One of Salvador Dali’s greatest paintings is called “The Persistence of Memory”.  Last week the results of a new study were published in Science magazine that conclusively prove the physical nature of that persistence.  In what other scientists have called a ‘foundational study’ a team of researchers from America and Israel have discovered and documented the physical nature of memory.

In the study, the researchers threaded tiny electrodes into the brains of 13 people with severe epilepsy.  Evidently this implanting of electrodes is standard procedure as it allows doctors to pinpoint the brain activity that cause epileptic seizures.  These patients watched 5 to 10 second film clips.  The researchers recorded the firing activity of about 100 neurons per person, all of which were concentrated in and around the hippocampus, a part of the brain know to be critical for memory.

The researchers identified single cells that became highly active during some videos and quiet during others.  More than half the recorded cells hummed with activity in response to at least …

The new age we are now entering, The Shift Age, will be a time of great transformation.  One of the areas that will undergo the greatest transformation is health and medicine.  It is expected that nanotechnology will bring great changes in both medical treatments and life expectancy.  The miniaturization of computer and chip technology will finally initiate the era of the bionic human to some degree.  There will breakthroughs in pharmacology and discoveries that will basically be unintended consequences of research into the treatment and cures of many diseases.

One such incredible discovery was reported last week by researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego.  They reported that they had found two drugs that increased muscle endurance without exercise.  The two drugs, Alcar and GW1516 increased the endurance of ‘couch potato mice” dramatically.  Alcar increased the mice’s endurance by 44% after just four weeks of treatment.  GW1516 increased endurance by 75% but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.

Across the country the sound of overweight couch potatoes clapping their remotes together was positively deafening.  On Wall Street, the price of publicly traded health club chains plummeted as sellers shorted the stocks.  Kidding on both accounts.

This discovery is analogous to eating meals without calories or smoking cigarettes without any negative health consequences. The “no pain, no gain” mantra spoken by thousands of personal trainers nation-wide might thankfully be retired.

There are some serious immediate positive possibilities for these drugs.  Health conditions such as obesity and diabetes which …