Science of the SpiritS


Gift 2

Genius comes in different shapes at different ages

Ephrat Livni
Quartz
Fri, 10 May 2019 12:33 UTC
bubbles
Young and old alike can rejoice in a new finding by researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Chicago. There is hope for us all when it comes to creativity, they say.

"Many people believe that creativity is exclusively associated with youth, but it really depends on what kind of creativity you're talking about," explains Bruce Weinberg, lead author of the study and professor of economics at Ohio State University, in a statement.

According to the study, published in the journal De Economist on April 26, there are two types of creativity that can blossom at different points in a person's life. Conceptual innovators tend to do their best work in their mid-twenties, while experimental innovators peak in their fifties, the researchers contend.

Comment: Creativity Explained
But creativity is not magic, and there's no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It's a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is and how to spark it in ourselves and our work.


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Cloud Precipitation

The dark side of meditation retreats

Henry Bodkin
The Telegraph
Thu, 09 May 2019 00:00 UTC
unpleasant side effects meditation
Meditation which ultimately reduces familiar feelings and views into fleeting sensations can engender sudden feelings of danger, particularly among inexperienced meditators.
Going on trendy meditation retreats may be bad for participants' mental health, a new study suggests.

An international survey of people who attended residential meditation programmes found three in ten suffered "unpleasant" episodes, including feelings of anxiety or fear.

The study by University College London (UCL) found that, overall, more than a quarter of people who regularly meditate experience such feelings.

However, those engaging in currently fashionable "deconstructive" forms such as Vipassana or Koan meditation, which encourage insight through questioning permanence of the self and the reality of sensations, were more likely to be affected.

These can take the form of days' long silent retreats with highly regulated sleep and diet regimens and restricted access to the outside world.

Last year the Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey attended a highly-publicised 10-day Vipassana meditation in Burma, encouraging his four million online followers to try it for themselves.

But Marco Schlosser, who led the research at UCL, said that meditation which ultimately reduces familiar feelings and views into fleeting sensations can engender sudden feelings of danger, particularly among inexperienced meditators.

Comment: A caution to tread carefully on the spiritual path: Meditation and the dark recesses of the mind
Repressed and traumatic material can easily resurface during intense meditation, which made me realize, with a sense of relief and humility, that meditation need not be a panacea to cure every ill, nor a tool to moral perfection. Perhaps we shouldn't treat it very differently from prayer, which can quiet our minds, give us some comfort and lead us towards a deeper place, where we can explore who we are or be closer to God.

Perhaps meditation was never supposed to be more than a tool to help with self-knowledge; one that could never be divorced from a strong ethical grounding of who we are and the world we live in.


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Heart

Longer exhalations: An easy way to hack your vagus nerve

Christopher Bergland
Psychology Today
Thu, 09 May 2019 13:38 UTC
Eiriu Eolas
© eiriu-eolas.org
Two years ago, in May of 2017, I published a nine-part series, "The Vagus Nerve Survival Guide to Combat Fight-or-Flight Urges." The genesis for that series came from a random "Aha!" moment when I noticed a pattern of diverse scientific literature being published by researchers around the world who were correlating unexpected lifestyle factors (e.g., positive social connections (Kok et al., 2013), narrative expressive writing (Bourassa et al., 2017), and self-distancing (Grossman et al., 2016)) with improved heart rate variability (HRV).

This post is a follow-up to, "Diaphragmatic Breathing Exercises and Your Vagus Nerve," from my nine-part series on combating fight-or-flight physiology. For this post, I'm excited to update what was primarily hypothetical speculation a few years ago with some new scientific literature (Gerritsen & Band, 2018 and De Couck et al., 2019). These studies corroborate that longer exhalations are an easy way to hack the vagus nerve, combat fight-or-flight stress responses, and improve HRV.

You might be asking, "What is HRV?" Heart rate variability represents the healthy fluctuation in beat-to-beat intervals of a human or animal's heart rate. During the inhalation phase of a breathing cycle, the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) facilitates a brief acceleration of heart rate; during exhalation, the vagus nerve secretes a transmitter substance (ACh) which causes deceleration within beat-to-beat intervals via the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS).

Comment: Éiriú Eolas is a breathing and meditation program that is scientifically proven to help reduce stress while also helping to heal emotional wounds via stimulation of the vagus nerve.

Visit the Éiriú Eolas site to learn more about the scientific background for this program and try it out, free of charge.

See also:

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Cell Phone

Social media has created a generation of narcissists

Gerald Sinclair
Awareness Act
Thu, 16 Mar 2017 00:01 UTC
kendall and kylie jenner
Social media has shaped mass culture in an enormous way. It has changed everything!

Social media has changed the way we communicate with one another it has turned an entire generation into narcissists. People are not concerned with world issues anymore. The majority of us are content spending our free time taking deceptive selfies and editing them in order to make ourselves more attractive so that we can post then all over our social media accounts.

Social media has taken over our lives and we pick and choose the things to post in order to make our lives seem a little less meaningless and more fulfilled. We are self-centered in all ways possible. Most teenagers never even leave their rooms, finding joy simply watching television and playing on their smartphones. Some people claim we are more connected thanks to social media but in some ways we are more separated, more broken.

Comment: See also:

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People 2

Flashback To understand Facebook, study Capgras syndrome

Robert Sapolsky
Nautilus
Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:01 UTC
Dadu Shin illustration
© Dadu Shin

We start with the case of a woman who experienced unbearable tragedy. In 1899, this Parisian bride, Madame M., had her first child. Shockingly, the child was abducted and substituted with a different infant, who soon died. She then had twin girls. One grew into healthy adulthood, while the other, again, was abducted, once more replaced with a different, dying infant. She then had twin boys. One was abducted, while the other was fatally poisoned.

Madame M. searched for her abducted babies; apparently, she was not the only victim of this nightmarish trauma, as she often heard the cries of large groups of abducted children rising from the cellars of Paris.

As if all this pain was not enough, Madame M.'s sole surviving child was abducted and replaced with an imposter of identical appearance. And soon the same fate befell Madame M.'s husband. The poor woman spent days searching for her abducted loved ones, attempting to free groups of other abducted children from hiding places, and starting the paperwork to divorce the man who had replaced her husband.

Comment: See also:

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Bulb

If we can learn from anyone - why is it so hard to take advice?

Bruce Grierson
Psychology Today
Wed, 08 May 2019 00:00 UTC
Wade LeBlanc
Wade LeBlanc
"Ask for money, get advice. Ask for advice, get money twice." - Armando Christian Perez (aka the rapper "Pitbull")
One morning in July of 2011, a taxi sat idling outside Petco Park stadium in San Diego, and Wade LeBlanc, struggling pitcher for the Padres, climbed in. "To the airport, please," he told the driver. LeBlanc was headed to Tucson, home of the club's triple-A affiliate. He'd been sent down to the minors. Again.

Eight times in the last three years LeBlanc had clawed his way up to the big league only to blow his chance and be sent packing. It was all becoming a cosmic test of character in a career that had started so promisingly, when the Padres drafted him out of college, in 2006, on the strength of his tricky change-up.

"You're Wade LeBlanc," the cab driver said.*

"Right."

"You got some good stuff."

This surprised the pitcher, after the previous night's disastrous performance.

"I think there's some things you should think about trying, some things that might make a difference," the driver continued. "I don't know, I'm not a player. Maybe something like going over your head in your windup."

Comment: See: The Truth Perspective: Insight, Or Why It's Not Just Your Boss Who Lacks Self-Awareness

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Candle

Four types of grief that are hardly ever discussed

Sarah Epstein MFT
Psychology Today
Wed, 17 Apr 2019 00:00 UTC
grieving man
The word grief has come to be understood solely as a reaction to a death. But that narrow understanding fails to encompass the range of human experiences that create and trigger grief. Here are four types of grief that we experience that have nothing to do with death:

1. Loss of identity: A lost role or affiliation. Examples include:
  • A person going through a divorce who feels the loss of no longer being a "spouse."
  • A breast cancer survivor who grieves the lost sense of femininity after a double mastectomy.
  • An empty nester who mourns the lost identity of parenthood in its most direct form.
  • A person who loses their job or switches careers grieves a lost identity.
  • Someone who leaves a religious group feels the loss of affiliation and community.
Whenever a person loses a primary identity, they mourn a lost sense of self. They're tasked with grieving who they thought they were and eventually creating a new story that integrates the loss into their personal narrative. In some instances, the identity feels stolen, as in the cases of the person who feels blindsided by divorce and the breast cancer survivor. For those individuals, the grief may feel compounded by the lack of control they had in the decision. Others choose to shed an identity, as in the case of switching careers or leaving a religious community. Though this may sound easier, those individuals may feel their grief compounded by the ambivalence of choosing to leave something they will also mourn. They may feel less entitled to their grief and lost sense of self because the decision was self-imposed.
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Brain

Can mind affect matter? New study finds changes in cancer cells when exposed to 'Energy Healing'

Arjun Walia
Collective Evolution
Tue, 30 Apr 2019 11:29 UTC
energy healing
A question that's become more prominent within mainstream scientific circles is whether or not the mind can affect matter.

The connection between human consciousness or factors associated with human consciousness such as intention, thoughts, feelings and emotions, and the physical realm is fascinating. This is precisely why nearly all of the founding fathers of quantum physics were so preoccupied with learning more about consciousness and "non-material" science in general. For instance, the theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, Max Planck regarded "consciousness as fundamental" and matter as a "derivative from consciousness." Eugene Wigner, another famous theoretical physicist and mathematician, also emphasized how "it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness."

Comment: Read more about the benefits of energy healing:

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Brain

'Physicalism' isn't just an abuse of language - it's wrong

Grant Bartley
Philosophy Now
Fri, 01 Jun 2018 10:53 UTC
mind physics
© Getty Images
The most widely accepted attempt at describing the nature of embodied thought in this materialistic age is called physicalism. (It has a variant called materialism, but I'll use the terms interchangeably.) There are many nuanced versions of physicalism, but in its basic form, it says that all the mental things - sensations, thoughts, ideas, all experiences - are really physical things: matter, energy and physical processes. But does such an idea make sense? Can it mean anything meaningful to say that the contents of minds are physical? I say no.

Let me start by saying that the debate about how to describe the nature of the mind is at its heart an argument about the proper language in which to do so. Although this might make the debate sound trivial or fussy, it is not. This is firstly because what we say about the mind will be fundamental for our understanding of the nature of reality, so to accurately describe the nature of the mind is not trivial but vital. Secondly, using the correct language is what makes the difference between describing something truthfully rather than falsely. And I want to say that describing the mind as 'physical' is a grossly false way of speaking about the mind that will hold metaphysics back for as long as people talk that way. In fact, I will argue that people can only believe physicalism because they haven't thought hard enough about what its core ideas actually imply or they are using the term 'physical' so imprecisely that it's meaningless.

Comment: For more on the topic, check out MindMatters:

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Hearts

Sex, Love, and Knowing the Difference

Debra Soh
Quillette
Tue, 30 Apr 2019 19:26 UTC
Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Casablanca
We all remember the first time we fell in love. No matter how strong or independent or free you thought you were, all at once, you became powerless in the face of feelings that, to others, seemed obsessive and irrational.

When you're in that state, everything reminds you of the one you love. They become the center of your world. Friends say your face lights up when you talk about them. You can't sleep, you can't eat. The thought of being without them feels like losing a part of yourself.

There are biological reasons that explain why the experience of being in love feels so overwhelming. These emotions serve an evolutionary purpose. Specifically, they allow two people to bond in a way that increases the likelihood they'll procreate and maintain an environment in which the resulting offspring survive.
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