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What are the metabolic costs of tulpa cognition?


Orz

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Take someone who believes their tulpa is a somehow independent of them rather than part of their mind, and have them clear their mind and rest and relax, while their tulpa(s) do something extremely mentally demanding in the background, like, say, I don't know, calculus or something like that. Does the host get mentally tired after spending a while "relaxing" like this? If so, that is an indication that their tulpas cannot think independent of the host. Or does the host not get tired, yet the tulpas come up with some meaningful result from their mental activity, like, say, a fully calculated high prime number that they were not aware of before, or whatever? If so, that is an indication that the tulpa CAN operate independent of the host.

Given that you replicate the experiment often enough to eliminate fluctuations in one's mental strength (everyone can have an extraordinary good or bad day), and compare the results to those of the host doing the same job while the tulpa relaxes, the idea sounds good.

While I find it hard to believe in any 'host-independence' which would violate fundamental laws of physics, it might indicate that such people are more efficient in using their brain's capabilities.

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  • 1 month later...

Orz and Yakumo

 

 

The solution to your question was almost right under your noses. You gentlemen mentioned calorimeters EEGs and MRIs, but you failed to mention PETs (Positron Emission Tomography).

 

PET scans depict brain activity by showing each brain area's consumption of its chemical fuel; glucose. Active neurons are glucose hogs. A person is administered a form of temporarily radioactive glucose, and the PET scan locates and measures the radioactivity, thereby detecting where the "food for thought" goes.

 

If an experienced tulpa creator subjected themselves to this possibly hazardous scan "For Science!" then invaluable information about tulpas could be obtained from the results.

"Sanity is the playground of the unimaginative."

 

Yumi + Cinema

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PET surely is an excellent method to evaluate brain metabolism.

I'm no expert when it comes to these methods but it should be possible to indirectly measure glucose uptake with fMRI as well, without the exposure to ionizing radiation.

 

I guess the risk from radiation in PET is comparatively small, but existent.

The fluorodeoxyglucose commonly used contains 18F which undergoes ß+ decay to 18O. Then there's the secondary gamma radiation from the positron-electron annihilation. I've looked it up and the exposure from an FDG-PET scan should be about 7 mSv. Depending on where you live this is about three times the dose you annually receive from natural background radiation. Surely not the healthiest way to spend your free time but quite unlikely to give you cancer unless you regularly do this as a hobby.

 

Still I highly doubt we'll ever see a tulpa-related study using PET.

The main obstacle is the ethical issue, exposing humans to significant radiation doses without clinical indication is hard to justify nowadays. You'd be having a pretty hard time finding an institution performing such a study on a rather esoteric subject like tulpas.

The second obstacle is of course the cost. I don't know what PET costs in the US but here in Germany it's above 1.000€ per scan, depending on the size of the area and the method used.

 

But that's a common problem with all hi-tech methods. Getting good statistics requires a decent number of replicates which are extraordinary expensive. IMO that's a quite dangerous development. I've been working with several scientific imaging methods which readily give you fancy colorful pics if you can afford them. But the power of the statistics behind those results is often poor because time is money. So you get fewer pics with better statistics or more with worse, but hardly enough in any case. Especially in complex scenarios (and humans are pretty complex) this can produce misleading results as you never can be sure that your few measurements allow generalizations of any sort. Even worse, often the scientists involved, as good as they may be in their discipline, lack the qualification to adequately interpret the huge amount of data produced when it comes to statistics. In fact using inadequate methods when performing statistical analysis or misinterpreting the results is one of the most common mistakes we see in studies nowadays.

 

See here for such problems concerning fMRI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_imaging#Criticism

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  • 3 months later...

Sorry to necropost, I have something to add.

 

I have had an MRI and my tulpa processes are heavily theta and alpha, it is not so much processing as it is observation and some recollection, but that is minimal. (As measured in the frontal lobes and junctions)

An observation of beta would have been the opposite.

 

Ergo, tulpa processes for me are more relaxing and in turn, burn less energy. It has a positive effect on my body as well, overall the process is beneficial to my self and metabolic processes.

 

Of course, the EEG does not show blood flow to the particular regions of the brain, this is a conclusion derived from all available information and experience with my mind and body.

Delete this account - I will not return.

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There's something I have to add as well.

 

As in your other post I don't know what to make of this. At least I can't make sense of some of your statements.

MRI does not give you information about brain waves, that's done by EEG, MEG

 

Please tell us why and how the MRI was performed, how much it cost and who paid for it.

What exactly did you / your tulpa do during the scan?

What were the results and how were they interpreted?

 

Regarding EEG I would not jump to any conclusions about overall metabolic costs from such results as it does not represent all neuron types equally and some signals tend to cancel each other out. Therefore EEG should not be used to make claims about global brain activity.

Super Girls don't cry

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I typoed. I have had an MRI and EEG.

 

As for the rest of the information you are not getting it. It was done medically by a major hospital and clinic.

Delete this account - I will not return.

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