1. Scientific Theories and Laws
2. The First Decade (1936-1946)
4. The Second Decade (1946-1956)
6. The Third Decade (1956-1966)
8. The Fourth Decade (1966-1976)
10. The Fifth Decade (1976-1986)
12. The Sixth Decade (1986-1996)
14. The Seventh Decade (1996-2006)
15. The Theory of More than Everything
16. The Eighth Decade (2006-2016)
18. The Ninth Decade (2016-2026)
Appendix A Paintings
Appendix B TTOMTE and a Steady State Universe
Appendix C Musical Compositions
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Human-gene codes can contain about three million variations. Hamer's group tested 1,001 people which meant the gene might be hiding somewhere in three billion codes. They had to find some way to limit the search.
When people have what's called a religious or peak experience, the activity in the brain offers a clue. Back in 1962, twenty divinity students took part in a study at Boston University. Just before they went into a chapel for a Good Friday service, they were each given a capsule. Some pills contained nothing special while others contained a drug called psilocybin found in mushrooms. Think LSD. By the way, Timothy Leary was one of the professors involved. Those students getting the drug had dramatic hallucinations. The swirling and colors made them feel a universal oneness, and twenty-five years later, they still remembered what happened to them. However, their level of spirituality did not change from the time before they took the drug up to the current day, although they did become more religiously inclined.
People have used these same mushrooms and other plants for centuries to bring about spiritual experiences. Their effect on the brain is key. Psilocybin imitates serotonin, a mood-changing brain-chemical, and dopamine, another brain-chemical, can bring someone to a happy place. Through a rather complex process, the brain produces these chemicals by itself. A gene or genes capable of helping cells to produce these chemicals has some part in bringing on a religious experience, and the team narrowed the choices down to nine possibilities. The VMAT2 gene was one of these. (The name the researcher gives a gene is hard to decipher.)
Another group of scientists had already done some work on this gene. They made the VMAT2 gene inactive and put it into mice stem-cells.
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