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How Prosthetics Will Change Our Lives In The Near & Distant Future

Third eye or protesthetic eye - Paul Wagner

Prosthetics

Prosthetics are becoming quite remarkable. A Shutterstock Licensed Image.

When it comes to innovation, medicine is enjoying an explosive renaissance. Universities and venture capital firms are financing new pathways to longer-term wellness. From anti-aging drugs on the verge of FDA approval to a blood test for breast cancer to the CRISPR gene-editing toolthat could soon eradicate malaria and HIV, the future of the human lifespan looks bright and beautiful.

Losing a limb is one of the most devastating experiences life offers. Without prosthetics, not only are amputees physically limited for the remainder of their lives, they tend to feel separate, broken, or ashamed. Prosthetics allows the wearer to regain utility, dignity, and dexterity. In some cases, because of the emerging prosthetics, the patient experiences a complete rebirth in strength, ability, spirit, and attitude.

One of the exciting trends in prosthetics is myoelectric arms that interpret brain signals through the remaining muscles in the amputated limb. Neuroprosthetics is a discipline at the intersection of neuroscience, biomedical engineering, and prostheses. It’s advancing at such a rapid rate that some patients can already control individual fingers while receiving clear, tactile feedback.

Users of these types of sleeves have reported sensory experiences telling them whether an object was hard or soft. Some have been able to control their robotic arts with their minds while regaining the sense of touch. Neurosurgeons perform surgical procedures that implant the devices.

Many more advances like these are expected soon, which will eventually give birth to products and services that even able-bodied people will desire. Someday soon, everyone will be financing their own brain, spine, and limb augmentations. While this idea is exciting, it’s potentially frightening!

Meanwhile, UChicago, Pitt, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) are collaborating on brain-computer interfaces (BCI) for paralyzed patients. The BCI is a variety of scenarios and used to replace missing biological functionality. The UChicago, PITT, and UPMC team recently received $7 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Check out these recent developments:

    • Doctors wired a prosthetic hand into a woman’s nerves giving her complete control using her brain and nervous system
    • Amputees can now have reduced phantom limb pain due to rerouting of nerves
    • Scientists are developing neural networks connected to human brains, which will make way for a variety of advanced prosthetics.
    • Several venture-backed biotech companies are developing synthetic skin infused with a superhuman sense of touch
    • Thought-controlled prosthetics are gaining ground, giving rise to a new category of orthopedic medicine

For prosthetics, here are the numbers driving the innovation:

  • The orthopedic category that accounts for the largest market share is lower extremities, which accounts for 5% of the orthopedic prosthetic market.
  • The primary cause of 22% of all lower extremity amputation surgeries is road accidents.
  • The orthopedic prosthetic market is multiplying in the Americas. Last year it saw a growth of nearly 5%. This incremental growth marker is a crucial inspiration for venture capital and grant funding for prosthetic R&D, which is now heavily influenced by the sciences that involve brains, spines, and nerves. It’s now a fact that limbs, spines, brains, and nerves comprise a powerful, interdependent ecosystem.

Prosthetics Cooler Than The Real Thing

Brilliant minds across the globe are working hard to innovate in this precious space, including 3D artists, engineers, scientists, and inventors, in a myriad of categories.

Here are a few examples of the phenomenal advancements in “cool prosthetics:”

  • Dean Kamen, who worked on the famous Segway, is a prolific inventor who also created the prosthetic arm known as LUKE (Life Under Kinetic Evolution). This unique device allows the user to manipulate the arm by contracting their other muscles and through natural movements.
  • YouBionic’s Double Hand prosthesis can give you up to 4 hands, all on one limb! These 3D-printed hands are powered by Arduino, which allows the patient to control each robotic hand separately.
  • James Young invented a prosthetic arm that includes a detachable drone, which he controls through parts of his arm that touches his skin. This unique prosthetic also consists of a flashlight, laser light, watch, and a USB port for charging his devices.
  • Open Bionics develops limbs that appear to be explicitly built for superheroes. Their artistry includes similarities to the brands Iron Man, Frozen, and Star Wars. These limbs are genuinely inspirational.
  • The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been focused on making prosthetics and other wearables feel more natural, including mimicking the sense of touch. Through electrode arrays built onto the sensory and motor cortexes, a recipient can experience the sensations almost akin to a human touching another human.
  • Indian surgical oncologist Vishal Rao has been hard at work, building a prosthetic voice box for throat surgery patients so that they can regain the ability of speech. His invention costs no more than $1 and includes no electronic parts. His innovation uses basic physics principles to allow someone’s voice to be audible. As a result of passing air from the lungs through the esophagus, the slightly obstructive device creates sounds akin to human speech. It’s quite remarkable.

Wonderful, Life-changing, And Inspiring Improvements For Amputees

All of this remarkable effort will give amputees and paralyzed individuals a variety of new benefits, including:

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  • More dexterity
  • Precision movement
  • Heightened sensory experiences
  • Improved neuron activity
  • Naturalistic nervous system responses and experiences
  • Controlling and manipulating objects in space
  • Sculpted movements
  • Natural and precise flow
  • Greater brain-control of the prosthetics, and eventually other ancillary devices

Augmenting Human Physical Capability

While all of these advances appear to be of benefit to amputees and paralyzed individuals, every advance in Neuroprosthetics will also benefit (and become available) to the rest of humankind.

Your brain-computer interface (BCI) will help you search through private internets, access specific data, and memorize information at a rapid rate. Your prosthetics will make you a better candidate for specific, it not all jobs. Your senses of smell, touch, and sight could make you incredibly valuable to the military and specific categories of commerce. Your intuition might also be enhanced, making you immeasurably valuable to a long list of organizations, causes, and pursuits, most notably your family.

As a result of all the advances in prosthetics and related sciences, human augmentation will naturally become the rage. You’ll be able to buy prosthetics and ancillary modules that will help you lift 100x your weight, hover and travel 20 feet above the floor, and see targets a mile away. Your neuro-hearing aid will replace your Fitbit and Alexa, enhance your brain activity and emotional states, and translate 21 languages in a single moment. All of these products (and many more) are in the final stages of development.

The physical enhancements found on Luke Skywalker, Iron Man,

and The Bionic Man/Woman are being built right now.

One day soon, many human beings will be able

to pick up a menu and choose from a list

of prosthetics, augmentations, and enhancements.

Much of what we have labeled as science fiction is fast becoming reality.

Ray Kurzweil speaks of the tech singularity, when our technological advances become uncontrollable, resulting in unfathomable shifts in civilization and the human condition. Kurzweil claims that the 3rd world war will not involve nation-states, rather, it will occur when those who object to unlimited human enhancements rage against those who demand them. His vision, however outrageous, speaks to a moral dilemma that future generations will surely face.

In the meantime, we can all be grateful that amputees finally have pathways to improve and potentially regain the majority of their mobility, sensitivity, strength, and dignity. Keep an eye out for emerging science and tech.

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How to Know if You’re an Empath: The 18 Signs of Being a Highly Sensitive Superhero

Heart wearing cape or empath superhero - Paul Wagner

an empath

If you’re an Empath, you have super-powers. A Shutterstock Licensed Image.

We are all made of sound and light, groupings of electromagnetic fields and frequencies, culminating in unique vibrations that repel and attract other vibrations. The realities that we embody are the magnets for all realities to come.

As you embrace your intuitive nature and highly sensitive self, you will eventually come to learn that other people’s feelings, actions, responses, and feedback are their dreams, not yours. These things are of no consequence to you, unless you afford them power.

In other words, while others emanate, vibrate, and irritate themselves, look deeper within and grow the light that most reflects your happiness.

You will always become the vibration that you feed.

 

These are the 18 Signs and Attributes of an Empath:

  1. You are acutely aware of what other people are feeling (emotions, moods, and attitudes) the majority of the time, whether in-person, remote, or via text messages.

  2. Your natural inclination is to carry the feelings and burdens of others, often being their therapist, healer, or “best friend.”

  3. When something is potentially questionable, wrong, or dangerous to yourself or others, you have an undeniable feeling in your heart, mind, or gut.

  4. You regularly absorb the energy, feelings, and attitudes of other people or groups of people. This can be debilitating, for a period of time.

  5. Loud, aggressive, and negative people overwhelm you, push you into an emotional corner, and deplete your positivity, receptiveness, and life force.

  6. Emotional confrontations with closed-minded people can feel momentarily traumatizing or oppressive.

  7. The crowds found in stores, and at parties and events, can feel so overwhelming to you, that you’d rather stay home or remain in the car. You might even hide in the bathroom.

  8. When other people in your circle are in pain, they confess their deepest secrets to you and seek your counsel. This doesn’t surprise you at all. You naturally oblige.

  9. Strangers might see something in your eyes or feel the emanations from your heart, which can cause them to want to be near you, hug you, share their secrets, or ask for your advice. They might tell you that they love you.
    book-live-intuitive-reading-with-paul-wagner

  10. No matter the emotional resonance of a room, whether filled with people or not, you will feel the energy of that room, and be able to describe it with the utmost clarity.

  11. Rain, snow, clouds, and shadowy weather can be helpful to you because it often keeps others indoors and makes everyone more self-reflective. The lessened energy buzzing around you helps you feel more at peace. Conversely, sunny days can have either a positive or negative effect on you, depending upon your personal boundaries and the levels of energy being emitted by others.

  12. You instinctively know when others are being truthful or dishonest, and transparent or protective. This is true whether your meeting is in-person, remote, and via text messages.

  13. When a person is speaking to you, you pay less attention to the words and more attention to the feelings beneath the surface. You will often become irritated when the words do not match the feelings.

  14. You can sense, perceive, or feel the potential of a forthcoming event, sometimes long before it happens, including when others are near to passing beyond this life.

  15. You accumulate emotions like others accumulate savings in their bank accounts. Regular emotional clearings are required.

  16. You are intuitively drawn to heart-centered movies because they inspire you to feel deeply, thereby helping you clear trapped emotions.

  17. When you do not clear your emotions or honor yourself, you are prone to feeling angry and you might wrongly assume the position of the victim. You are not a victim.

  18. When you take care of yourself and continually refuse the victim mindset, your life has a beautiful flow to it, and you feel like an emotional Superhero.

Click here, if you’re ready to take The Empath Oath.

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We Can Seek Heaven Without Demanding Others Join Us

Seek heaven

Heaven doesn’t readily welcome racists, bigots, and fundamentalists. They first get a muzzle. A Shutterstock Licensed Image.

As a little boy, I was fascinated with Jesus. I imagined walking with Him everywhere I went. I never related to how he was presented in churches, but I always felt Him to be my teacher and friend. I would talk to him throughout every day.

I didn’t see Jesus as the judgemental white supremacist that many Christians make him out to be today. I saw Jesus as a spirit who could embody any physical form. To me, Jesus was everywhere and everything. He was the flowers, sky, refrigerator, postman, and the quiet whisper of love and light in the back of my mind.

I saw Jesus as unconditional Love.

Given how Christianity is often marketed, I was surprised to learn that Jesus never called himself a Christian. It’s now my belief that “Christian” is the last thing He’ll be if he ever comes back, in whatever form. Jesus was a spiritual master. He was beyond any tidy box we might imagine him to occupy.

As a card-carrying member of the forward-thinking, spiritually-inclined, I tend to reduce religious labels and dogma down to suggestions, and spend my time focusing on divine attributes.

Judgmental born-againers (in any religion) seem to be unhappy people trying to enroll others in their miseries. They push a spiritual master’s biography rather than the tenets of their teachings.

I’m motivated by divine transmissions and holy attributes, not the crafted, edited biographies, written hundreds of years after a master’s death.

I remember when I was a born-again Catholic, then a born-again Christian, then a born-again New-Ager, then a born-again Native American shaman, then a born-again Buddhist. And when I was a Sikh, I was fervently born-again, and frankly, a dick. It was all love-focused, but with a stinky layer of ego.

In retrospect, I’m healthily ashamed of how I defended my invisible friends along the way, but this powerful shame is now my master. In pursuit of a purer clarity, I’ve become so lovingly hard on myself that I thoroughly enjoy it.

From what I can tell, rather than enrolling others, the key to spiritual life is accepting everything. If my goal is to help others along their spiritual paths, it must include accepting each person for who they are in this moment.

In Jungian psychology, there’s the concept of matching and leading. The idea is to meet someone where they are at so that you can gently guide them to a deeper understanding and clarity.

Alignment with others invites openness and doorways to transformation. If we can’t see ourselves in another person, we’re missing the point. Truth be told, there is no “other.”

The moment we call ourselves Christians, Sikhs, Jews, Pagans, Hindus, Buddhists, or any other “ist,” it’s violent.

All religions have been over-marketed and under-researched by mostly uneducated people. Without all the noise and logos, we stand a much better chance of embodying love and its kin. Removing labels, name tags, prejudices, and allegiances, we see ourselves and the divine more clearly.

Our needs to identify as Christian, Hindu, Pagan, Buddhist, Sikh, Jewish, heck even Republican or Democrat, and other group-identifiers born from cultures (not spirit), is about ego, nothing more.

Your self-identity has nothing to do with any of these labels. Ask yourself, “Do I really need to identify with a word, organization, or movement? Or is it more transformative, more inclusive, and less aggressive to identify with an attribute?”

Can we live without the words Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist, Jew, etc, and still be loving, spiritual, powerful, divine, and proactive human beings?

Yes, we can.

Without labels, can we still embody and share the teachings of Muhammad, Buddha, Moses, Amma, Krishna, Joshua (Jesus), and others? 

Yes!

If I fully understand that living and past spiritual masters and avatars had no egos, then why do I care about labels or attributing my experience to them or their movements?

Why can’t I just enjoy my culture’s rituals without advertising them and without trying to enroll others? Why can’t I just focus on becoming a better person and serving my fellow living beings?

If a religion needs followers or funding or anything, wouldn’t the original master of the religion call these things into being through divine manifestation? That would make sense, right?

The original, big-religion spiritual masters didn’t focus on the organizations they spearheaded. They focused on embodying the universes within them and sharing love with others. As disciples, we are called to do the same.

In order to feel whole, we can identify with whatever lexicon or religion we choose. It’s our right and it can be enjoyable.

profoundly-inspirational-inuitive-reading-with-paul-wagner

But the moment we promote our lexicon and religions to others, and the moment we preach from a religion’s point of view, we disconnect from our spirits and the truth. We become judgmental and nothing short of violent.

Let’s stop calling ourselves Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan, and the others. It’s all the same story changed over time to support myths, political movements, and temporary organizational concepts. Also, the original religious manuscripts are largely inconsistent in their interpretations and translations. These narratives distract, control, and oppress, more than they liberate. Religious books and labels are secondary to compassion.

We are servants of the divine. Let’s embody love and help others to do the same.

Please stop saying these phrases, too: “We are all Jews” and “We are all Christians.” These are passive-aggressive, judgmental ways of saying, “Our club is the best, our labels are the best, and today we consider you an honorary member of our exclusive tribe.”

Phrases like these are insidious ways of telling someone that they are missing something. They’re not.

The more we hide under the egoistic shields of religious labels, the less effective we’ll be. Live joyfully within the bounds of your religion. Love your religion. But don’t pretend that it’s special. It’s not. It’s a story, akin to hundreds of stories that have been birthed over thousands and thousands of years.

Leave the books at home. Stop talking about your invisible friend as if he or she is the only one. Encourage positive, loving attributes in yourself and others. There is how real change occurs.

Start with this:

“I may be a cultural Christian, Sikh, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist or New-Ager, but I am most importantly a loving, whole, listener. I am joyful, accepting, and appreciative. I love all life and I seek to bring light to the world. I embody positivity, and I pray that all living beings are protected from violence and pain. I humbly seek to embody the best attributes of all the masters throughout all time. May I be of service to all living beings in this life and all the lives that follow.”

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