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What do you think of when you hear the word soul? What exactly is it? What does it consist of? Why is it important? In this edition of “Making Sense with Rob Case,” we will explore the entity of the soul, study its working components, and consider how these components work in the backdrop of how we think, act, feel, and thrive in the world around us. Where does God fit in with all of this? Find out on this edition of "Making Sense with Rob Case." To access the podcast, click HERE, or click on the above link.

The journal Epilepsy and Behavior published the findings of the accidental discovery. The evidence was found when scientists were studying an epilepsy patient. They used electrodes deep within a patient's brain to try to determine where her seizures were coming from. ... The scientists stimulated an area of the brain called the claustrum, an area of the brain that had never been stimulated. Once stimulated, the woman, who was reading, stopped responding to all visual and audible cues, as if she were a robot that had been shut down. The team was able to recreate the scenario several times to...

As you come to this program, you reside within a certain frame of mind. Your outlook, experience, and analysis of life has, along with what has influenced you over the course of your lifetime, shaped your frame of mind. But what if you are confronted with the concept of God? How do you respond? What constitutes each response, and if you accept him, what can come in applying His word to your life? Find out this and much more as you listen to this edition of “Making Sense with Rob Case.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxudNp9Iz9o

The federal government is hiring what it calls a "Behavioral Insights Team" that will look for ways to subtly influence people's behavior, according to a document describing the program obtained by FoxNews.com. Critics warn there could be unintended consequences to such policies, while supporters say the team could make government and society more efficient.

... Does the mere possibility that a phone call or e-mail will soon arrive drain your brain power? And does distraction matter — do interruptions make us dumber? Quite a bit, according to new research by Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab. There’s a lot of debate among brain researchers about the impact of gadgets on our brains. Most discussion has focused on the deleterious effect of multitasking. Early results show what most of us know implicitly: if you do two things at once, both efforts suffer. In fact, multitasking is a misnomer. In most situations, the person juggling e-mail,...

The Two-Track Mind In the spring of 1988, a woman named Dee Fletcher collapsed into a coma from carbon monoxide poisoning. She awoke in the hospital some time later, having been saved by her partner who arrived home just in time. But when she awoke, she was unable to see.The doctors diagnosed her with cortical blindness, suggesting that her brain’s primary visual center had been damaged. However, over the next few days, Dee started to see some things–flashes of red and green in the flowers beside her bed, of blue and white in the sky outside.Dee’s mother flew in to...

In the libertarian sci-fi classic, "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," Robert A. Heinlein describes a successful revolution of the individualistic, free-market-oriented residents of the Moon against the Earth's tyrannical big government. The ins and outs of agitating and organizing the masses to fight the oppressive Authority feel just as realistic as the finer points of everyday life in the underground Lunar cities of the future. The proposed revolutionary scenario could even serve as a workable model for similar real-life endeavors, if only the renowned futurist author hadn't neglected to factor in the immanent function of any oppressive regime: systemic...

Every now and then a word just catches your ear, and several times in a day it jumps out at you and you’re tempted to say: “There it is again!”Yesterday it was the word “consider”, an ordinary, daily word. Or is it? Why did it strike me so? With my knowledge of Latin, it occurred to me that “consider” has something to do with the stars, for the Latin word sidera means “stars” or “heavenly bodies.” How interesting, I have use the word for the better part of 50 years and that had never crossed my mind. But as sometimes...

I swear to god, for the first time in my life I cannot seem to make an enemy on the internet! As a matter of strategy, this is what Man Alive! seeks: To disintermediate the ruling class. Disintermediation means cutting out the middle-man, and, by teaching you a new way of thinking about human nature and about your own unique self, the book puts you in charge of your own philosophical affairs. You no longer have to turn to so-called "thought leaders" -- most of whom are frauds anyway -- for answers -- which answers are almost always contrary to...

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. by Greg Swann Chapter 12. The love of Splendor is the life divine. We see the world weÂ’re looking for. I see a world full of children. I see the adults around me, of course, and the houses and cars and trees and birds and animals. I love everything in existence, natural and man-made, and I take in everything the world brings to me. But I focus on the children. I love babies when theyÂ’re barely old enough to smile at the world. And I love toddlers, just learning to...

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. by Greg Swann Chapter 11. Indomitable you. If you have been paying attention to the slow-motion train wreck going on among the allegedly capitalist nation-states and their undeniably socialist central banks, you will have heard terms like “crony-capitalism” or “entitlement mentality.” Perhaps the pundits you have read have been honest enough to use a more comprehensive coinage – such as “moochers.” All of these ugly phenomena, and many others, are manifestations of a practice economists call “rent-seeking.” That term is used to mean market or legislative manipulations by which someone...

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. by Greg Swann Chapter 10. A mindful catalog of mindlessness. I told you how you came to be a self, but how did you go about failing so completely, so consistently, to be a defective, bungled and botched not-self? You worked at it, thatÂ’s how. It really is a testament to your fundamental goodness that you have tried so hard, for all of your life, to conform to ideas of moral virtue that no one can live down to fully and yet still manage to remain alive as a human...

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. by Greg Swann Chapter 9. The high cost of mindlessness. When you are not thinking carefully, you are not not-thinking. If you are not asleep and not unconscious, you are always thinking – always sustaining an uninterruptible mental “dialogue” with yourself in Fathertongue. But if you are not thinking carefully – thinking mindfully – then you are thinking carelessly – mindlessly. Most of the academic nonsense I have mocked in this book consists of a scrupulous cataloging of the processes and consequences of human mindlessness – which is misrepresented by...

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. by Greg Swann Chapter 8. The integrity of art. The universe is internally self-consistent. This is what we mean when we say it “makes sense” – the laws of nature are comprehensible to us because they are all consistent with each other, all superficially differentiated manifestations of the law of identity. This is actually a matter of controversy right now in theoretical physics, where the self-consistency of the universe and humanity’s seemingly uncanny adaptation to it are held to be evidence – in the mother of all We-Now-Know-We-Know-Nothing theories –...

Art is demanding, and that's good. But art is petulant and importunate and presumptuous to a fault. Art is that damned nuisance of a snoopy neighbor who keeps knocking, knocking, knocking on your cellar door. Art goes straight for the places you forbid yourself to think about and rummages through your most terrifying secrets like a burglar tearing through your underwear drawer. Good art makes you hate it as you devour it, shun it as you immerse yourself in it. Good art makes you restless and jagged and ragged and inspired. Good art makes you shiver. Great art makes you...

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. by Greg Swann Chapter 7. A calculus of morality on a first-grade number line. Spirit your mind back to your first-grade classroom. Can you see that number line tacked up above the blackboard? In the middle is the number zero – one of the most important inventions in mathematics, incidentally. To the right are the positive integers – 1, 2, 3 – up to 10 or 25 or 100. To the left are the negative integers – and take a moment to salute the incomparable genius of subjunctivity who first...

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. by Greg Swann Chapter 5. The greatest love of all. When the subject of love and sex come up, our friends in the lab coats have a field day. For one thing, gibbons and other critters pair-bond for life, so they’re “just like us.” And for another, when you’re in the thrall of your best-beloved, your brain is all but drowning in pheromones and oxytocin and a mad obsession to rut yourself raw, so you’re no different from a house-cat in heat. Everything they have to say about you omits...

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. by Greg Swann Chapter 4. The greatest invention in the history of humanity. That chapter heading is really just a tease. WhatÂ’s the most important invention ever devised by the mind of man? Fathertongue, of course. All other inventions flow from it. Without it, we are badly-adapted hairless apes, ultimately doomed to an ignominious extinction. With it, human beings danced on the Moon. In the last chapter, I raised the idea of your being stranded on a desert island. ThatÂ’s a hugely unlikely scenario, but itÂ’s interesting to think about...

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. by Greg Swann Chapter 2. The nature of your nature. Everything I have to say about anything starts with carrying the claim back to the object. The essence of philosophical error, deliberate or not, is creative solipsism: “The nature of the thing under discussion is what I need it to be to make my argument work out.” This is useless, of course, since no amount of creative map-making will turn a mountain into a valley. The map is not the territory. If we want to make useful, cogent arguments about...