to liquid—that has a much higher density of dark energy than the spacetime surrounding the star. This provides the pressure necessary to hold gravity at bay and prevent a singularity from forming. Without a singularity in spacetime, there is no black hole.

The idea has found no support in the astrophysical community—over the last decade, Chapline’s papers on this topic have garnered only single-digit citations. His most popular paper in particle physics, by contrast, has been cited over 600 times. But Chapline suspects his days of wandering in the scientific wilderness may soon be over. He believes that the Event Horizon Telescope will offer evidence that dark energy stars are real.

This strange toroidal geometry isn’t a bug of dark energy stars, but a feature.

The idea goes back to a 2000 paper, with Evan Hohlfeld and David Santiago, in which Chapline and Laughlin modeled spacetime as a Bose-Einstein condensate—a state of matter that arises when taking an extremely low-density gas to extremely low temperatures, near absolute zero. Chapline and Laughlin’s model is quantum mechanical in nature: General relativity emerges as a consequence of the way that the spacetime condensate behaves on large scales. Spacetime in this model also undergoes phase transformations when it gains or loses energy. Other scientists find this to be a promising path, too. A 2009 paper by a group of Japanese physicists stated that “[Bose-Einstein Condensates] are one of the most promising quantum fluids for” analogizing curved spacetime. 

Chapline and Laughlin argue that they can describe the collapsed stars that most scientists take to be black holes as regions where spacetime has undergone a phase transition. They find that the laws of general relativity are valid everywhere in the vicinity of the collapsed star, except at the event horizon, which marks the boundary between two different phases of spacetime.

In the condensate model the event horizon surrounding a collapsed star is no longer a point of no return but instead a traversable, physical surface. This feature, along with the lack of a singularity that is the signature feature of black holes, means that paradoxes associated with black holes, like the destruction of information, don’t arise. Laughlin has been reticent to conjecture too far beyond his and Chapline’s initial ideas. He believes Chapline is onto something with dark energy stars, “but where we part company is in the amount of speculating we are willing to do about what ‘phase’ of the vacuum might be inside” what most scientists call black holes, Laughlin said. He’s holding off until experimental data reveals more about the interior phase. “I will then write my second paper on the subject,” he said.

In recent years Chapline has continued to refine his dark energy star model in collaboration with several other authors, including Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina and Piotr Marecki of Leipzig University. He’s concluded that dark energy stars aren’t spherical or oblate, like black holes. Instead, they have the shape of a torus, or donut. In a rotating compact object, like a dark energy star, Chapline believes quantum effects in the spacetime condensate generate a large vortex along the object’s axis of rotation. Because the region inside the vortex is empty—think of the depression that forms at the center of whirlpool—the center of the dark energy star is hollow, like an apple without its core. A similar effect is observed when quantum mechanics is used to model rotating drops of superfluid. There too, a central vortex can form at the center of a rotating drop and, surprisingly, change its shape from a sphere to a torus.  

In the condensate model the event horizon surrounding a collapsed star is no longer a point of no return but instead a traversable, physical surface.

For Chapline, this strange toroidal geometry isn’t a bug of dark energy stars, but a feature, as it helps explain the origin and shape of astrophysical jets—the highly energetic beams of ionized matter that are generated along the axis of rotation of a compact object like a black hole. Chapline believes he’s identified a mechanism in dark energy stars that explains observations of astrophysical jets better than mainstream ones, which posit that energy is extracted from the accretion disk outside of a black hole and focused into a narrow beam along the black hole’s axis of rotation. To Chapline, matter and energy falling toward a dark energy star would make its way to the inner throat (the “donut hole”), where electrons orbiting the throat would, as in a Biermann Battery, generate magnetic fields powerful enough to drive the jets. 

Chapline points to recent experimental work where scientists, at the OMEGA Laser Facility at the University of Rochester, created magnetized jets using lasers to form a ring-like excitation on a flat surface. Though the experiments were not conducted with dark energy stars in mind, Chapline believes it provides support for his theory since the ring-like excitation—Chapline calls it a “ring of fire”—is exactly what he would expect to happen along the throat of a dark energy star. He believes the ring could be the key to supporting the existence of dark energy stars. “This ought to eventually show up clearly” in the Event Horizon Telescope images, Chapline said, referring to the ring.  

Chapline also points out that dark energy stars will not be completely opaque to light, as matter and light can pass into, but also out of, a dark energy star. A dark energy star won’t have a completely black interior—instead it will show a distorted image of any stars behind it. Other physicists, though, are skeptical that these kinds of deviations from conventional black hole models would show up in the Event Horizon Telescope data. Raul Carballo-Rubio, a physicist at the International School for Advanced Studies, in Trieste, Italy, has developed his own alternative model to black holes known as semi-classical relativistic stars. Speaking more generally about alternative black hole models Caraballo-Rubio said, “The differences [with black holes] that would arise in these models are too minute to be detected” by the Event Horizon Telescope. 

Chapline plans to discuss his dark energy star predictions in December, at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. But even if his predictions are confirmed, he said he doesn’t expect the scientific community to become convinced overnight. “I expect that for the next few years the [Event Horizon Telescope] people will be confused by what they see.”

Jesse Stone is a freelance writer based in Iowa City, Iowa. Reach him at jessebstone@gmail.com.

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The Simple Explanation suggests that there is a toroidal force that feeds our universe information and coherence from the Universal Unit of Consciousness. The Simple Explanation hypothesizes that our space is seeded with tiny toruses kicking out information. These toruses are also kicking out coherence in the form of gravity, which attracts ordinary matter to itself. These energetic toruses are the seeds of stars and galaxies, and they throw toroidal patterns into the space surrounding the large objects in which they nest. The dark energy force counteracts entropy and it is causing space to expand at a more rapid rate than before.

Yesterday I ran across an article in National Geographic that expressed confusion over the roles of dark matter and dark energy in galaxy formation. "This Galaxy Has Almost No Dark Matter, and Scientists Are Baffled." Scientists had observed a "halo of dark matter" surrounding all galaxies and had hypothesized that galaxies are formed by dark matter pressing in from the outside and thereby capturing the aggregations of matter that form the galaxy.  But then they found this galaxy with no dark matter halo and that blew the theory of galaxy formation.

My Simple Explanation is that the reason there is a dark matter "halo" (read "torus") around galaxies is because the dark energy torus at the galaxy's center pushes the dark matter outward to the galaxy's edge, like a giant leaf blower blowing the dark matter out of the garden and leaving the carved out impression of the torus at the edge. The dark matter is wispy and easy to push around. The torus at the center is powerful, and it gathers the ordinary material to itself to build, in a coherent fashion, the objects that surround it.

The Gnostic Gospel identifies the dark energy as Logos and the ALL repairing the mess that started out as the Imitation. The Tripartite Tractate describes how the Imitation, the Deficiency, was only step one in creation, with a quick adjustment that halted production of the Dark Ones until a more "reasonable" form of matter could be produced that combined light with matter, leading to the eventual redemption of matter by mind and spirit. This will be simply explained in my continuing Gnostic Cosmology series. But meanwhile, you can see the evidence for yourself in the NASA illustrations included with this article.

By borrowing information from the unlikely source of an ancient wisdom book that lay buried under Egyptian sand for almost 2,000 years, we have generated several scientific predictions that will prove or disprove my hypotheses. This Gnostic creation story claims that the first material objects in our universe were dark matter. Light and ordinary matter followed later and began a never-ending dance with dark matter. And then, much later, about the time of our solar system's formation, the dark energy faucet turned up and began streaming coherence into our universe at ever-increasing rate, expanding the size of our universe. 

Reprint: The healing power of love

Here's an excellent article about the nature and power of love, reprinted from alternative physician, Keith Scott-Mumby.

Love As Healer Love As Killer

Some years ago, Kenneth R. Pelletier wrote a book graphically titled: Mind As Healer Mind As Slayer. Yes, the power of mind can heal. We all know that. And, yes, the mind can kill. Stress is probably the number one killer of all. If you are not happy, balanced, centered and grounded, you are likely subject to stress. Remember my own definition of stress, which “the difference between what you’ve got and what you wanted.” The wider the gap, the more stress you are subject to. We can say the same about love… and there's a science to go with it. Those who are loved, or FEEL that they are loved, live longer and enjoy better health. That’s why we sometimes talk about “vitamin L”! So why not Love as Healer, Love as Slayer? Except that love can never slay. Only lack of love (which is one of the worst imaginable stresses) can hurt you. So we are left with just Love as Healer! That’s what I want to talk about. First of all, what is love? We all think we know... Then on closer questioning, or deeper introspection, the honest ones among us realize we know nothing. Let’s take a shot at defining it. First, what love is not: Love is not need, longing or desire. To need or desire is to WANT. It basically means lack. Love is not lack. Love is a fullness and outgoing, a giving and enfolding. There is no lack. It is a state of abundance. That’s the difference between love in the spiritual or philosophical sense and love in the biological or sexual sense. That kind of “love” can be very needy and demanding. It’s more of a craving than a fulfillment. Lust more than satisfaction. Nothing wrong with lust and desire... Everything in its place; but to consider that to be pure love, just because it’s intense, is probably misleading. If you keep these two poles well apart in your own mind, then a lot of talk and emotions surrounding love begin to clarify somewhat.

Religious Ecstasy The highest kind of spiritual love may have no sexual element but can be extremely intense; ecstasy even. That’s the kind of love those deeply engaged in the pursuit of Being and deeper knowledge are likely to encounter or manifest. It shows as love of God, love of The Buddha, love of The One True God, Yahweh, Aphrodite, the love of Christ, or love of the truth. These are the religious adepts and mystics; Their kind of love is at the ultimate upper end of Being: serene contemplation, thrill, ecstasy and self death. St. Teresa de Avila, Hildegard of Bingen and St. Francis lived many years in close contact with this level of enlightenment. 13th Century poet and mystic, Rumi, wrote of it in his ecstatic love poems (written for a man, Shams of Tabriz.) John Donne (pronounced Dunn), the Elizabethan poet, hovers over it without actually pressing the GO button! Artists can manifest it. Michelangelo’s terribilità (driven force, almost madness) was clearly of that order of ecstasy and engagement. Dance: If you’ve ever seen the “whirling dervishes” (Mevlevi Dervishes), a Muslim sufi sect, you’ll not doubt that a person can pass into ecstasy, simply by prolonged, rhythmical whirling. The Mevlevi, by the way, owe a lot to Rumi. Let’s come back to earth and consider love for the ‘Everyman.’ As I said, need and desire point to a different phenomenon, most typically the “love” that arises from sexual attachment. It has a place, but it can hurt like hell, as we all know. The pain of love is built into a language and proverbs: “You always hurt the one you love,” or “Love is the most beautiful of dreams and the worst of nightmares,” or “Where there is love, there is pain.” [Spanish Proverb]

The Everly Brothers hit it beautifully with their song, which speaks to every tortured teenage heart, sick with love: Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and mars Any heart not tough, nor strong enough To take a lot of pain, take a lot of pain Love is like a cloud, holds a lot of rain Love hurts… Let me sum it up by saying that kind of love is driven by hormones and pheromones. It’s chemical. We are looking for something better. Not just romantic, sexual love.

Broken Heart Syndrome Have you heard of broken heart syndrome? It’s real. Its other name is ‘stress-induced cardiomyopathy’ and a new study shows that an actual heart attack can result from life tragedy, such as losing a loved one. Imran Arif, MD, UC Health interventional cardiologist, says the symptoms of broken-heart syndrome may be brought on by the heart’s reaction to a surge of stress hormones, and as a result, part of the heart muscle suffers damage. The newest study by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston shows that the day following the loss of a loved one, a person is 21 times more likely to suffer a heart attack, and the spike occurs even in people at a low risk for heart attack.[1]

The Healing Power Of Love We’ll pass on from sexual love to the “real” thing! Perhaps it is, as Ethel Specter Person tells us, “An act of imagination.” For some of us, it will be the great creative triumph of our lives. In its very nature as an act of the imagination lies the source of its power for both good and ill, for it can indeed exploit the lover’s illusions or delusions, but alternately can lead the lover to transcending truths.” [Love and Fateful Encounters, 1989] This is the kind of love that can heal, can save lives, can create wonder and delight. It’s true! I’ve quoted several times previously the interesting bit of research: In a Harvard study, researchers discovered that married men who felt loved by their wives experienced 50 percent fewer heart issues, despite having high risk factors like high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes.[2] Not just men, either. A study from the University of Pittsburgh found that women in happy marriages have a much lower risk of cardiovascular disease than those in high-stress ones. Love really is good for your heart.

Prevention online magazine tells us that the benefits of love are explicit and measurable: The National Longitudinal Mortality Study, which has been tracking more than a million subjects since 1979, shows that married people live longer. Plus, they have fewer heart attacks and lower cancer rates, and even get pneumonia less frequently than singles.[3]

Put another way, a study done by UCLA researchers found that unmarried people had a "significantly higher" death rate than married couples who live together. Harvard University researchers also found that married women are 20 percent less likely than single women die of stress-related causes like heart disease, suicide and cirrhosis of the liver. As for married men, they're 100 to 200 percent times less likely to die of these causes than single men are. Love is healing! Some experts think it won't be long before doctors prescribe steamy sex, romantic getaways, and caring communication! That’s a whole lot better idea than pills and exercise! Yay! Have fun! (wink!)

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby The Official Alternative Doctor

Sources: 1. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-emotional-grief-heart.html 2. https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/marriage-and-mens-health 3. https://www.prevention.com/sex/relationships/a20435514/how-love-keeps-you-healthy/#ixzz2Zt8bXeaV