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If mages collaborate with medical researchers, what techniques might we develop?
Scientists have recently found the area of the brain that motivates us to exercise. They found it in mice, and hope to develop human-friendly ways to stimulate it, which would help with both fitness and depression.
What if we could use magick to stimulate that brain area? Could we produce the same results without surgery or drugs? Could we program ethereal software to do it when anyone stares at a sigil and says a word, so people could use it in their own home?
I don’t know. But when I think about combining magick with medical research, this is one of the things I think about. Magick alone is useful, but magick plus medicine, physics, and other sciences? That’s what really excites me.
(Hat tip to Takeo for the article. Thanks, man!)
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‘Magick plus medicine’. I can almost hear the American Medical Association calling for you to be burnt at the stake! If you have a hard time convincing some people on here that your approach can fit within the doctrines of orthodox materialist reductionism then just imagine the frustration you’d encounter with these guys…
There’s currently a mini war on with certain factions trying their hardest to stop any moves whatsoever to integrate orthodox ‘science-based’ Medicine with anything that doesn’t narrowly conform to a bio-chemical model. Needless to say propositions of an entirely new form of matter to try and explain some aspects of ‘magical’ practice are unlikely to go down well.
http://www.medicaldaily.com/doctors-propose-end-reiki-trials-practitioners-defend-marriage-science-and-holistic-298920
But I admire your intentions to try – even if I do think a lot of this issue has less to do with science per-se and more to do with a fanatical attachment to the doctrine of materialist reductionism at all costs on the part of figures such as Steven Novella and David Colquhoun.
Might as well know what you’re up against though..
I wonder what we’d see if we use hypnosis to stimulate the desire to exercise? How would that indirectly activate that centre? Knowing that mechanism would be instructive, perhaps being the same as a ‘magickal route’.
(And Simon makes a good point: If something like hypnosis has taken so long to be accepted, something involving alternative, non-visually-perceivable structures might be pretty challenging!)
Indeed. I never expected it to be easy. But it certainly seems worth doing.