Wikipedia

Quantum Theory Proves Consciousness Moves To Another Universe After Death

Posted by

0


A book titled “Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the Nature of the Universe” has stirred up the Internet, because it contained a notion that life does not end when the body dies, and it can last forever. The author of this publication, scientist Dr. Robert Lanza who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times, has no doubts that this is possible.

1. BEYOND TIME AND SPACE

Lanza is an expert in regenerative medicine and scientific director of Advanced Cell Technology Company. Before he has been known for his extensive research which dealt with stem cells, he was also famous for several successful experiments on cloning endangered animal species.

But not so long ago, the scientist became involved with physics, quantum mechanics and astrophysics. This explosive mixture has given birth to the new theory of biocentrism, which the professor has been preaching ever since. Biocentrism teaches that life and consciousness are fundamental to the universe. It is consciousness that creates the material universe, not the other way around.

Lanza points to the structure of the universe itself, and that the laws, forces, and constants of the universe appear to be fine-tuned for life, implying intelligence existed prior to matter. He also claims that space and time are not objects or things, but rather tools of our animal understanding. Lanza says that we carry space and time around with us “like turtles with shells.” meaning that when the shell comes off (space and time), we still exist.

The theory implies that death of consciousness simply does not exist. It only exists as a thought because people identify themselves with their body. They believe that the body is going to perish, sooner or later, thinking their consciousness will disappear too. If the body generates consciousness, then consciousness dies when the body dies. But if the body receives consciousness in the same way that a cable box receives satellite signals, then of course consciousness does not end at the death of the physical vehicle. In fact, consciousness exists outside of constraints of time and space. It is able to be anywhere: in the human body and outside of it. In other words, it is non-local in the same sense that quantum objects are non-local.

Lanza also believes that multiple universes can exist simultaneously. In one universe, the body can be dead. And in another it continues to exist, absorbing consciousness which migrated into this universe. This means that a dead person while traveling through the same tunnel ends up not in hell or in heaven, but in a similar world he or she once inhabited, but this time alive. And so on, infinitely. It’s almost like a cosmic Russian doll afterlife effect.

2. MULTIPLE WORLDS

This hope-instilling, but extremely controversial theory by Lanza has many unwitting supporters, not just mere mortals who want to live forever, but also some well-known scientists. These are the physicists and astrophysicists who tend to agree with existence of parallel worlds and who suggest the possibility of multiple universes. Multiverse (multi-universe) is a so-called scientific concept, which they defend. They believe that no physical laws exist which would prohibit the existence of parallel worlds.

The first one was a science fiction writer H.G. Wells who proclaimed in 1895 in his story “The Door in the Wall”. And after 62 years, this idea was developed by Dr. Hugh Everett in his graduate thesis at the Princeton University. It basically posits that at any given moment the universe divides into countless similar instances. And the next moment, these “newborn” universes split in a similar fashion. In some of these worlds you may be present: reading this article in one universe, or watching TV in another.

The triggering factor for these multiplyingworlds is our actions, explained Everett. If we make some choices, instantly one universe splits into two with different versions of outcomes.

In the 1980s, Andrei Linde, scientist from the Lebedev’s Institute of physics, developed the theory of multiple universes. He is now a professor at Stanford University. Linde explained: Space consists of many inflating spheres, which give rise to similar spheres, and those, in turn, produce spheres in even greater numbers, and so on to infinity. In the universe, they are spaced apart. They are not aware of each other’s existence. But they represent parts of the same physical universe.

The fact that our universe is not alone is supported by data received from the Planck space telescope. Using the data, scientists have created the most accurate map of the microwave background, the so-called cosmic relic background radiation, which has remained since the inception of our universe. They also found that the universe has a lot of dark recesses represented by some holes and extensive gaps.

Theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton from the North Carolina University with her colleagues argue: the anomalies of the microwave background exist due to the fact that our universe is influenced by other universes existing nearby. And holes and gaps are a direct result of attacks on us by neighboring universes.

3. SOUL

So, there is abundance of places or other universes where our soul could migrate after death, according to the theory of neo-biocentrism. But does the soul exist? Is there any scientific theory of consciousness that could accommodate such a claim? According to Dr. Stuart Hameroff, a near-death experience happens when the quantum information that inhabits the nervous system leaves the body and dissipates into the universe. Contrary to materialistic accounts of consciousness, Dr. Hameroff offers an alternative explanation of consciousness that can perhaps appeal to both the rational scientific mind and personal intuitions.

See also: Russian Scientist Photographs Soul Leaving Body And Quantifies Chakras. You Must See This!

Consciousness resides, according to Stuart and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose, in the microtubules of the brain cells, which are the primary sites of quantum processing. Upon death, this information is released from your body, meaning that your consciousness goes with it. They have argued that our experience of consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in these microtubules, a theory which they dubbed orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR).

Consciousness, or at least proto-consciousness is theorized by them to be a fundamental property of the universe, present even at the first moment of the universe during the Big Bang. “In one such scheme proto-conscious experience is a basic property of physical reality accessible to a quantum process associated with brain activity.”

Our souls are in fact constructed from the very fabric of the universe – and may have existed since the beginning of time. Our brains are just receivers and amplifiers for the proto-consciousness that is intrinsic to the fabric of space-time. So is there really a part of your consciousness that is non-material and will live on after the death of your physical body?

Dr Hameroff told the Science Channel’s Through the Wormhole documentary: “Let’s say the heart stops beating, the blood stops flowing, the microtubules lose their quantum state. The quantum information within the microtubules is not destroyed, it can’t be destroyed, it just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large”. Robert Lanza would add here that not only does it exist in the universe, it exists perhaps in another universe. If the patient is resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules and the patient says “I had a near death experience”

He adds: “If they’re not revived, and the patient dies, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”

This account of quantum consciousness explains things like near-death experiences, astral projection, out of body experiences, and even reincarnation without needing to appeal to religious ideology. The energy of your consciousness potentially gets recycled back into a different body at some point, and in the mean time it exists outside of the physical body on some other level of reality, and possibly in another universe.

ROBERT LANZA ON BIOCENTRISM:

Is Wikipedia Covering Up The True Origin of AIDS?

Posted by

0


Wikipedia's Strange Certainty about Edward Hooper, Brian Martin, and the OPV/AIDS Hypothesis

Originally titled, “Wikipedia’s Strange Certainty about Edward Hooper, Brian Martin, and the OPV/AIDS Hypothesis”

On controversial issues Wikipedia can only be expected to lag behind rather than lead public discussion.  On issues like the origin of Aids debate, Wikipedia can only be expected to reflect those institutional interests.  Any headway against those interests would have to be gained elsewhere.

 

Author contact: <StrangeCertainty2015@gmail.com>

 

“To me, the line in the sand that divides science from what’s not science is—the way I think about it is, what makes me a scientist is—that I would much rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question.”

–Max Tegmark, Professor, Department of Physics, MIT (expanding a quote from Richard Feynman).

 

“If you thought that science was certain – well, that is just an error on your part.”

–Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1965.

 

Abstract:

The Wikipedia editors and administrators who control the Brian Martin (social scientist) and Edward Hooper Wikipedia pages, and also the OPV/AIDS Hypothesis Wikipedia page, differ from Tegmark and Feynman, and other philosophers of science.  These editors and administrators prefer answers that cannot be questioned.  They promote certainty and the suppression of contrary evidence.  They put Wikipedia on the wrong side of the line that divides science frompseudoscience.  This brief paper reports on some of the factors that allow biased editorial control to undermine science and biography at Wikipedia.

 

I.  Some background.

 

I have never met either Edward Hooper or Brian Martin.  I have read much of their published work, I have seen Hooper on camera in the Origin of Aids movie, and I have communicated with each of them individually.  Martin posted a paper I wrote called “A Strange Case of Certainty” at the Suppression of Dissent website he administers, http://www.bmartin.cc/dissent/.

 

Hooper has commented on my paper and has linked to it on his website, www.aidsorigins.com.

 

My Strange Case of Certainty paper used the origin of Aids debate as a case study making the point that institutional interests can powerfully influence the flow of ideas.

 

It was an odd chance that got me interested in the origin of Aids.  I saw a box of books called The River, by Edward Hooper, being unpacked and shelved at my local bookstore in 1999.  Thinking that it would be about water rights issues, a subject that was of interest to me, I looked through a copy.  Turned out it wasn’t what I was interested in, but it was so well written, and so thoroughly documented, that I bought it anyway.

 

The River is an investigation of how a chimpanzee virus jumped species to humans to cause the Aids pandemic.  The conclusions of The River supported what has come to be known as the OPV/AIDS hypothesis.

 

The OPV/AIDS hypothesis proposes that the Aids pandemic originated from the Wistar Institute’s experimental oral polio vaccine called CHAT that was administered in Africa in the late 1950s.  It is alleged, with supporting evidence, that batches of CHAT were prepared locally in Africa using tissue cultures made from sacrificed caged chimpanzees that were part of Wister’s vaccine program.  Wistar denies this use of chimpanzee tissues, but claims that records that might help their case have been lost.

 

An alternative theory, the bushmeat hypothesis, supported by Wistar and the medical industry, proposes that Africans started the pandemic by killing and eating wild chimpanzees.

 

At first the debate about the origin of Aids was covered by the news media.  But then  the media reporting about the debate became one sided.  Many “final” claimed refutations of the OPV/AIDS hypothesis were offered over the years since 1992 or earlier by Wistar and its supporters.  These were generally accepted by the media without questioning why every few years new final claims were necessary.

 

I found Hooper’s website for a different view.  The reason for the series of refutations was that one after another they were not holding up.  It became obvious that institutional interests were successfully controlling the public debate.

 

My Strange Case of Certainty paper takes no position on the outcome of the origin of Aids debate.  The debate is unresolved, and it is not my purview to resolve it.  My interest is in how institutional interest in suppressing the debate has been effective in foreclosing public discussion of the issue.

 

One section of Strange Case of Certainty analyzed the OPV/AIDS Hypothesis page at Wikipedia, finding it a travesty of errors and spin.

 

Each Wikipedia page (or article–the terms page and article seem to be interchangeable at Wikipedia) has a tab labeled Talk which accesses edit histories and discussions.  The history gets archived, although it is not clear whether all deletions and discussions remain accessible.  The OPV/AIDS Hypothesis Talk archive for years past revealed that much of my factual criticism was not new to the editors and administrators of the Wikipedia page.

 

My Strange Case of Certainty is now being discussed on the OPV/AIDS Hypothesis Talk page.  But, although the many errors have again come to the attention of the active Wikipedia editors and administrators, it seems unlikely that this attention will result in any substantive change to the OPV/AIDS Hypothesis page.  The archive shows a consistent policy of ignoring the substance of criticism over the past many years.

 

I recently received an email from Edward Hooper asking me to look into what is going on at Wikipedia regarding references both to him and to Brian Martin.  Hooper had been alerted by a third party that he and Martin should be prepared for some sort of new campaign against them at Wikipedia.

 

II. What I have found.

 

A. Wikipedia editing.

 

I do use Wikipedia.  It is a convenient free source for information.  The day I began this essay I was also writing about the Bronte sisters (18th century English novelists) and wanted to say something about their early deaths.  Wikipedia is reasonably vague given the state of medicine at the time, but suggests the three sisters died of tuberculosis, possibly complicated by typhoid fever.  I accepted that as sufficiently reliable and non-controversial, and I used it in my text.

 

I began with the idea that entries such as on the Bronte sisters would be reliable because of the absence of institutional interests vested in the outcome of the postings.  After all, the sisters’ books are out of copyright and can be read without charge over the internet.  Checking the edit history of the Bronte page disabused me of my confidence.

 

The Bronte family Wikipedia page cites to a 1995 biography by Juliet Barker for the tuberculosis cause of death.  In the associated Talk page the editors request information about a Scientific American story on tuberculosis as their cause of death.  There was no followup.  In 2012 an editor requested that the page be “semi-protected due to the recent multiple attempts of vandalism from unregistered users”.  An anonymous editor, Brownbearwolf, on February 19, 2015, argued on the Talk page that two of the sisters were suicides.

 

Wikipedia relies on mostly anonymous editors for its quality control.  The Talk pages are full of much nonsense, bickering, and power plays, even when the subject is as innocuous as 18th century literature.

 

Lawyers know that there are many ways to obscure facts.  One is with stonewalling and suppression.  Another is to overwhelm with volume.  Wikipedia’s transparency is overwhelming.  There are over 5 million Wikipedia subject articles, each with its own Talk pages and archives.

Wikipedia presently has over 30,000 editors, about 1300 of whom have additional powers and are called administrators.  Around 5500 of the regular editors, as well as the administrators, have what are called rollback powers.  There are also small numbers of Wikipedia editors called bureaucrats and Wikimedia global editors called stewards, each with additional powers and somewhat vague duties.

Wikipedia protocols are extensive, flexible, much subject to debate and revision, and uncertain in effect.  Undermining the protocols is the directive, “If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it.”

Wikipedia is one of the internet sites owned and facilitated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit organization.  The Foundation has control over the Wikipedia software, and has provided software, Huggle, Winkle, and Rollback among them, that enables administrators and experienced editors with rollback power to quickly monitor and reverse page edits.  The full scope of Wikimedia oversight of Wikipedia is not clear.

Wikipedia is also governed by a plethora of committees.  Much of Wikipedia governance is duplicative (or more) with contrary positions frequently argued or posted on governance issues.  There is also very extensive commentary and criticism outside of Wikipedia, much of it also reposted or discussed on Wikipedia pages.

An investigation of Wikipedia could become a bottomless never ending project.  What I write herein can be documented using Wikipedia sources, but some of it can also be contradicted from other Wikipedia sources.  I have given up on footnoting the present paper; readers with questions are advised to check for themselves–everything written here has been found using internet searches.

Wikipedia’s anonymous editing and administrating is open to abuse.  Paid editors are supposed to declare payments and conflicts of interest.  It is suspected that there is much more paid editing than is disclosed.  Disclosure is self monitored, except in cases where there has been public exposure.  An internet search for “paid editing at Wikipedia” produced over 10 million hits, including recent articles at Time and The Atlantic.

Many critics conclude that paid editing at Wikipedia is common.  Most editing is done by anonymous users with such tags as Guy, SmithBlue, Seabreezes1, Gongwool, Harrald88, and Mastcell.  Other editors are identified only by an IP address.

When some editors have been identified as having made hundreds of edits over short periods of time, paid editing has been suspected.  Especially when those editors have industry connections and their point of view has favored their employers.

Powerful editors and administrators (power editors) are able to effectively control Wikipedia pages they are interested in using their enhanced editing powers, their insider knowledge, their rollback powers, and their selective use of protocols.

The use of Wikipedia protocols on reliable sources is especially interesting, and explains much about Wikipedia power editor control.  Sometimes a protocol is cited that only peer reviewed articles can be used.  Sometime a protocol requiring only secondary sources is cited.  Original research is barred, except when it is not.

An example from the analysis of the Wikipedia OPV/AIDS Hypothesis page in my Strange Case of Certainty paper is illustrative.  I criticized Wikipedia for relying on secondary sources making claims about a scientific paper rather than using the paper itself.  The original paper did not support all of the claims being made about it.  Why not use the original source? I asked.  It appears that the secondary claims were preferred over the more moderate claims in the original because they better supported the point of view of Wikipedia power editors.

The Talk page and archive for the OPV/AIDS Hypothesis page shows that various editors brought up factual deficiencies in the page and argued for changes.  Suggested changes were rejected on the grounds of being original research not backed by secondary sources.

One editor, Harald88, consistently argued for a more balanced presentation of Hooper and the OPV/AIDS Hypothesis, noting the supposed Wikipedia policy of neutral point of view.  He was not successful.

 

Harald88 retired from editing in September 2013, stating, “This user is tired of silly drama on Wikipedia.”

 

My Strange Case of Certainty paper has been discussed in Talk, but will not be cited because it is not peer reviewed (a flexible term easily abused–my paper has been reviewed by experts, but not by outside referees), but a recent textbook, Tools for Critical Thinking in Biology, by Stephen H. Jenkins, Oxford: 2015, is regarded as an ideal source in Wikipedia Talk.  Although it also has not gone through outside referees, it is regarded as a secondary (or tertiary) source and therefore accepted without further analysis as reliable.

 

Jenkins is not only cited for the OPV/AIDS Hypothesis page, the textbook is quoted in a footnote to the Brian Martin (social scientist) Wikipedia page for its erroneous conclusion that Martin has been promoting the OPV/AIDS hypothesis.

 

The OPV/AIDS Hypothesis page and the Brian Martin and Edward Hooper Wikipedia pages have all come under the attention of an overlapping set of editors and administrators.  These editors and administrators evince strong medical industry biases.  They are clearly determined that Wikipedia shall not in any way undermine public confidence in vaccination.

 

B. The Wikipedia Brian Martin (social scientist) page.

 

Brian Martin is a professor of social science at the University of Wollongong in Australia.  He has a distinguished career and an extensive academic publishing history.  He maintains a very useful website on the Suppression of Dissent.  He is not popular with those who wish to suppress dissent.

 

The Brian Martin Wikipedia page was once nominated for deletion, but Talk states that after discussion the decision in 2010 was to keep it.  Martin has his Talk defenders, who point out among other things that Martin has consistently maintained neutrality on vaccination issues and the OPV/AIDS hypothesis.

 

One of Martin’s defenders has been SmithBlue, with support from Seabreezes and sometimes Bibby.  An ardent adversary has been GongWool, supported by Guy, an administrator.  Gong Wool Station is an historic location in Australia, about 400 miles from Wollongong University.  GongWool’s pseudonym  seems an unlikely coincidence.  GongWool has suggested that SmithBlue has a personal interest in his proposed edits, but GongWool may be the one on a personal campaign.

 

Guy, the administrator, has threatened to have SmithBlue barred from editing.

 

The Wikipedia editing of the Martin page has proceeded this way: Newspaper articles (secondary sources) have made allegations about Martin opposing vaccination and supporting the OPV/AIDS hypothesis.  The allegations are made the basis of the Martin page.  SmithBlue submits that nothing in Martin’s writing supports this view, and he cites possible violations of the Wikipedia protocol for biographies of living persons.

 

SmithBlue’s edits are rejected on the grounds that they violate protocols against original research or because they are based on primary rather than secondary sources.

 

Researchers Create “Wikipedia” for Neurons .

Posted by

0


The decades worth of data that has been collected about the billions of neurons in the brain is astounding. To help scientists make sense of this “brain big data,” researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have used data mining to create www.neuroelectro.org, a publicly available website that acts like Wikipedia, indexing physiological information about neurons.

The site will help to accelerate the advance of neuroscience research by providing a centralized resource for collecting and comparing data on neuronal function. A description of the data available and some of the analyses that can be performed using the site are published online by the Journal of Neurophysiology.

The neurons in the brain can be divided into approximately 300 different types based on their physical and functional properties. Researchers have been studying the function and properties of many different types of neurons for decades. The resulting data is scattered across tens of thousands of papers in the scientific literature. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon turned to data mining to collect and organize these data in a way that will make possible, for the first time, new methods of analysis.

“If we want to think about building a brain or re-engineering the brain, we need to know what parts we’re working with,” said Nathan Urban, interim provost and director of Carnegie Mellon’s BrainHubSM neuroscience initiative. “We know a lot about neurons in some areas of the brain, but very little about neurons in others. To accelerate our understanding of neurons and their functions, we need to be able to easily determine whether what we already know about some neurons can be applied to others we know less about.”

Shreejoy J. Tripathy, who worked in Urban’s lab when he was a graduate student in the joint Carnegie Mellon/University of Pittsburgh Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) Program in Neural Computation, selected more than 10,000 published papers that contained physiological data describing how neurons responded to various inputs. He used text mining algorithms to “read” each of the papers. The text mining software found the portions of each paper that identified the type of neuron studied and then isolated the electrophysiological data related to the properties of that neuronal type. It also retrieved information about how each of the experiments in the literature was completed, and corrected the data to account for any differences that might be caused by the format of the experiment. Overall, Tripathy, who is now a postdoc at the University of British Columbia, was able to collect and standardize data for approximately 100 different types of neurons, which he published on the website www.neuroelectro.org.

Since the data on the website was collected using text mining, the researchers realized that it was likely to contain errors related to extraction and standardization. Urban and his group validated much of the data, but they also created a mechanism that allows site users to flag data for further evaluation. Users also can contribute new data with minimal intervention from site administrators, similar to Wikipedia.

“It’s a dynamic environment in which people can collect, refine and add data,” said Urban, who is the Dr. Frederick A. Schwertz Distinguished Professor of Life Sciences and a member of the CNBC. “It will be a useful resource to people doing neuroscience research all over the world.”

Ultimately, the website will help researchers find groups of neurons that share the same physiological properties, which could provide a better understanding of how a neuron functions. For example, if a researcher finds that a type of neuron in the brain’s neocortex fires spontaneously, they can look up other neurons that fire spontaneously and access research papers that address this type of neuron. Using that information, they can quickly form hypotheses about whether or not the same mechanisms are at play in both the newly discovered and previously studied neurons.

To demonstrate how neuroelectro.org could be used, the researchers compared the electrophysiological data from more than 30 neuron types that had been most heavily studied in the literature. These included pyramidal neurons in the hippocampus, which are responsible for memory, and dopamine neurons in the midbrain, thought to be responsible for reward-seeking behaviors and addiction, among others. The site was able to find many expected similarities between the different types of neurons, and some similarities that were a surprise to researchers. Those surprises represent promising areas for future research.

In ongoing work, the Carnegie Mellon researchers are comparing the data on neuroelectro.org with other kinds of data, including data on neurons’ patterns of gene expression. For example, Urban’s group is using another publicly available resource, the Allen Brain Atlas, to find whether groups of neurons with similar electrical function have similar gene expression.

“It would take a lot of time, effort and money to determine both the physiological properties of a neuron and its gene expression,” Urban said. “Our website will help guide this research, making it much more efficient.”

 

Don’t ask Dr. Wikipedia to diagnose your medical condition.

Posted by

0


It’s hard to resist looking your symptoms up online. But try harder: Not only will your internet search scare you more often than not, it’s also wrong… a lot.

Since it launched in 2001, Wikipedia has become THE reference source. But according to a new study comparing several Wikipedia articles about medical conditions with peer-reviewed research papers, you should speak with your doctor and not take Wikipedia’s word for it: The site contradicted medical research 90 percent of the time.

To evaluate the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, a team led by Robert Hasty from Campbell University looked up the top 10 most costly conditions (in terms of public and private expenditure) in the U.S. These are heart disease, cancer, mental disorders, trauma-related disorders, osteoarthritis, chronic obstructive lung disease/asthma, hypertension, diabetes, back problems, and hyperlipidemia (high blood cholesterol).

newwikimediafoundationoffice-400px.jpg

They printed out the corresponding Wikipedia entries on April 25, 2012. Two investigators reviewed each article and identified all the assertions made in it. Then to fact-check each implication and statement, the reviewers conducted a literature search to see if each assertion was supported by evidence in peer-reviewed sources through UpToDate, PubMed, or Google Scholar.

They found that nine out of 10 Wikipedia articles contained “many errors.” Looks like trauma-related disorders — or its corresponding Wikipedia entry, concussions — was the only one that didn’t contain statistically significant discordance with scientific studies.

Wikipedia ranks sixth globally, based on internet traffic. All users can edit the information, which of course raises concerns about the reliability of its information. That’s particularly worrisome because up to 70 percent of physicians and medical students admit using Wikipedia as a reference, a recent study found.

“While Wikipedia is a convenient tool for conducting research,” Hasty tells BBC, “from a public health standpoint patients should not use it as a primary resource.”

The work was published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association last month.

5 Ways to Overcome the Imposter Syndrome.

Posted by

0


imposter

We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face… we must do that which we think we cannot. ~Eleanor Roosevelt

According to Wikipedia, the impostor syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.

Some ‘symptoms’ of Impostor Syndrome include:

Worrying that at any moment someone will ‘find you out’ and you’ll be fired or made to leave a group because you’re a fraud.

Believing that when people praise you, they’re just being nice or they feel they have to say good things about you.

Feeling that people with the same job title as you are more responsible or better at their job than you.

Not taking up new responsibilities, projects or stepping towards your dreams because you’ve already convinced yourself you’re unworthy or fail at everything.

Being unusually sensitive to constructive criticism.

If any of these look familiar to you, use these 5 tips to build yourself up and own your magnificence:

1)   Take out your CV and write down all the things you’ve achieved- qualifications, promotions, successful marketing strategies, helping students, etc.

2)   Now imagine you have to write a ‘life CV’- what are you really proud of? Your children, your husband, your gardening skills, your sense of humour, trying to eat healthily…you are incredible, go for it.

3)   Reserve a day or afternoon to yourself- switch your phone off and really treat yourself. Have a massage, go and try on dresses with no intention of buying them or have lunch alone in a beautiful restaurant. You deserve it and yes, you deserve all the good feelings that come with it.

4)   For goodness sakes, let go of the need to compare yourself to other people. It’s a huge waste of energy. You are never going to be that person, and you are better and more fabulous as you. Just concentrate on being grateful that you’re so flipping fantastic.

5)   Ask a close friend to write a list of 10 reasons they they’re friends with you (and no, they’re not doing it just to be nice!)

If you’ve been nodding your head all the way through this article and you feel as if something has clicked, I’ll let you into a little secret. You are not alone. You are not alone in feeling like this- it is incredibly common. Many people know the feeling, but not many people share the feeling.

Use your fear and turn it into love. Love for yourself, love for others, love for your life. Love your Fear– you are worthy and truly deserving