Response to Jerry Coyne's Misrepresentation of My Position on HIV/AIDS

Jerry Coyne has set himself up repeatedly to use smear tactics in order to portray me as irrational. It’s unfortunate that he didn’t go to medical school, but I did. Of course the HIV virus causes AIDS.

 

Coyne had to dig up a conversation from 1990 and place it in the worst possible light even to find a hint that I am an AIDS denier. Since I’ve written dozens of books, hundreds of online articles, ten peer-reviewed scientific articles, and a daily stream of tweets, wouldn’t I have mentioned AIDS denial at least once if that’s what I believed? Most deniers shout it from the rooftop.

 

That wasn’t the point I was making in the conversation with Tony Robbins. I chose the phrase “precipitating agent” quite deliberately.

 

Exposure to HIV isn’t a guarantee of acquiring it, unlike Ebola, for example, where contact of even the slightest kind with fluids from someone with Ebola can lead to infection. HIV is far more difficult to transmit. Who, then, is most liable to actually be infected? There are certain conditions, such as an open wound, even a tiny one at the gum line, where access to the bloodstream allows the virus to enter. So poor personal hygiene, such as not brushing your teeth and allowing your gums to swell and bleed, is most certainly a risk. That’s one thing I was touching upon.

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Remember Me – Support Cure Alzheimer's Fund Research

“The Voice” and the Neuroscientist Team Up to Fight Alzheimer’s.  After meeting in a television studio this unlikely pair has teamed up with Cure Alzheimer’s Fund for a worthy cause: Campaign Remember Me.  Proceeds from sales of the song and direct donations will support innovative research into the causes of the disease and the development of effective therapies to stop it. Because Cure Alzheimer’s Fund’s Board of Directors funds all the organization’s expense, every penny of every contribution goes directly to research.

 

[youtube]http://youtu.be/wv1bf7S2XV0[/youtube]

Do Your Emotions Help You or Hold You Back?

 

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Recently, a close friend of mine made the remark that our emotions for the most part are basic, primal, immature, and unevolved. Ever since then, I have been ruminating on the validity of this statement. If our emotions are basically primitive, then how they be our allies, especially on the path to personal growth? Might emotions be so backward that they are enemies of growth instead? Like most generalities, this one about the primitive nature of emotions seems to be equally true and untrue — and therefore, possibly a half truth. In nature’s scheme, nothing is wasted. The universe is a big jigsaw puzzle where everything seems to fit.

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Powers of Mind: In Praise of Subtle Actions

By Deepak Chopra

 

At a time when the mass of headlines seem to be about the brain, artificial intelligence, robotics, and smarter computers, not enough is said about the mind. When reduced to a mechanism, the mind somehow is thought to turn into the brain, with no difference between them. It’s true that the brain seems to exhibit physical changes that correlate with every activity of the mind, and one day the word “seems” may no longer be necessary. The brain as mirror of the mind may be completely understood and mapped out.

 

It should be underlined, however, that neuroscience is far from understanding the mind’s subtlety, and the most sophisticated brain scans take broad swipes at mental processes–there is no fine detail. The same areas of the brain devoted to language will light up on an fMRI whether Shakespeare is writing a sonnet or a very bad poet is writing doggerel. There is no area of the brain that can remotely be detected in such detail that a researcher reading the scan can say, “Oh, that’s Mozart.” In fact, if you present our brain scan to a neuroscientist, he won’t be able to identify who you are, either. The broad strokes of current brain research yield interesting and medically valuable information, but they don’t come close to explaining the activity I’d call “subtle action.”

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