ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_philosophy

According to James Kirchner there is a spectrum of Gaia hypotheses, ranging from the undeniable to radical. At one end is the undeniable statement that the organisms on the Earth have radically altered its composition. A stronger position is that the Earth's biosphere effectively acts as if it is a self-organizing system which works in such a way as to keep its systems in some kind of equilibrium that is conducive to life. Biologists usually view this activity as an undirected emergent property of the ecosystem; as each individual species pursues its own self-interest, their combined actions tend to have counterbalancing effects on environmental change. Proponents of this view sometimes point to examples of life's actions in the past that have resulted in dramatic change rather than stable equilibrium, such as the conversion of the Earth's atmosphere from a reducing environment to an oxygen-rich one.

An even stronger claim is that all lifeforms are part of a single planetary being, called Gaia. In this view, the atmosphere, the seas, the terrestrial crust would be the result of interventions carried out by Gaia, through the coevolving diversity of living organisms. Many scientists deny the possibility of this view; however, such a view is considered within scientific possibility.

The most extreme form of Gaia theory is that the entire Earth is a single unified organism; in this view the Earth's biosphere is consciously manipulating the climate in order to make conditions more conducive to life. Scientists contend that there is no evidence at all to support this last point of view, and it has come about because many people do not understand the concept of homeostasis. Many non-scientists instinctively and incorrectly see homeostasis as a process that requires conscious control.

The more speculative versions of Gaia, including versions in which it is believed that the Earth is actually conscious, sentient, and highly intelligent, are usually considered outside the bounds of what is usually considered science.

I'm really scaring myself now. I'm a dendritic cell.

You are my helper T-cell and I am your dendritic cell. Hopefully, I am "professional" enough to activate the resting helper T-cells. The antigen is "Joy". In my opinion, we are two cells that are part of an immune system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendritic_cell
Formation of immature cells

Immature dendritic cells constantly sample the surrounding environment for pathogens such as viruses and bacteria. This is done through pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) such as the toll-like receptors (TLRs). TLRs recognize specific chemical signatures found on subsets of pathogens. Immature dendritic cells may also phagocytose small quantities of membrane from live own cells, in a process called nibbling. Once they have come into contact with a presentable antigen, they become activated into mature dendritic cells and begin to migrate to the lymph node. Immature dendritic cells phagocytose pathogens and degrade their proteins into small pieces and upon maturation present those fragments at their cell surface using MHC molecules. Simultaneously, they upregulate cell-surface receptors that act as co-receptors in T-cell activation such as CD80 (B7.1), CD86 (B7.2), and CD40 greatly enhancing their ability to activate T-cells. They also upregulate CCR7, a chemotactic receptor that induces the dendritic cell to travel through the blood stream to the spleen or through the lymphatic system to a lymph node.

Here they act as antigen-presenting cells: they activate helper T-cells and killer T-cells as well as B-cells by presenting them with antigens derived from the pathogen, alongside non-antigen specific costimulatory signals.

Every helper T-cell is specific to one particular antigen. Only professional antigen-presenting cells (macrophages, B lymphocytes, and dendritic cells) are able to activate a resting helper T-cell when the matching antigen is presented. However, macrophages and B cells can only activate memory T cells whereas

dendritic cells can activate both memory and naive T cells, and are the most potent of all the antigen-presenting cells.

The word "entactogen" is derived from the roots "en" (Greek: within), "tactus" (Latin: touch) and "gen" (Greek: produce)

An endosymbiont is any organism that lives within the body or cells of another organism, i.e. forming an endosymbiosis (Greek: ἔνδον endon "within", σύν syn "together" and βίωσις biosis "living").

Your Joy article was an entactogen that reached my autistic world. There are people that are entactogens. When all else fails, there are psychoactive drugs that can do the same thing.

Brain Areas Critical To Human Time Sense Identified

Timing is everything. It comes into play when making split second decisions, such as knowing when to stop at a red light, catch a ball or modulate rhythm when playing the piano.
Now researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Albuquerque have identified areas in the brain responsible for perceiving the passage of time in order to carry out critical everyday functions.

Their study is the first to demonstrate that the basal ganglia located deep within the base of the brain, and the parietal lobe located on the surface of the right side of the brain, are critical areas for this time-keeping system.

Their results are published in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience. Importantly, the study calls into question a long-standing and widely held belief in the scientific community that the cerebellum is the critical structure involved in time perception.

"We are excited that our findings can also have application to better understand some neurological disorders," says Stephen M. Rao, Ph.D., professor of neurology at the Medical College and principal investigator. "By identifying the area in the brain responsible for governing our sense of time, scientists can now study defective time perception, which has been observed in patients with Parkinson's disease and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), two maladies commonly thought to have abnormal function within the basal ganglia."

Making accurate decisions regarding the duration of brief intervals of time from 300 milliseconds to 10 seconds is critical to most aspects of human behavior. Contemporary theories of short interval timing assume the existence of a timekeeper system within the brain, yet identifying these brain systems has been elusive and controversial.

Using a novel functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique that tracks second-by-second changes in brain activity, investigators identified regions within the brain that are critical for this timekeeping system.

Seventeen healthy, young men and women volunteers were imaged while being asked to perceive the duration of time between the presentations of two consecutive tones. One second later, two more tones were presented and subjects were asked to make a judgment as to whether the duration between the tones was shorter or longer than the first two tones.

To make sure that the brain systems associated with time perception were clearly identified, two control tasks were given which involved listening to tones or estimating their pitch, but not making judgments about their duration.

Using this fast imaging technique, the investigators were able to isolate only those areas of the brain activated during presentation of the first two tones -- when subjects are only perceiving and attending to time. Their results conclusively demonstrated that timekeeping functions are governed by the basal ganglia and the right parietal cortex.

Investigators have long suspected, based on indirect evidence, that the basal ganglia might be involved in time perception. The basal ganglia have nerve cells that primarily contain the neurotransmitter, dopamine.

Patients with Parkinson's disease have an abnormal reduction in dopamine within the basal ganglia and commonly experience problems with time perception. These difficulties partially improve when patients are administered a drug that increases dopamine levels in the brain.

Defective time perception has also been observed in patients with Huntington's disease and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), two disorders commonly thought to have abnormal function within the basal ganglia. Animal studies have also demonstrated the importance of dopamine in timekeeping.

Medical College researchers at Froedtert Hospital, a major teaching affiliate of the Medical College, are currently using this new neuroimaging procedure to better understand how the brain enables dopamine replacement drugs and methylphenidate (Ritalin) to normalize time perception in individuals with Parkinson's disease and ADHD, respectively.

An additional study, in collaboration with investigators at the University of Iowa, will examine time perception in the early stages of Huntington's disease, prior to the development of the characteristic movement disorder.

The critical role of the parietal lobes in timekeeping was first suggested by coauthor Deborah L. Harrington, Ph.D., research scientist, Veterans Affairs Medical Center and associate research professor of neurology and psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM. She and her colleagues reported that stroke patients with damage to the parietal cortex on the right but not the left side of the brain experienced impaired time perception.

Patients for the study have been drawn from Froedtert Hospital and the VA Medical Center in Milwaukee. Additionally, the researchers are studying adult ADHD patients who have been seen since childhood at the Medical College.

Coauthor of the study with Drs. Rao and Harrington is Andrew R. Mayer, M.S., graduate student, department of neurology, Medical College of Wisconsin.

The study was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the W.M. Keck Foundation to the Medical College, and the Department of Veterans Affairs and National Foundation for Functional Brain Imaging to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Albuquerque. - By Toranj Marphetia

People with depressive-spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, and adult ADHD tend to smoke heavily, which suggested to researchers that nicotine may soothe their symptoms. Common to all these disorders is a failure of attention, an inability to concentrate on particular stimuli and screen out the rest. Nicotine helps. Researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse have shown via functional magnetic resonance imaging that nicotine activates specific brain areas during tasks that demand attention (Box 1). This may be because of its effects, shared with many other addictive drugs, on the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. “Schizophrenia is a disorder largely of the dopamine system,” says John Dani of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Dopamine signals in the brain occur in two modes—a kind of background trickle, punctuated by brief bursts. “It's thought that schizophrenics have a hard time separating that background information from important bursts. We've shown that nicotine helps to normalize that signaling by depressing the background but letting the bursts through well,” he says. “I'll be surprised if there's not a co-therapy [to help schizophrenics] that takes advantage of nicotine systems in less than a decade.”

I’m entertaining the idea that the Orbitofrontal Cortex is the “Kundalini Genie”. When the hippocampus gets “torn asunder” by too much stress, the tranquilizing parasympathetic nervous system provides an anesthesia consciousness that’s out of this world. I would call it “Ecstasy, (or ekstasis) from the Ancient Greek, έκ-στασις (ex-stasis), "to be or stand outside oneself, a removal to elsewhere (from ex-: out, and stasis: a stand, or a standoff of forces)."

I'm also entertaining the idea that ecstasy is the altered state right before we die.