Science of the SpiritS


Brain

Neurofeedback training shown to rebalance brain circuits in those with depression

Janice Wood
Psych Central
Fri, 25 Oct 2019 00:01 UTC
brain circuit board
© Bigstock
A new study has found that patients with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) who had recovered from symptoms were able to strengthen some of their brain connections, increasing their self-esteem.

The research showed that connectivity between certain brain regions — previously found to be decreased when people with a history of depression feel guilt — could be strengthened in a single session of neurofeedback training. Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), captured before and after the procedure, to measure the difference.

Using fMRI, the researchers found that people with depression, even when recovered from symptoms, showed less connectivity between two specific brain areas while experiencing feelings of guilt — the right anterior superior temporal (ATL) and the anterior subgenual cingulate (SCC).

Comment: See also:

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Candle

Dia De Los Muertos: Mexicans honor the souls of lost loved ones on Day of the Dead


RT
Sun, 03 Nov 2019 15:48 UTC
Day of the Dead celebration
Millions of Mexicans dressed up, paraded, and laid food and flowers for the souls of relatives who have passed away in celebration of the Day of the Dead on Saturday.

Residents of the San Andres Mixquic area south of Mexico City adorned relatives' graves with flowers and lit candles as they gathered together in remembrance of those loved ones who have died.

People donned special costumes and painted their faces for the commemorations, and festooned the streets with special Day of the Dead artwork.
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Mr. Potato

Caitlin Johnstone: Things are only going to get weirder

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium
Fri, 01 Nov 2019 00:01 UTC
Trump Ivanka Thanos
Things are getting stranger and stranger. If you would have told someone ten years ago that Dennis Rodman would one day be helping to negotiate peace between North Korea and President Donald Trump, they would have assumed you were describing some weird movie cooked up in the mind of Mike Judge or the South Park guys. But in this timeline it's an actual news story.

Everything about the last few years has been weird. The mass media's behavior has been weird, Russiagate was weird, Ukrainegate is weird, a former presidential candidate accusing a current presidential candidate of working for the Kremlin was weird, people constantly accusing strangers on the internet of being Russian agents is weird, factions of the US government constantly leaking information against other factions of the US government is weird, the DNC getting caught rigging their primary was weird, Hillary Clinton losing the election was weird, the Skripal poisoning was weird, US government officials openly tweeting about their Venezuela coup is weird, the breakdown of the entire mainstream Syria narrative is weird, Assange's arrest was weird, the campaign to censor the internet is weird, and this is just stuff off the top of my head from the areas I've been looking at in my own narrow spectrum of focus. Anyone else could list dozens of other weird new developments from their own slice of the information pie.

I often hear people in my line of work saying "Man, we're going to look back on all this crazy shit and think about how absolutely weird it was!"
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Info

Science as we know it can't explain consciousness

Professor Philip Goff
The Conversation
Fri, 01 Nov 2019 10:24 UTC
MRI scan of the brain
© MRImanMRI scan of the brain.
Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time. The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, consisting of almost 100 billion cells - known as neurons - each connected to 10,000 others, yielding some ten trillion nerve connections.

We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behaviour. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences. How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red?

There is growing suspicion that conventional scientific methods will never be able answer these questions. Luckily, there is an alternative approach that may ultimately be able to crack the mystery.

For much of the 20th century, there was a great taboo against querying the mysterious inner world of consciousness - it was not taken to be a fitting topic for "serious science". Things have changed a lot, and there is now broad agreement that the problem of consciousness is a serious scientific issue. But many consciousness researchers underestimate the depth of the challenge, believing that we just need to continue examining the physical structures of the brain to work out how they produce consciousness.

The problem of consciousness, however, is radically unlike any other scientific problem. One reason is that consciousness is unobservable. You can't look inside someone's head and see their feelings and experiences. If we were just going off what we can observe from a third-person perspective, we would have no grounds for postulating consciousness at all.
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Light Saber

How smart people neutralize the effects of difficult people

Dr. Travis Bradberry
LinkedIn.com
Tue, 24 Sep 2019 00:00 UTC
toxic people
To deal with toxic people effectively, you need an approach that enables you, across the board, to control what you can and eliminate what you can’t. The important thing to remember is that you are in control of far more than you realize.
Toxic people defy logic. Some are blissfully unaware of the negative impact that they have on those around them, and others seem to derive satisfaction from creating chaos and pushing other people's buttons. Either way, they create unnecessary complexity, strife, and worst of all stress.

Studies have long shown that stress can have a lasting, negative impact on the brain. Exposure to even a few days of stress compromises the effectiveness of neurons in the hippocampus — an important brain area responsible for reasoning and memory. Weeks of stress cause reversible damage to neuronal dendrites (the small "arms" that brain cells use to communicate with each other), and months of stress can permanently destroy neurons. Stress is a formidable threat to your success — when stress gets out of control, your brain and your performance suffer.

Most sources of stress at work are easy to identify. If your non-profit is working to land a grant that your organization needs to function, you're bound to feel stress and likely know how to manage it. It's the unexpected sources of stress that take you by surprise and harm you the most.

Research from the Department of Biological and Clinical Psychology at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany found that exposure to stimuli that cause strong negative emotions — the same kind of exposure you get when dealing with toxic people — caused subjects' brains to have a massive stress response. Whether it's negativity, cruelty, the victim syndrome, or just plain craziness, toxic people drive your brain into a stressed-out state that should be avoided at all costs.

Comment: Saving your sanity and career: Six toxic relationships to avoid like the plague

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Snakes in Suits

Smooth-talking charmers: Why psychopaths can be so attractive to the unsuspecting

Tom Hale
In Science
Thu, 31 Oct 2019 16:19 UTC
psychopaths dating
© JSTOCK/ShutterstockYoung men with stronger psychopathic traits tend to have higher social intelligence and more relaxed attitudes towards casual sex.
The old cliché of psychopaths being smooth-talking charmers might not be far wrong, at least according to a new study.

The study carried out by psychologists from Brock University and Carleton University in Canada claims that young women are more attracted to men with stronger psychopathic personality traits, despite these prospective partners having little interest in a committed relationship.

Reporting in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science, the researchers wanted to follow up on "reports" that psychopathic traits were attractive in potential romantic partners, despite the known pitfalls of entering interpersonal relationships with psychopaths.

For the first part of their study, the researchers recruited 46 men, aged 17 to 25, and gauged psychopathy and social intelligence using a filmed fake date scenario with a female research assistant for about 2 minutes. According to the study, the majority of the male participants (89 percent) self-reported as heterosexual.

Comment: Psychopaths are masters at wearing a mask to disarm their prey - it behooves everyone to learn how to spot these 'intraspecies predators':

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Music

Brain takes just less than 300 milliseconds to recognize familiar music


University of Central London
Wed, 30 Oct 2019 12:00 UTC
vinyl record lp
The human brain can recognise a familiar song within 100 to 300 milliseconds, highlighting the deep hold favourite tunes have on our memory, a UCL study finds.
Anecdotally the ability to recall popular songs is exemplified in game shows such as 'Name That Tune', where contestants can often identify a piece of music in just a few seconds.

For this study, published in Scientific Reports, researchers at the UCL Ear Institute wanted to find out exactly how fast the brain responded to familiar music, as well as the temporal profile of processes in the brain which allow for this.

The main participant group consisted of five men and five women who had each provided five songs, which were very familiar to them. For each participant researchers then chose one of the familiar songs and matched this to a tune, which was similar (in tempo, melody, harmony, vocals and instrumentation) but which was known to be unfamiliar to the participant.

Comment: See also:

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Info

The brain has distinct areas for all manner of ideas, research suggests

Paul Biegler
Cosmos Magazine
Tue, 29 Oct 2019 17:59 UTC
MRI Brain Scans
© WLADIMIR BULGAR/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, VIA GETTY IMAGESBrain scans can tell more than we thought about our thoughts and feelings, research suggests.
Researchers have deciphered the abstract concepts people are thinking about - for example justice, truth and forgiveness - merely by analysing their brain scans.

Until now, this type of "thought decoding" has been largely confined to concrete concepts such as apple and hammer. The new findings, however, suggest slippery ideas that are not of the physical world also inhabit distinct parts of the brain.

The study is the work of psychologist Marcel Just and graduate student Robert Vargas from Carnegie Mellon University in the US.

It makes intuitive sense, they say, that physical or "concrete" objects, such as hammers and apples, will be represented in the brain similarly between people. Trade tools and fruit are, by nature, unambiguous.

It's a contention born out in the science of neural decoding, where patterns of activity on brain scans are used to work out what someone is thinking.

Just, for example, has used brain scans to predict when a person is reading sentences that refer to concrete things, such as "the flood damaged the hospital".

But given the fuzziness of abstract ideas like justice and ethics, intuitions cut the other way - could we really share common brain space for them too?

To find out, Vargas and Just put nine people in an MRI scanner and flashed an array of 28 abstract concepts at them, shown as words.
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Brain

Thinking about death: High neural activity is linked to shorter lifespans

Matt Davis
Big Think
Fri, 25 Oct 2019 00:01 UTC
the thinker
© Flickr/Todd Martin
If there's one thing that humans can't stop thinking about, it's death. But new research published in the journal Nature suggests that all that thinking might be the very thing that brings death on.

More precisely, researchers discovered that higher neural activity has a negative effect on longevity. Neural activity refers to the constant flow of electricity and signals throughout the brain, and excessive activity could be expressed in many ways; a sudden change in mood, a facial twitch, and so on.

"An exciting future area of research will be to determine how these findings relate to such higher-order human brain functions," said professor of genetics and study co-author Bruce Yankner. While it's probably not the case that thinking a thought reduces your lifespan in the same way smoking a cigarette does, the study didn't determine whether actual thinking had an impact on lifespan — just neural activity in general.
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Life Preserver

Discovering Wholeness and Healing after Trauma

Joseph Mercola
Mercola.com
Sun, 27 Oct 2019 00:00 UTC
Healing Trauma
Dr. James Gordon is a Harvard-educated psychiatrist who uses self-care strategies and group support to help patients heal from psychological trauma. In this interview, he shares some of those strategies, which are also detailed in his book "The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma."

Gordon is also the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM) in Washington, D.C., and is a clinical professor at Georgetown Medical School. During his presidency, President Bill Clinton appointed Gordon chairman of the National Advisory Council to the National Institutes of Health Office of Alternative Medicine.
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