Holy mother of quack science, Neuroquantology. But that withstanding, some of you real scientists should really satisfy their call for reviewers. I mean think how much fun you could have tearing holes in their papers :
We need additional reviewers:
Since in our interdisciplinary Journal we seek for holistic approach to science and particularly in neurobiology and consciousness studies, we strongly encourage authors that submit reviews that aim popularization of the recent advances of Quantum Field Theory (QFT), Relativity, String and Brane Theories, Evolution, Chaotic Dynamics, Nonlinear science, Mathematics, Neuroscience. The editorial board aims to increase the impact factor of the Journal in order NeuroQuantology to be synonym of scientific excellence.
They want scientific excellence? We could certainly give them some scientific, uh, guidance, no?
I wonder if they did that if you could sue them for slander?
Some recent titles:
“Conscious Electromagnetic (CEMI) Field Theory”
“The Process of Thought, Neurological Completion, and the Electro-Magnetic Quantum Frequency Dynamics of the Mind/Brain Relationships”
“Dark Chemistry or Psychic Spin Pixels?”
“On Dark Chemistry: What’s Dark Matter and How Mind Influences Brain Through Proactive Spin”
Very very quacky.
Bad idea 🙂 They will ignore your advice, but list your name on their list of reviewers to lend themselves an air of authority.
Has anything worthwhile come out of this field? What are the shortcomings? Why is it quack science?
Aren’t there always quacks in any field of science? Is it fair to say the entire field is a “quack science?” I’ll have to look into it myself, but do you know of any substantial contributions to the field of neuroscience from this community?
There are, without doubt, quacks in every field of science, and I’d expect that most good journals have published bad papers. However, I’ve seen NeuroQuantology before — it came up back when I was an active Wikipedian, trying to keep quackery out of that project — and if there’s a single good paper in NeuroQuantology, I haven’t seen it. Even the least nonsensical papers read like ideas which Philip Pullman considered for The Subtle Knife or The Amber Spyglass but abandoned when he realized he couldn’t even make them float as science fiction.
I mean, when you look at a title like “On Dark Chemistry: What’s Dark Matter and How Mind Influences Brain Through Proactive Spin” — what can you say but “Dust!”
Those titles are so awesome.
I see Brian Josephson (Nobel prize for discovering the Josephson Junction) is on the Editorial Board. Of course, pretty-much everyone in science (except apparently Josephson’s employers at the University of Cambridge) think he’s a quack, so his presence on the board of this journal doesn’t do anything to dispell the notion that this is very duck-sounding publication.
Hey man, I ain’t got no problem reading all sorts of quackry. You obviously have not been reading this blog for long (or know, for example, that I’m talking about time travel at the March American Physical Society meeting :)) Dude I love reading quack shit. And I read it. And I think why it could or could not be true. And I look for signs that the authors have any small clue as to what they are talking about. Just because you can string a few words together and call it a “theory of consciousness” doesn’t mean you can tell your ass from your face. And yes I’m grumpy when there is an entire journal devoted pretending to be science when it isn’t anything of the kind and money is being spent buying magnetic rocks to cure diseases instead of on medical research to cure those same diseases. Yeah, that makes me grumpy.
Oh, man … where’s your sense of adventure? Or your sense of childlike wonder or even your sense of humour? What did they do to you back in grad school to leave you so jaded and bitter about these things? C’mon, man, lighten up, live a little.
I know what you mean, I mean, I look at Japanese Anime and I think “I could never draw that story because I would become to obsessessed with thinking that monster could never live or that machine could never fly” and so I sit unable to join the fun. Shouldn’t a proper theory of consciousness seek to explain rather than to dismiss other points of view? I read some of those papers, and they are no where near as blatently hocus and quacky as what I was handed during my adventures in supposed mainstream psychology! After all, let us recall the famous conversation of Karl Popper with Adler …
that’s why I love to read whatever Jack Sarfatti takes a mind to write about. there’s a man who ain’t afraid of being wrong and revels in the fuzzy fringes that bring humility to our science. its what I love about the non-pop books of Stephen Hawking, there’s never a fear to go out on a limb that might cost him a set of encyclopedias, never a hesitation to wax sci-fi and have some fun with science and logic. Remember his chapter on the effects of a collision of two universes resulting in an immediate unpredicted and undetectable total anihila–
if it can’t be fun, if you can’t stretch the fabric, we might as well all become jesuit monks.
oh, wait.
sorry. “Quantum Pontiff” … ah … ok. I see now. Yes, of course.
Never mind 🙂
Well, if you didn’t like Neuroquantummysticism, then sit down man, because you are going to LOVE this one, and this is dedicated to everyone who said String Theory has no explanation 😉 which, just for the record, include the folks who’ve crafted this site they say does not explain it (grok that! ha!) — dive into The Tenth Dimension
g’wan … I know you secretly want to 🙂
um … fwiw …
AJoP quackery? I think the saying apropos here is something about boobies, and the wisdom of waiting for them to hatch 😉 or perhaps put far more eloquently …
Well, then there’s no problem, is there? I mean, all you do is fold the dimensions back in time when you get there and hand one of these guys one of your late 21st century papers and they publish it today and they go from being a laughed-at fringe non-journal to being fabulously rich and begat the timeline that invents your reason for being! QED.
I mean, c’mon, that’s not a real journal, is it? It would be different if you couldn’t get published because all the real journals were bumping you out in favour of high-profile money-attracting sensationalist papers of suppositions and mistaken analyses that just happen to have cooler keywords than you did. Then I’d say you have a point, but as for this, hey, you might as well go argue with the milkman about the price of oil.
It’s a test. They are probing your psyche, testing your metal and above all, they are trying to distract you and keep you from doing any real research because you’ll be becoming ever more obsessed with including the right and far more cooler keywords in your research, and that’s just what they want. Stall you out while they roll out their invasion force and they do this with an energy beam from the Moon, man.
think … about … it …
🙂
I was read your comment about NeuroQuantology (NQ) Journal. You are skepdic and we are Skeptic (and ı was read many year Skeptical Inq. magazine).
We think that thare is an explanatory gap neuroscience and classical physics. The aim of the NeuroQuantology journal is distinguishing the science from pseudoscience. We began this adventure with NQ in 2002. I believe that NQ will be developing by time. This new journal has emerged from a change in the Zeitgeist: Quantum Physics and Neuroscience era.
We are not NATURE or SCIENCE journal. But you know FAKE articles from these journal. e.g: Davenas E. et al., Human basophil degranulation triggered by very dilute antiserum agains IgE. Nature 1988;333:816-818.- Carrick F. Changes in brain function after manipulation of the cervical spine. J of Manipulative of Physiological therapeutics 1997;20:529-54 adn others…
The present journal is a non-profit scientific electronic journal without any organisational relations and published quarterly per year. In the last 10 years a remarkable increase of articles and conferences in the area of NeuroQuantology is noticed. However, such kind of articles are not properly gathered in a single journal. Above mentioned gap in this field enabled us to publish such a journal.
We hope that NeuroQuantology will aid in gathering such data in the specific journal. Today NeuroQuantology is the only single journal which deals with the relationship between quantum physics and neuroscience.
If you have, any idea about “there is no any relationship neurobiology and quantum physics”, please write a paper.
We want to publish with pleasure in the our journal.
Associate Editor, NQJ: I didn’t say there wasn’t a realtionship between quantum physics and neuroscience. I said most of the articles would not be regarded as scientific. If you would be happy to recieve an article detailing all of the problems with the papers accepted, I would be happy to think abour writing such a paper.
MrG: Can you really not distinguish between results showing no efficiancy for magnetic braceletts and a controlled application of a magnetic field under very precise conditions?
Carter R, Aspy CB, Mold J. The effectiveness of magnet therapy for treatment of wrist pain attributed to carpal tunnel syndrome. J Fam Pract 2002;51: 38-40.
Collacott EA, Zimmerman JT, White DW, Rindone JP. Bipolar permanent magnets for the treatment of chronic low back pain: a pilot study. JAMA 2000;283: 1322
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/290/11/1474
We need professional and reliable interdisciplinary article(s)about quantum physics and neuroscience. NQ is still an “unknown” for the many professional authors. I agree your opinion but just now our journal NQ is a childhood. I believe that NQ will be grow by time. We are in the boundary between Science and ProtoScience. Just now, I think that NQ is ProtoScience.
Best
Some time ago, I was asked by Sultan Tarlaci to contribute to he nascent journal Neuroquantology with a (technical) paper on quantum time perception (Vol 2, No 4, 2004). I should say that the merit of the journal is to offer a unique tribune at the interface of many fields from quantum physics and biology to neuro-psychology, medicine and philosophy. No doubt that the scientific soundness of most papers increases on diverse, challenging and holistic topics such as quantum consciousness, biophotons, synaptic quantum tunnelling and quantum monades, to mention a few.
You guys are guilty of a kind of higher-order buffoonery endemic to academia.
Most of what’s published in most scientific journals is crap: Foregone conclusions from dubious premises, promulgated in execrable prose — a monstrous farce, worthy of Swift, which I mean to write someday, if I can find the time.
In a (most likely) misguided attempt at illuminating the awful murk inside your heads, I offer the following remarks from a handful of worthies who seem to have owned a clue:
[Let] us now turn to the assumption opposite to the “first alternative†considered so far: that the laws of physics will have to be modified drastically if they are to account for the phenomena of life. Actually, I believe that this second assumption is the correct one.
Can arguments be adduced to show the need for modification? There seem to be two such arguments. The first is that, if one entity is influenced by another entity, in all known cases the latter one is also influenced by the former. The most striking and originally the least expected example for this is the influence of light on matter, most obviously in the form of light pressure. That matter influences light is an obvious fact—if it were not so, we could not see objects. The influence of light on matter is, however, a more subtle effect and is virtually unobservable under the conditions which surround us […] Since matter clearly influences the content of our consciousness, it is natural to assume that the opposite influence also exists, thus demanding the modification of the presently accepted laws of nature which disregard this influence. (Wigner)
Among the many biological objects a particularly interesting one is the brain. For any theory to be able to claim itself as a brain theory, it should be able to explain the origin of such fascinating properties as the mechanism for creation and recollection of memories and consciousness.
For many years it was believed that brain function is controlled solely by the classical neuron system which provides the pathway for neural impulses. This is frequently called the neuron doctrine. The most essential one among many facts is the nonlocality of memory function discovered by Pribram […]
There have been many models based on quantum theories, but many of them are rather philosophically oriented. The article by Burns […] provides a detailed list of papers on the subject of consciousness, including quantum models. The incorrect perception that the quantum system has only microscopic manifestations considerably confused this subject. As we have seen in preceding sections, manifestation of ordered states is of quantum origin. When we recall that almost all of the macroscopic ordered states are the result of quantum field theory, it seems natural to assume that macroscopic ordered states in biological systems are also created by a similar mechanism. (Umezawa)
[So] few and far between are the occasions for forming notions whose specializations make up a continuous manifold, that the only simple notions whose specializations form a multiply extended manifold are the positions of perceived objects and colors. (Riemann)
The characteristic of an n-dimensional manifold is that each of the elements composing it (in our examples, single points, conditions of a gas, colors, tones) may be specified by the giving of n quantities, the “co-ordinates,” which are continuous functions within the manifold. (Weyl)
A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red must have some color; it is, so to speak, surrounded by color-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on. (Wittgenstein)
There is nothing else except these fields: the whole of the material universe is built of them. (Dyson)
What we see depends on light entering the eye. Furthermore we do not even perceive what enters the eye. The things transmitted are waves or—as Newton thought—minute particles, and the things seen are colors. Locke met this difficulty by a theory of primary and secondary qualities. Namely, there are some attributes of the matter which we do perceive. These are the primary qualities, and there are other things which we perceive, such as colors, which are not attributes of matter, but are perceived by us as if they were such attributes. These are the secondary qualities of matter.
Why should we perceive secondary qualities? It seems an unfortunate arrangement that we should perceive a lot of things that are not there. Yet this is what the theory of secondary qualities in fact comes to. There is now reigning in philosophy and in science an apathetic acquiescence in the conclusion that no coherent account can be given of nature as it is disclosed to us in sense-awareness, without dragging in its relation to mind. (Whitehead)
We are accustomed to regarding as real those sense perceptions which are common to different individuals, and which therefore are, in a measure, impersonal. The natural sciences, and in particular, the most fundamental of them, physics, deal with such sense perception. (Einstein)
Modeling the brain by quantum Molecular Dynamics does not solve this puzzle.
Molecular Dynamics may be modeled on supercomputers doing discrete digital approximations to Quantum Mechnics, but Nature integrates in real time in another way entirely. That is what prompted Feynman to be the great-grandfather of Quantum Computing. Use quantum computers to computer quantum mechanics, he said.
Whether or not Penrose is right (he’s obviously a far better
Mathematical Physicist than I) he at least gives a novel spin to the question: WHERE does thought take place? I think that it does use molecular dynamics, just not in the conventional model. Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson thinks that something spooky and nonlocal is going on, which allows for genuine non-inverse-square-law telepathy. (he’s also obviously a far better Mathematical Physicist than I).
The first Nobelist I know who denied that thought took place in the brain at all, in an idiosyncratic take on mind-body duality, Sir John Carew Eccles, Australian physiologist [born 27 Jan 1903, Melbourne, Australia]. His analogy was that the brain is an extremely sensitive
radio receiver, picking up signals from a non-material mind/soul.
According to Eccles, we have a nonmaterial mind or self which acts upon, and is influenced by, our material brains; there is a mental world in addition to the physical world, and the two interact. Eccles denies that the mind is a type of nonphysical substance (as it is in Cartesian dualism), and says that it merely belongs to a different world. (How the Self Controls Its Brain, p. 38.)
http://www.neuroquantology.com/repository/
arNQ Eprint is the NeuroQuantology’s digital repository. Material included in the repository should be of a research or scholarly nature. This includes digital copies of journal articles, book section, monograph, conference or workshop item, thesis, video, audio, teaching resource.
I suggest this paper for background
Why We Need Quantum Physics for Cognitive Neuroscience
http://www.neuroquantology.com/journal/index.php/nq/article/view/271
And also
A Historical View of the Relation Between Quantum Mechanics and the Brain: A NeuroQuantologic Perspective
http://www.neuroquantology.com/journal/index.php/nq/article/view/278