Yes, DEFINITELY *lies. I was going to say * wtf instead of worldaffairs in the submission I was about to put up, but otherwise, you got it.

I found it via RPS:

"The shooting has thrown everyone - even more than any terrible killing in a high school - because Steven Kazmierczak doesn’t fit into any of the easy stereotypes for those who might usually perform such a crime. From the scraps of information we have, it seems he had recently stopped taking psych meds, and taking into account his actions, would indicate paranoid schizophrenia. Obviously this is speculation. But intriguingly, it’s speculation based on facts, rather than randomly attributing a cause de jour in order to propogate someone’s personal agenda.

The opening question (once we get past the entertaining moment of the anchor accidentally sharing everyone’s wishes):

“What does it tell you about this guy, the suspect, that he’s twenty-seven years old - he’d already graduated - not an 18 year-old, a 17, 18, 19 year-old student currently enrolled?”

Thompson’s reply:

“Well, we find from brain scan studies out of Harvard that if you get started, for example, playing violent video games you can, er, more likely copycat the behaviours in the games.”

The rest of his speech is the usual nonsense and undemonstrable claims about a connection between previous high school shootings and video games, but it’s this first sentence that merits the most attention.

Thompson’s a lawyer, so I’m not going to say he’s lying. But I will say what he says makes no sense in any possible way. Even if there were these “brain scan studies”, how exactly would a functional MRI demonstrate the likelihood of a “copycat” shooting? Is there an animated picture of a little pixel gunman firing a weapon on the scans? It’s gibberish. It’s the sort of woo-woo nonsense you expect to hear from someone trying to explain how their crystals prevent cats from being afraid of ghosts. “Harvard you say?! Gosh, that sounds scientific!” It’s embarrassing.

The most frustrating thing about this man’s escapades is it obfuscates what might be a very serious subject. What if violent videogames could have a negative correlative effect on young people? This is something we would surely like to know, and see studied rationally. People like Thompson (who encourages far greater feelings of violence in me than any “training simulator” like, er, Counter-Strike: Half-Life ever has) stifle this discussion through their sensationalist bullshit.

To conclude, I’d like to transcribe his last sentence.

“One of the things personally disturbing for me dist, including the fact that we have a community now of survivors and victims’ families all across the country like at Perduco who go through the trauma of these type events with the families who are, uh, most immediately hit in this way most recently because they themselves have endured these type situations is the, um… err, the… uh, fact that, you’ve got, um, uhhh, uh, I wrote a, I’m sorry I lost my train of thought, because, uh, but, uh, I wrote a book called Out Of Harm’s Way for a Chicago publisher in which, the, the only chapter they deleted was a fictionalised of, of one of these incidents in which I I said that a kid should walk onto a stage in an audatorium and open fire with a shotgun and they dist they deleted it because it was too disturbing.”

“Campus shooting expert” indeed."

I disagree Choggie, that whole 10% thing is a popular science myth, people say it's only 10% because we use our brains in parts, electrical activity fires where needed when needed, every time you see a picture of a brain scan all people see is a few spots here and there. But over the long term you are using the entirety of your brain, like over the course of the day.

Where this phenomenon occurs is in perception suppression and mind-body control, we know that the brain receives more data then we actually perceive, now this makes evolutionary sense you wouldn't want to have your senses heightened at the expense of higher brain functions. For example your ability to dream is suppressed when you are awake, when you recall a memory you remember it in your mind and not in your minds eye like when you are asleep. Or when you think about something scary, and remember say a spider, your visual memory is suppressed so you don't see it in your minds eye.

So your body is constantly modifying your bodies response to the environment, if that changes it reacts in kind, if you see a car is about to hit you, some of your functions go offline and some go into overdrive, many people say how they have a loss of color when traumatic events occur such as airplane crashes, this because with adrenaline your reaction time increases and you have to act fast so some features become redundant.

Autism as is classified as a neurodevelopmental disorder that manifests in delays of "social interaction, language as used in social communication, or symbolic or imaginative play". So while Stephen Wiltshire has problems in these areas he has autistic spectrum disorder, the ability to capture visual information like computer data. Think of Rain Man, he has the ability to recall over 2000 years of historical data but suffers from the inability to interact socially.

Our normal perception also has those experiences but they are very faint because our perception of reality is controlled, think about professional athletes, you always hear them speak of being 'in the zone'. That perfect time where mind body reactions are synchronized, the entire experience becomes natural and without thought, the athlete is perfectly focused on his task. This comes through years of training and preparation. The same applies to soldiers in the field under fire, when adrenaline kicks in, they freeze, but then training comes back with the help of muscle memory and they react, at those times your perception of time slows down, seconds become eternity.

I believe unlocking the secrets of the mind is one of the 3 most important questions everyone should ask, alongside with why are we here? and are we alone?

QuantumMushroom said:

As long as there is poverty there will be gods. Humans have a need for ritual that goes beyond logic and reason, the latter of which is more often a rearranging of prejudices than original thought.

You have no idea how close you are. Brain scans during prayer and meditation have shown that a specific portion of the brain becomes much more active, while suppressing the facuties that allow us to distinguish between our bodies and the world. So, our brains, for whatever reason, are wired to be able to have an irrational faith and belief even in the most dire of situations.