http://www.sott.net/signs/list_by_category/20-Science-of-the-Spirit Signs of the Times: The World for People who Think. Featuring news and commentary on world events. en-us Original content Copyright 2012 by Signs of the Times/Sott.net. For other content, see our Fair Use Policy at www.sott.net. Wed, 22 Feb 2012 05:23:07 -0600 http://www.sott.net/images/sottlogo_rss.jpg SOTT.net http://www.sott.net https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241907-The-Lorax-and-What-Matters I was thinking about the state of the world yesterday, having gotten off the phone with my sister. She was once again reminding me that even though she and her husband both work, they barely make it most months and things just keep getting worse. She said that they feel they have no connection to anything, since fewer things just make common sense - that she has no control - that no matter how hard they work, for so many years, the rules keep shifting and the liars keep making more money while normal people drown a little more every day. She's right. The rules have changed and they changed while no one was watching. In fact, I'd say they changed because no one was watching. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241907-The-Lorax-and-What-Matters Wed, 22 Feb 2012 05:22:55 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241856-You-Didn-t-Thank-Me-For-Punching-You-in-the-Face On a somewhat serious note today because of a conversation the other day: I am sure every girl can recall, at least once as a child, coming home and telling their parents, uncle, aunt or grandparent about a boy who had pulled her hair, hit her, teased her, pushed her or committed some other playground crime. I will bet money that most of those, if not all, will tell you that they were told "Oh, that just means he likes you". I never really thought much about it before having a daughter of my own. I find it appalling that this line of b******t is still being fed to young children. Look, if you want to tell your child that being verbally and/or physically abused is an acceptable sign of affection, I urge you to rethink your parenting strategy. If you try and feed MY daughter that crap, you better bring protective gear because I am going to shower you with the brand of "affection" you are endorsing. When the f*** was it decided that we should start teaching our daughters to accept being belittled, disrespected and abused as endearing treatment? And we have the audacity to wonder why women stay in abusive relationships? How did society become so oblivious to the fact that we were conditioning our daughters to endure abusive treatment, much less view it as romantic overtures? Is this where the phrase "hitting on girls" comes from? Well, here is a tip: Save the "it's so cute when he gets hateful/physical with her because it means he loves her" asshattery for your own kids, not mine. While you're at it, keep them away from my kids until you decide to teach them respect and boundaries. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241856-You-Didn-t-Thank-Me-For-Punching-You-in-the-Face Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:53:48 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241792-6-Month-Old-Infants-Understand-Words While his mother is cooing "Does baybee want his bahbah?" that 6- to 9-month-old infant may just be thinking something along the lines of "Yes, I do want my bottle!" New research indicates that infants as young as 6 months can understand the meaning of many spoken words. "Kids at this age aren't saying anything, they're not pointing, they're not walking," study researcher Erika Bergelson, of the University of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. "But actually, under the surface, they're trying to put together the things in the world with the words that go with them." This is the first demonstration that children of this age can understand such words. "There had been a few demonstrations of understanding before, involving words like 'mommy' and 'daddy'," study researcher Daniel Swingley, of the University of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. "Our study is different in looking at more generic words, words that refer to categories," like apple or mouth, which come in different shapes and sizes. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241792-6-Month-Old-Infants-Understand-Words Sun, 19 Feb 2012 21:23:38 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241763-New-Connections-Between-Brain-Cells-Form-in-Clusters-During-Learning New connections between brain cells emerge in clusters in the brain as animals learn to perform a new task, according to a study published in Nature on February 19 (advance online publication). Led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the study reveals details of how brain circuits are rewired during the formation of new motor memories. The researchers studied mice as they learned new behaviors, such as reaching through a slot to get a seed. They observed changes in the motor cortex, the brain layer that controls muscle movements, during the learning process. Specifically, they followed the growth of new "dendritic spines," structures that form the connections (synapses) between nerve cells. "For the first time we are able to observe the spatial distribution of new synapses related to the encoding of memory," said Yi Zuo, assistant professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology at UC Santa Cruz and corresponding author of the paper. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241763-New-Connections-Between-Brain-Cells-Form-in-Clusters-During-Learning Sun, 19 Feb 2012 12:13:46 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241754-Puzzle-Play-Helps-Boost-Learning-Math-Related-Skills Children who play with puzzles between ages 2 and 4 later develop better spatial skills, a study by University of Chicago researchers has found. Puzzle play was found to be a significant predictor of spatial skill after controlling for differences in parents' income, education and the overall amount of parent language input. In examining video recordings of parents interacting with children during everyday activities at home, researchers found children who play with puzzles between 26 and 46 months of age have better spatial skills when assessed at 54 months of age. "The children who played with puzzles performed better than those who did not, on tasks that assessed their ability to rotate and translate shapes," said psychologist Susan Levine, a leading expert on mathematics development in young children. The ability to mentally transform shapes is an important predictor of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) course-taking, degrees and careers in older children. Activities such as early puzzle play may lay the groundwork for the development of this ability, the study found. Levine, the Stella M. Rowley Professor in Psychology at UChicago, is lead author on a paper, "Early Puzzle Play: A Predictor of Preschoolers' Spatial Transformation Skill," published in the current early view issue of Developmental Science. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241754-Puzzle-Play-Helps-Boost-Learning-Math-Related-Skills Sun, 19 Feb 2012 11:05:06 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241746-Brain-Scans-Prove-Meditation-Effective-in-Curing-Mental-Illness- Mediation, an eastern philosophy which was once dismissed as pretentious, can be effective in treating mental illness, brain scans have proved. The buzzword is mindfulness. Meditation, which is practised a lot in India and in parts of Islington, is an NHS-approved treatment that combines conventional psychotherapy with meditation techniques, breathing and yoga. It is sitting around trying to think about nothing and letting out the occasional "ommmm". Meditation has been around since the Seventies, but in the past decade there has been growing evidence that it is highly effective. Researchers at Britain's most respected medical centres have found that it can halve the risk of relapse for those with depression. "Psychotherapy involves patients analysing thoughts and feelings, with the hope that by understanding them some kind of change can be made. Mindfulness has some of this but it also involves meditation," the Daily Mail quoted Mark Williams, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oxford's Department of Psychiatry and co-developer of one of the many variants, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), said. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241746-Brain-Scans-Prove-Meditation-Effective-in-Curing-Mental-Illness- Sun, 19 Feb 2012 07:33:29 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241736-Babies-Know-What-s-Fair "That's not fair!" It's a common playground complaint. But how early do children acquire this sense of fairness? Before they're 2, says a new study. "We found that 19- and 21-month-old infants have a general expectation of fairness, and they can apply it appropriately to different situations," says University of Illinois psychology graduate student Stephanie Sloane, who conducted the study with UI's Renée Baillargeon and David Premack of the University of Pennsylvania. The findings appear in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. In each of two experiments, babies watched live scenarios unfold. In the first, 19-month-olds saw two giraffe puppets dance around at the back of a stage. An experimenter arrived with two toys on a tray and said, "I have toys!" "Yay!" said the giraffes. Then the experimenter gave one toy to each giraffe or both to one of them. The infants were timed gazing at the scene until they lost interest. Longer looking times indicated that something was odd - unexpected - to the baby. In this experiment, three-quarters of the infants looked longer when one giraffe got both toys. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241736-Babies-Know-What-s-Fair Sun, 19 Feb 2012 02:37:16 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241704-Texting-Affects-Ability-to-Interpret-Words Research designed to understand the effect of text messaging on language found that texting has a negative impact on people's linguistic ability to interpret and accept words. The study, conducted by Joan Lee for her master's thesis in linguistics, revealed that those who texted more were less accepting of new words. On the other hand, those who read more traditional print media such as books, magazines, and newspapers were more accepting of the same words. The study asked university students about their reading habits, including text messaging, and presented them with a range of words both real and fictitious. "Our assumption about text messaging is that it encourages unconstrained language. But the study found this to be a myth," says Lee. "The people who accepted more words did so because they were better able to interpret the meaning of the word, or tolerate the word, even if they didn't recognize the word. Students who reported texting more rejected more words instead of acknowledging them as possible words." https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241704-Texting-Affects-Ability-to-Interpret-Words Sat, 18 Feb 2012 06:33:25 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241672-Not-surprising-Military-service-changes-personality-promotes-and-induces-psychopathic-behavior It's no secret that battlefield trauma can leave veterans with deep emotional scars that impact their ability to function in civilian life. But new research led by Washington University in St. Louis suggests that military service, even without combat, has a subtle lingering effect on a man's personality, making it potentially more difficult for veterans to get along with friends, family and co-workers. "Our results suggest that personality traits play an important role in military training, both in the sort of men who are attracted to the military in the first place, and in the lasting impact that this service has on an individual's outlook on life," says study lead author Joshua J. Jackson, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences. Published in the journal Psychological Science, the study found that men who have experienced military service tend to score lower than civilian counterparts on measures of agreeableness - a dimension of personality that influences our ability to be pleasant and accommodating in social situations. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241672-Not-surprising-Military-service-changes-personality-promotes-and-induces-psychopathic-behavior Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:46:24 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241597-An-Interview-with-Theoretical-Mathematical-Physicist-Arkadiusz-Jadczyk A few days ago, unexpectedly, I received an email from a young high school student from the little town of Wolbrom, near Krakow - the ancient capital of Poland. Her name is Dominika, and she explained that even though she plans to study architecture, she is participating in a national physics competition. One of the projects available to choose from is to conduct an interview with a physicist. Since she had been reading my Polish science blog, she selected me and asked if I would agree. I said, "why not?" So she sent me her fourteen questions. I think her questions are, perhaps, even more interesting than my answers, so here is the whole interview. 1. Why physics? Was it one of your childhood dreams? There were many childhood dreams. They went in various directions, overlapped each other; in some areas they positively strengthened each other while in others, they neutralized like waves on water originating from multiple sources. I dreamed of being a firefighter, a detective; I wanted to fight together with good Indians, or to be an electronics engineer like my older brother. Eventually, I became a physicist, you could say, by chance. I did so well in a national Physics Olympiad, that I was allowed to begin studies at the physics department of the university without having to take the entrance examination. Otherwise, I would probably have chosen the University of Technology. I wrote "probably by chance," but I admit, I use the word "chance" reluctantly. We often describe events as "accidental", while at their roots lie unclear, obscure, or unknown causal chains. We are, perhaps, cutting corners this way. So maybe it was not a coincidence, maybe it was not just chance, perhaps it was 'destiny'? As a physicist, I'm a little bit of a firefighter because I am always putting out fires to uphold the truth. I am also a detective, because I follow Nature and seek to discover its secrets. I'm fighting at the side of the good Indians when I expose the scams in Science. The least thing I do is likely the work of an engineer, though even here there is a link, because as a physicist, I am interested in the world we live in, not just in a philosophical imaginary reality. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241597-An-Interview-with-Theoretical-Mathematical-Physicist-Arkadiusz-Jadczyk Wed, 15 Feb 2012 06:52:30 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241582-Different-Bodies-Different-Minds-The-Handedness-Bias We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, absorbing information, weighing it carefully, and making thoughtful decisions. But, as it turns out, we're kidding ourselves. Over the past few decades, scientists have shown there are many different internal and external factors influencing how we think, feel, communicate, and make decisions at any given moment. One particularly powerful influence may be our own bodies, according to new research reviewed in the December issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Cognitive scientist Daniel Casasanto, of The New School for Social Research, has shown that quirks of our bodies affect our thinking in predictable ways, across many different areas of life, from language to mental imagery to emotion. People come in all different shapes and sizes, and people with different kinds of bodies think differently - an idea Casasanto has termed the 'body-specificity hypothesis.' One way our bodies appear to shape our decision-making is through handedness. Casasanto and his colleagues explored whether being right-handed or left-handed might influence our judgments about abstract ideas like value, intelligence, and honesty. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241582-Different-Bodies-Different-Minds-The-Handedness-Bias Wed, 15 Feb 2012 01:56:50 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241566-People-forage-for-memories-in-the-same-way-birds-forage-for-berries Humans move between 'patches' in their memory using the same strategy as bees flitting between flowers for pollen or birds searching among bushes for berries. Researchers at the University of Warwick and Indiana University have identified parallels between animals looking for food in the wild and humans searching for items within their memory - suggesting that people with the best 'memory foraging' strategies are better at recalling items. Scientists asked people to name as many animals as they could in three minutes and then compared the results with a classic model of optimal foraging in the real world, the marginal value theorem, which predicts how long animals will stay in one patch before jumping to another. Dr Thomas Hills, associate professor in the psychology department at the University of Warwick, said: "A bird's food tends to be clumped together in a specific patch - for example on a bush laden with berries. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241566-People-forage-for-memories-in-the-same-way-birds-forage-for-berries Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:45:58 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241516-TEDxRainier-Dimitri-Christakis-Media-and-Children Dimitri Christakis is a pediatrician, parent, and researcher whose influential findings are helping identify optimal media exposure for children. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241516-TEDxRainier-Dimitri-Christakis-Media-and-Children Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:19:35 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241494-Human-Cognitive-Performance-Suffers-Following-Natural-Disasters Not surprisingly, victims of a natural disaster can experience stress and anxiety, but a new study indicates that it might also cause them to make more errors -- some serious- in their daily lives. In their upcoming Human Factors article, "Earthquakes on the Mind: Implications of Disasters for Human Performance," researchers William S. Helton and James Head from the University of Canterbury explore how cognitive performance can decline after earthquakes and other natural disasters. Past research has indicated that more traffic accidents and accident-related fatalities occur following human-made disasters such as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, due to increased cognitive impairment that can lead to higher stress levels and an increase in intrusive thoughts. However, no research has been conducted on the effects of natural disasters on cognitive performance. The authors were unexpectedly presented with a unique opportunity to investigate the impact of the devastating 2010 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, with participants in a study on human performance they were conducting at the time of the quake. "We were conducting a [different] study on human performance requiring two sessions," said Helton. "In the midst of the study, between the two sessions, we had a substantial local earthquake, which resulted in the rare opportunity to do a before/after study. We were quick to seize the opportunity." https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241494-Human-Cognitive-Performance-Suffers-Following-Natural-Disasters Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:02:44 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241431-Is-There-a-Psychopath-in-Your-Inbox- The internet has become a hunting ground for psychopaths, explains forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes, who has written a book on how to spot them . I'm all for online dating but what if the person you "met" via the internet turns out to be unpleasantly different in real life? More often than not it will simply be that the chemistry between you is wrong, or that you've stumbled across a perfectly harmless odd ball. But as a consultant forensic psychologist, I'm finding that both criminal and non-criminal psychopaths are increasingly turning to the internet as a means of meeting people, just as you would expect as social networking grows in popularity. This means that there's a small chance that the person sitting across the table could be a psycho - and you will need to take steps to protect yourself. Psychopathy can only be diagnosed using strict and detailed criteria but as a lay person there are certain red flags that can alert you to the possibility that there's a psycho in your life. Most of us have referred to a "psycho ex" or "psycho boss" at one time or another - probably because the former watched too much Top Gear, or the latter made us work late on a Friday night - but few really understand what the term means. Psychopaths don't walk around with a severed head in one hand and a bloody knife in the other. They are much - much - more subtle than that. Psychopathy is a clinical condition and psychopaths appear in all walks of life and in as many different guises; the only thing they have in common is a cluster of emotional abnormalities and anti-social behaviours that can wreak havoc in families, organisations and even entire communities. Between 1 and 3 per cent of the population exhibit psychopathic tendencies - in other words, potentially one in 100 of your Facebook friends - which puts anyone socialising online at risk of encountering a psycho. Their condition is resistant to treatment and they are devoid of empathy, out to get what they want no matter who gets in their way. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241431-Is-There-a-Psychopath-in-Your-Inbox- Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:25:04 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241363-Breaking-the-Code-Why-Yuor-Barin-Can-Raed-Tihs You might not realize it, but your brain is a code-cracking machine. For emaxlpe, it deson't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aepapr, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pobelrm. S1M1L4RLY, Y0UR M1ND 15 R34D1NG 7H15 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17. Passages like these have been bouncing around the Internet for years. But how do we read them? And what do our incredibly low standards for what's legible say about the way our brains work? According to Marta Kutas, a cognitive neuroscientist and the director of the Center for Research in Language at the University of California, San Diego, the short answer is that no one knows why we're so good at reading garbled nonsense. But they've got strong suspicions. "My guess is that context is very, very, very important," Kutas told Life's Little Mysteries. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241363-Breaking-the-Code-Why-Yuor-Barin-Can-Raed-Tihs Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:41:51 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241322-Study-Schizophrenia-s-Hallucinated-Voices-Drown-Out-Real-Ones A new finding in brain science reveals that the voices in a schizophrenia patient's head can drown out voices in the real world - and provides hope that people with the disorder can learn to ignore hallucinatory talk. The new research pulls together two threads in earlier schizophrenia studies. Many scientists have noticed that when patients hallucinate voices, neurons in brain regions associated with processing sounds spontaneously fire despite there being no sound waves to trigger this activity. That's an indication of brain overload. But when presented with real-world voices, other studies showed, hallucinating patients' brains often failed to respond at all, in contrast with healthy brains. These studies pointed to a stifling of brain signals. By analyzing all of these studies together, biological psychologist Kenneth Hugdahl of the University of Bergen in Norway found the simultaneous over-stimulation and dampening of brain signals to be two sides of the same coin. The findings help explain why schizophrenia patients retreat into a hallucinatory world. Now, Hugdahl wants to use this knowledge to help patients reverse that tendency. "What if one could train the patient to shift attention away from the inside voices to voices coming from outside?" Hugdahl said. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241322-Study-Schizophrenia-s-Hallucinated-Voices-Drown-Out-Real-Ones Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:47:44 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241231-Silence-May-Not-Cause-a-Memory-to-Fade Emerging research questions the belief that if we do not talk about something, then we will forget the episode. The issue is timely as experts look for new methods to help people recover after a traumatic experience. "There's this idea, with silence, that if we don't talk about something, it starts fading," says Charles B. Stone, an author of a new paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science. Although this perspective has been widely accepted, researchers question this view saying that the belief is not supported by empirical psychological research - a lot of it comes from a Freudian belief that everyone has deep-seated issues that are repressed and need to be talked about. The real relationship between silence and memory is much more complicated, Stone said. "We are trying to understand how people remember the past in a very basic way," he said. "Silence is everywhere." Stone and his coauthors divide silence about memories into several categories. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241231-Silence-May-Not-Cause-a-Memory-to-Fade Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:38:04 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241178-Unraveling-the-Mystery-of-Consciousness Antonio Damasio, author of Self Comes to Mind, published by Pantheon/Vintage, is a professor of neuroscience and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. He spoke at the TED2011 conference in Long Beach, California. TED is a nonprofit dedicated to "Ideas worth spreading," which it makes available through talks posted on its website. How do living organisms become conscious of what is happening to them and around them? How is it that I as well as you, reader of these words, can be conscious of our respective existences and of what is going on in our minds - in my case, ideas about how the brain generates consciousness, about the fact that I was asked to prepare this particular text for a specific deadline, along with the fact that I happen to be in Paris, at the moment, not Los Angeles, and that I am writing this on a cold January day. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241178-Unraveling-the-Mystery-of-Consciousness Mon, 06 Feb 2012 03:54:36 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241125-Hearing-metaphors-activates-brain-regions-involved-in-sensory-experience When a friend tells you she had a rough day, do you feel sandpaper under your fingers? The brain may be replaying sensory experiences to help understand common metaphors, new research suggests. Linguists and psychologists have debated how much the parts of the brain that mediate direct sensory experience are involved in understanding metaphors. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their landmark work 'Metaphors we live by', pointed out that our daily language is full of metaphors, some of which are so familiar (like "rough day") that they may not seem especially novel or striking. They argued that metaphor comprehension is grounded in our sensory and motor experiences. New brain imaging research reveals that a region of the brain important for sensing texture through touch, the parietal operculum, is also activated when someone listens to a sentence with a textural metaphor. The same region is not activated when a similar sentence expressing the meaning of the metaphor is heard. The results were published online this week in the journal Brain & Language. "We see that metaphors are engaging the areas of the cerebral cortex involved in sensory responses even though the metaphors are quite familiar," says senior author Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine and psychology at Emory University. "This result illustrates how we draw upon sensory experiences to achieve understanding of metaphorical language." Sathian is also medical director of the Center for Systems Imaging at Emory University School of Medicine and director of the Rehabilitation R&D Center of Excellence at the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Seven college students who volunteered for the study were asked to listen to sentences containing textural metaphors as well as sentences that were matched for meaning and structure, and to press a button as soon as they understood each sentence. Blood flow in their brains was monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging. On average, response to a sentence containing a metaphor took slightly longer (0.84 vs 0.63 seconds). https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241125-Hearing-metaphors-activates-brain-regions-involved-in-sensory-experience Sun, 05 Feb 2012 04:36:20 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241083-The-Price-of-Your-Soul-How-Your-Brain-Decides-Whether-to-Sell-Out- A neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold. "Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred - whether it's a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics - is a distinct cognitive process," says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits. Berns headed a team that included Emory economist Monica Capra; Michael Prietula, a professor of information systems and operations management at Emory's Goizueta Business School; a psychologist from the New School for Social Research and anthropologists from the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris, France. (Click here to see the full list of names.) The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241083-The-Price-of-Your-Soul-How-Your-Brain-Decides-Whether-to-Sell-Out- Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:54:54 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241052-Brains-of-Addicts-Are-Inherently-Abnormal Drug addicts have inherited abnormalities in some parts of the brain which interfere with impulse control, said a British study published in the United States on Thursday. Previous research has pointed to these differences, but it was unclear if they resulted from the ravages of addiction or if they were there beforehand to predispose a person to drug abuse. Scientists at the University of Cambridge compared the brains of addicts to their non-addicted siblings as well as to healthy, unrelated volunteers and found that the siblings shared many of the same weaknesses in their brains. That indicates that the brain vulnerabilities had a family origin, though somehow the siblings of addicts -- either due to environmental factors or other differences in brain structure -- were able to resist addiction. "Presumably, the siblings must have some other resilience factors that counteract the familial vulnerability to drug dependence," said the study led by Karen Ersche of the University of Cambridge, published in the journal Science. "An individual's predisposition to become addicted to stimulant drugs may be mediated by brain abnormalities linked to impaired self-control." https://www.sott.net/articles/show/241052-Brains-of-Addicts-Are-Inherently-Abnormal Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:56:29 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240988-Think-You-Know-How-to-Spot-a-Psychopath-Think-Again We'd all like to think that we have some sort of sixth sense that will warn us when we're truly in danger, some animal instinct that raises the hair on the backs of our necks, gives us goose bumps and sends us running in the opposite direction. Retired FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole, Ph.D., is here to tell us the truth about trusting our intuition in perilous situations. In Dangerous Instincts: How Gut Feelings Betray Us, she outlines how to protect yourself and your loved ones from bad people. Her tips are especially useful if you're thinking of doing some online dating, hiring a contractor/nanny/assistant, or letting your child's coach or another parent give him a ride home. It's perilous out there, and you could just crawl under the covers (with your entire family) and never come out. Or you can learn from O'Toole's 28 years of experience as an FBI agent, 15 of them as a profiler with the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) - the work popularized by shows like CBS's Criminal Minds. O'Toole worked on such cases as the Green River Killer, the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping and the hunt for the Unabomber. This and other experience interrogating wrongdoers taught her how to read people. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240988-Think-You-Know-How-to-Spot-a-Psychopath-Think-Again Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:11:14 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240967-Groundhog-Day-Phil-s-Myth-Stretches-Back-Centuries On Wednesday, a roly-poly rodent named Punxsutawney Phil will be hoisted from his burrow in front of TV cameras and cheering crowds and be called upon to predict the weather. If this famous groundhog casts a shadow, legend has it that winter is here to stay for six more weeks. Weird tradition, huh? In fact, relying on rodents as forecasters may date back to the early days of Christianity in Europe, when clear skies on Candlemas Day (Feb. 2) were said to herald cold weather ahead. In Germany, the tradition morphed into a myth that if the sun came out on Candlemas, a hedgehog would cast its shadow, predicting snow all the way into May. When German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania, they transferred the tradition onto local fauna, replacing hedgehogs with groundhogs. Groundhog Day is now kept alive by the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, whose members care for Punxsutawney Phil year-round. (Phil lives in an enclosure in the Punxsutawney Memorial Library along with several other groundhogs.) Every year, the Groundhog Club rises early with their charge and takes him to a local hillside, Gobbler's Knob, for the weather-prediction ceremony. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240967-Groundhog-Day-Phil-s-Myth-Stretches-Back-Centuries Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:27:38 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240944-Near-Death-Researcher-Believes-the-Mind-Survives-Death Robert Mays has studied near-death experiences for years, and has reached some conclusions. One is that the mind is "an energetic entity" that separates from the body as people are dying. "We believe a strong case can be made that the mind survives death," Mays said. "If we take what the near-death experiencers are saying, the mind will go to a place which is very positive. It's what everybody would call heaven." Mays is a board member of the International Association For Near Death Studies, a nonprofit research organization based in Durham. It has about 850 members worldwide, and its stated purpose is to promote responsible, multi-disciplinary exploration of near-death and similar experiences. An MIT graduate and retired software engineer at IBM, Mays has been interested in accounts of near-death experiences since he and his wife read Raymond Moody's book, Life After Life, in 1976, and George Ritchie's book, Return From Tomorrow. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240944-Near-Death-Researcher-Believes-the-Mind-Survives-Death Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:57:16 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240941-Inside-Your-Mind-Scientist-Can-Eavesdrop-on-What-You-Hear By analyzing the brain, scientists can tell what words a person has just heard, research now reveals. Such work could one day allow scientists to eavesdrop on the internal monologues that run through our minds, or hear the imagined speech of those unable to speak. "This is huge for patients who have damage to their speech mechanisms because of a stroke or Lou Gehrig's disease and can't speak," said researcher Robert Knight at the University of California at Berkeley. "If you could eventually reconstruct imagined conversations from brain activity, thousands of people could benefit." Recent studies have shown that scientists could tell what number a person has just seen by carefully analyzing brain activity. They similarly could figure out how many dots a person was presented with. To see if they could do the same for sound, researchers focused on decoding electrical activity in a region of the human auditory system called the superior temporal gyrus, or STG. The 15 volunteers in the study were patients undergoing neurosurgery for epilepsy or brain tumor - as such, researchers could directly access the STG with electrodes and see how it responded to words in normal conversation that volunteers listened to. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240941-Inside-Your-Mind-Scientist-Can-Eavesdrop-on-What-You-Hear Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:37:31 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240893-Are-We-Ready-for-a-Morality-Pill- Last October, in Foshan, China, a 2-year-old girl was run over by a van. The driver did not stop. Over the next seven minutes, more than a dozen people walked or bicycled past the injured child. A second truck ran over her. Eventually, a woman pulled her to the side, and her mother arrived. The child died in a hospital. The entire scene was captured on video and caused an uproar when it was shown by a television station and posted online. A similar event occurred in London in 2004, as have others, far from the lens of a video camera. Yet people can, and often do, behave in very different ways. A news search for the words "hero saves" will routinely turn up stories of bystanders braving oncoming trains, swift currents and raging fires to save strangers from harm. Acts of extreme kindness, responsibility and compassion are, like their opposites, nearly universal. Why are some people prepared to risk their lives to help a stranger when others won't even stop to dial an emergency number? https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240893-Are-We-Ready-for-a-Morality-Pill- Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:48:56 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240859-How-a-Mother-s-Love-Changes-a-Child-s-Brain Nurturing a child early in life may help him or her develop a larger hippocampus, the brain region important for learning, memory and stress responses, a new study shows. Previous animal research showed that early maternal support has a positive effect on a young rat's hippocampal growth, production of brain cells and ability to deal with stress. Studies in human children, on the other hand, found a connection between early social experiences and the volume of the amygdala, which helps regulate the processing and memory of emotional reactions. Numerous studies also have found that children raised in a nurturing environment typically do better in school and are more emotionally developed than their non-nurtured peers. Brain images have now revealed that a mother's love physically affects the volume of her child's hippocampus. In the study, children of nurturing mothers had hippocampal volumes 10 percent larger than children whose mothers were not as nurturing. Research has suggested a link between a larger hippocampus and better memory. "We can now say with confidence that the psychosocial environment has a material impact on the way the human brain develops," said Dr. Joan Luby, the study's lead researcher and a psychiatrist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo. "It puts a very strong wind behind the sail of the idea that early nurturing of children positively affects their development." https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240859-How-a-Mother-s-Love-Changes-a-Child-s-Brain Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:13:23 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240857-FYI-Will-Listening-to-Mozart-Really-Make-Me-Smarter- Yes, but no more than listening to Justin Bieber. The misconception that there's something unique about Mozart's ability to increase brainpower began in 1993, with a paper in Nature. Neurobiologists Gordon Shaw, Frances Rauscher and Katherine Ky of the University of California at Irvine found that students who listened to 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata demonstrated a temporary increase in spatial-temporal reasoning, as measured by an IQ test. The public seized on the romantic idea that listening to Mozart would make them smarter, and Don Campbell, a teacher and music educator from Texas, capitalized on the notion with an international bestseller, The Mozart Effect. But Glenn Schellenberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, says that there is no Mozart effect. Any number of experiences besides listening to music might improve cognition. Most people find the music of Mozart pleasant to listen to, and it might increase dopamine levels in the brain, which is generally thought to improve cognition. But "eating chocolate might have the same effect," Schellenberg says. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240857-FYI-Will-Listening-to-Mozart-Really-Make-Me-Smarter- Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:45:04 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240825-Primitive-Attraction-Magnetized-Moon-Rock-Points-to-Lunar-Core-s-Active-Past A lunar sample collected by Apollo astronauts suggests that other-Earthly geophysics drove the moon's churning interior The moon of today is a static orb with little to no internal activity; for all intents and purposes it appears to be a dead, dusty pebble of a world. But billions of years ago the moon may have been a place of far more dynamism - literally. A new study of a lunar rock scooped up by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during their Apollo 11 mission indicates that the ancient moon long sustained a dynamo - a convecting fluid core, much like Earth'sthat produces a global magnetic field. The age of the rock implies that the lunar dynamo was still going some 3.7 billion years ago, about 800 million years after the moon's formation. That is longer than would be expected if the lunar dynamo were powered primarily by the natural churning of a cooling molten interior, as is the case on Earth. The moon's small core should have cooled off rather quickly and put an end to any dynamo-generated magnetic field within a few hundred million years. So researchers may have to explore alternate explanations for how a dynamo could be sustained - explanations that depart from thinking of the lunar interior in terms of Earthly geophysics. A standard-issue, Earth-like dynamo "would have died out on the moon much, much before 3.7 billion years ago," says Erin Shea, a graduate student in geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author on a study in the January 27 issue of Science. "We have to start thinking outside the box about what generates a lunar dynamo." https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240825-Primitive-Attraction-Magnetized-Moon-Rock-Points-to-Lunar-Core-s-Active-Past Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:18:46 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240769-Low-IQ-Conservative-Beliefs-Linked-to-Prejudice There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy. The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience. "Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood," he said. Controversy ahead The findings combine three hot-button topics. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240769-Low-IQ-Conservative-Beliefs-Linked-to-Prejudice Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:43:51 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240767-Study-Multitasking-Hinders-Youth-Social-Skills FaceTime, the Apple video-chat application, is not a replacement for real human interaction, especially for children, according to a new study. Tween girls who spend much of their waking hours switching frantically between YouTube, Facebook, television and text messaging are more likely to develop social problems, says a Stanford University study published in a scientific journal on Wednesday. Young girls who spend the most time multitasking between various digital devices, communicating online or watching video are the least likely to develop normal social tendencies, according to the survey of 3,461 American girls aged 8 to 12 who volunteered responses. The study only included girls who responded to a survey in Discovery Girls magazine, but results should apply to boys, too, Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor of communications who worked on the study, said in a phone interview. Boys' emotional development is more difficult to analyze because male social development varies widely and over a longer time period, he said. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240767-Study-Multitasking-Hinders-Youth-Social-Skills Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:51:15 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240765-The-Pupils-are-the-Windows-to-the-Mind The eyes are the window into the soul - or at least the mind, according to a new paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Measuring the diameter of the pupil, the part of the eye that changes size to let in more light, can show what a person is paying attention to. Pupillometry, as it's called, has been used in social psychology, clinical psychology, humans, animals, children, infants - and it should be used even more, the authors say. The pupil is best known for changing size in reaction to light. In a dark room, your pupils open wide to let in more light; as soon as you step outside into the sunlight, the pupils shrink to pinpricks. This keeps the retina at the back of the eye from being overwhelmed by bright light. Something similar happens in response to psychological stimuli, says Bruno Laeng of the University of Oslo, who cowrote the paper with Sylvain Sirois of Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and Gustaf Gredebäck of Uppsala University in Sweden. When someone sees something they want to pay closer attention to, the pupil enlarges. It's not clear why this happens, Laeng says. "One idea is that, by essentially enlarging the field of the visual input, it's beneficial to visual exploration," he says. However it works, psychological scientists can use the fact that people's pupils widen when they see something they're interested in. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240765-The-Pupils-are-the-Windows-to-the-Mind Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:44:37 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240738-The-Amygdala-And-Fear-Are-Not-The-Same-Thing In a 2007 episode of the television show Boston Legal, a character claimed to have figured out that a cop was racist because his amygdala activated - displaying fear, when they showed him pictures of black people. This link between the amygdala and fear - especially a fear of others unlike us, has gone too far, not only in pop culture, but also in psychological science, say the authors of a new paper which will be published in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Indeed, many experiments have found that the amygdala is active when people are afraid. But it also activates at other times, for example in response to pleasant photographs and happy faces. The misconception came from how scientists first approached studying the brain. A lot of people came to the amygdala from the study of fear, says Wil Cunningham of Ohio State University, who co wrote the new paper with Tobias Brosch of New York University. "It's a great emotion to study because it's very important, evolutionarily, and we know a lot about fear in animals," Cunningham says. Almost every study of fear finds that the amygdala is active. But that doesn't mean every spark of activity in the amygdala means the person is afraid. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240738-The-Amygdala-And-Fear-Are-Not-The-Same-Thing Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:37:28 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240657-Babies-Are-Born-With-Intuitive-Physics-Knowledge-Says-Researcher While it may appear that infants are helpless creatures that only blink, eat, cry and sleep, one University of Missouri researcher says that studies indicate infant brains come equipped with knowledge of "intuitive physics." "In the MU Developmental Cognition Lab, we study infant knowledge of the world by measuring a child's gaze when presented with different scenarios," said Kristy vanMarle, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences in the College of Arts and Science. "We believe that infants are born with expectations about the objects around them, even though that knowledge is a skill that's never been taught. As the child develops, this knowledge is refined and eventually leads to the abilities we use as adults." In a review of related scientific literature from the past 30 years, vanMarle and Susan Hespos of Northwestern University found that the evidence for intuitive physics occurs in infants as young as two months - the earliest age at which testing can occur. At that age, infants show an understanding that unsupported objects will fall and that hidden objects do not cease to exist. Scientific testing also has shown that by five months, infants have an expectation that non-cohesive substances like sand or water are not solid. In a previous publication, vanMarle found that children as young as 10 months consistently choose larger amounts when presented with two different amounts of food substance. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240657-Babies-Are-Born-With-Intuitive-Physics-Knowledge-Says-Researcher Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:17:48 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240627-The-Smell-of-Anxiety-Induces-Empathy-in-Humans New research flying in the face of many popular and not-so-forgiving views about 'human nature' indicates there is an olfactory-based, evolutionary mechanism built into the human genome/soul to feel empathy for the anxiety/suffering of others. In a fascinating study entitled "Induction of empathy by the smell of anxiety," published in the journal of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) in 2009, researchers discovered "The chemosensory perception of human anxiety seems to automatically recruit empathy-related resources." Smelling chemical signals from the sweat of anxious subjects elicited an empathic response, even when the smell was below the threshold of consciousness in half the subjects. Empathy, in fact, has concrete and measurable therapeutic effects in others. In 2009, researchers found that practitioner empathy reduced the duration of the common cold in their patients. Conversely, a negative and/or indifferent attitude towards the patient has measurable adverse effects, also known as the nocebo effect. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240627-The-Smell-of-Anxiety-Induces-Empathy-in-Humans Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:46:52 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240560-Toddlers-to-Tweens-Relearning-How-to-Play Havely Taylor knows that her two children do not play the way she did when she was growing up. When Ms. Taylor was a girl, in a leafy suburb of Birmingham, Ala., she climbed trees, played imaginary games with her friends, and transformed a hammock into a storm-tossed sea vessel. She even whittled bows and arrows from downed branches around the yard and had "wars" with friends - something she admits she'd probably freak out about if her children did it today. "I mean, you could put an eye out like that," she says with a laugh. Her children - Ava, age 12, and Henry, 8 - have had a different experience. They live in Baltimore, where Taylor works as an art teacher. Between school, homework, violin lessons, ice-skating, theater, and play dates, there is little time for the sort of freestyle play Taylor remembers. Besides, Taylor says, they live in the city, with a postage stamp of a backyard and the ever-present threat of urban danger. "I was kind of afraid to let them go out unsupervised in Baltimore...," she says, of how she started down this path with the kids. "I'm really a protective mom. There wasn't much playing outside." This difference has always bothered her, she says, because she believes that play is critical for children's developing emotions, creativity, and intelligence. But when she learned that her daughter's middle school had done away with recess, and even free time after lunch, she decided to start fighting for play. "It seemed almost cruel," she says. "Play is important for children - it's something so obvious it's almost hard to articulate. How can you talk about childhood without talking about play? It's almost as if they are trying to get rid of childhood." Taylor joined a group of parents pressuring the principal to let their children have a recess, citing experts such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends that all students have at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day. They issued petitions and held meetings. And although the school has not yet agreed to change its curriculum, Taylor says she feels their message is getting more recognition. She is not alone in her concerns. In recent years, child development experts, parents, and scientists have been sounding an increasingly urgent alarm about the decreasing amount of time that children - and adults, for that matter - spend playing. A combination of social forces, from a No Child Left Behind focus on test scores to the push for children to get ahead with programmed extracurricular activities, leaves less time for the roughhousing, fantasizing, and pretend worlds advocates say are crucial for development. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240560-Toddlers-to-Tweens-Relearning-How-to-Play Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:16:15 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240518-When-did-clapping-start- Why do we applaud a great performance? Why not stand on our heads or click our heels instead? Who started this hand-clapping stuff? Hear, hear! Huzzah! Bravo! Excellent question. Superb, really. And ultimately unanswerable. As Elwyn Simons, head of Duke University's Division of Fossil Primates, tells AF, "We don't know how far back it goes, not without a time machine. Cavemen and human ancestors - we don't know whether they clapped hands or not. But you don't find primates doing it unless they've been taught to do it. They do clap hands in the wild. It's not to applaud something; it's because they're frightened or want to call attention to food." Yvette Blanchard, a pediatric physical therapist and researcher at the University of Hartford, says that human clappers are made, not born. "I think it's a learned behavior. What I've seen babies do spontaneously, from excitement, is clasp their hands together. But the motion of clapping, I think that's a learned behavior." https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240518-When-did-clapping-start- Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:29:19 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240508-Group-Settings-Can-Diminish-Expressions-of-Intelligence-Especially-Among-Women In the classic film 12 Angry Men, Henry Fonda's character sways a jury with his quiet, persistent intelligence. But would he have succeeded if he had allowed himself to fall sway to the social dynamics of that jury? Research led by scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute found that small-group dynamics -- such as jury deliberations, collective bargaining sessions, and cocktail parties -- can alter the expression of IQ in some susceptible people. "You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well," said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, who led the study. The scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how the brain processes information about social status in small groups and how perceptions of that status affect expressions of cognitive capacity. "We started with individuals who were matched for their IQ," said Montague. "Yet when we placed them in small groups, ranked their performance on cognitive tasks against their peers, and broadcast those rankings to them, we saw dramatic drops in the ability of some study subjects to solve problems. The social feedback had a significant effect." https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240508-Group-Settings-Can-Diminish-Expressions-of-Intelligence-Especially-Among-Women Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:02:32 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240471-Bad-Bosses-The-Psycho-path-to-Success- Think you suffer from a "psycho" boss? A small but growing body of global research suggests you might be right. Call it the "Psycho-path to Success." Psychopaths -- narcissists guided without conscience, who mimic rather than feel real emotions -- bring to mind serial killers such as Ted Bundy or fictional murderers such as Hannibal Lecter or Dexter, the anti-hero of the popular Showtime TV series. But psychologists say most psychopaths are not behind bars -- and at least one study shows people with psychopathic tendencies are four times more likely to be found in senior management. "Not all psychopaths are in prison -- some are in the boardroom," said Dr. Robert Hare, a Canadian psychologist who is co-author of the book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work. Is your boss a 'psycho'? And British researcher Clive Boddy goes further: He thinks the 2007-2008 financial crisis may have resulted in the growing proliferation of psychopathic personalities in the corner office -- an offshoot of the erosion of single company employment in the last generation. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240471-Bad-Bosses-The-Psycho-path-to-Success- Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:34:48 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240406-When-it-Comes-to-Accepting-Evolution-Gut-Feelings-Trump-Facts For students to accept the theory of evolution, an intuitive "gut feeling" may be just as important as understanding the facts, according to a new study. In an analysis of the beliefs of biology teachers, researchers found that a quick intuitive notion of how right an idea feels was a powerful driver of whether or not students accepted evolution - often trumping factors such as knowledge level or religion. "The whole idea behind acceptance of evolution has been the assumption that if people understood it - if they really knew it - they would see the logic and accept it," said David Haury, co-author of the new study and associate professor of education at Ohio State University. "But among all the scientific studies on the matter, the most consistent finding was inconsistency. One study would find a strong relationship between knowledge level and acceptance, and others would find no relationship. Some would find a strong relationship between religious identity and acceptance, and others would find less of a relationship." https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240406-When-it-Comes-to-Accepting-Evolution-Gut-Feelings-Trump-Facts Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:04:48 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240360-Toxic-Couple-Relationships PART 1 - Five Protective Neural Patterns & Role Scripts Love that turns toxic is neither healthy nor genuine, though the intentions of each partner are often well-meaning. A couple relationship can be described as toxic when, due to intense emotional reactivity and defensive interaction patterns, it no longer promotes, and instead harms the individual mental, emotional, and physical, well-being and growth of each partner. The relationship is increasingly off balance, a factor that is affected by, and directly affects the individual inner sense of balance, health and safety of each partner. In contrast, genuine love is an empathic connection that recognizes the authentic other and self as separate and unique beings, even encouraging the individuality of each as essential to the formation of healthy intimacy in a relationship. Neurological findings in the last decades show that we are wired for certain early protective behaviors in life, and that these become habitual responses automatically activated throughout life, often without conscious awareness. Intense emotional experiences in childhood can alter the structure of the brain and have enduring effects in adulthood. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240360-Toxic-Couple-Relationships Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:56:14 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240335-Statin-Associated-Memory-Loss ABSTRACT OBJECTIVE: To obtain and examine Medwatch reports of cases of cognitive impairment associated with atorvastatin. METHODS: A FDA database of Medwatch reports of atorvastatin-associated adverse events was searched for terms that included the word amnesia. This search revealed reports listed as transient amnesia, transient global amnesia, wandering amnesia, anterograde amnesia, dissociative amnesia and retrograde amnesia. No reports were uncovered using the terms memory loss, memory disturbance, or memory disruption, yet memory impairment revealed multiple reports. Searches were directed at only serious cognitive events. Minor events such as forgetfulness or confusion were not sought, and it is possible that we missed an occasional serious event listed under a mild symptom. The well-known Naranjo probability scale was applied to 50 randomly selected, case reports of Lipitor associated cognitive dysfunction. RESULTS: Six hundred and sixty-two Medwatch reports were received of atorvastatin-associated cognitive impairments. Of these, 399 were cases of amnesia, and 263 were cases of memory impairment. The number of reports per year increased from 1997 through 2006. Random analysis of individual Medwatch reports demonstrated that most were definitely or probably caused by atorvastatin. The average atorvastatin dosage of cases 1997-2001 was 15 mg/day, whereas the average dosage in 2006 was 22 mg/day. Earlier research suggests that the number of Medwatch reports for statin-linked adverse events greatly underestimates the scope of the problem. Other research suggests that statin drugs may cause subclinical yet important cognitive impairments in all patients receiving statins. CONCLUSION: The findings of the present study coupled with earlier research demonstrate the urgent need for further research regarding the frequency and severity of cognitive impairments in patients receiving statin drugs. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240335-Statin-Associated-Memory-Loss Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:53:35 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240334-Study-Abstract-Total-Serum-Cholesterol-Level-and-Violent-Criminal-Offences Total serum cholesterol level, violent criminal offences, suicidal behavior, mortality and the appearance of conduct disorder in Finnish male criminal offenders with antisocial personality disorder. Abstract Associations between low total serum cholesterol (TC) levels and antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), violent and suicidal behavior have been found. We investigated the associations between TC levels, violent and suicidal behavior, age of onset of the conduct disorder (CD) and the age of death among 250 Finnish male criminal offenders with ASPD. The CD had begun before the age of 10 two times more often in non-violent criminal offenders who had lower than median TC levels. The violent criminal offenders having lower than median TC levels were seven times more likely to die before the median age of death in the study material. The violent offenders having lower than median TC levels were eight times more likely to die of unnatural causes. The mean TC level of these male offenders with ASPD was lower than that of the general Finnish male population. Low TC levels are associated with childhood onset type of the CD, and premature and unnatural mortality among male offenders with ASPD. The TC level seems to be a peripheral marker with prognostic value among boys with conduct disorder and antisocial male offenders. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240334-Study-Abstract-Total-Serum-Cholesterol-Level-and-Violent-Criminal-Offences Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:48:13 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240332-Does-Low-Serum-Cholesterol-Cause-Psychopathy- Strange as it may seem, low cholesterol could be a significant factor, maybe even the cause, of psychopathy. I got to thinking about this as a result of reading an article about psychopathy in the current New Yorker, in which we learn about a psychological researcher named Kent Kiehl, who is using MRI scans to study the brains of imprisoned psychopaths. To date, Kiehl has scanned ninety adult psychopathic brains with the portable scanner. The data, he says, confirm his hypothesis that psychopathy corresponds to a deficit in the paralimbic region. "If you put the pictures of the psychopaths' brains next to the control group, it's obvious," he told me. The paralimbic region of the brain is responsible for memory formation as well as mediating negative emotional states, such as guilt. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240332-Does-Low-Serum-Cholesterol-Cause-Psychopathy- Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:46:41 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240311-How-the-Modern-Lifestyle-Breeds-Depression-and-Distress Mental illness is a steadily rising epidemic. With nearly half of all Americans set to receive some form of diagnosis for a mental disorder, it's hardly something that can be glossed over. Mental health, however, is in a highly compromised state due to all forms of societal changes and technological advances over the last century. In this modern age, many simple truths about human nature are overshadowed by our demanding lifestyle, and our propensity to gravitate toward forms of instant cures and gratification. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240311-How-the-Modern-Lifestyle-Breeds-Depression-and-Distress Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:10:34 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240206-The-Amazing-Power-of-Regret-to-Shape-Our-Future Why people are reluctant to exchange lottery tickets, but will happily exchange pens. Regret might not make a list of the most powerful emotions. It would probably include things like anger, happiness, jealousy, sadness and especially for us English, embarrassment. We tend to think of regret as essentially a backward-looking emotion. We regret things in the past, like not trying hard enough in school, how we treated a friend or the things we said to our partner in the heat of an argument. In this sense you might argue that it's useless: why regret something you can't change? But regret isn't just a backward-looking emotion, it also looks forward and it can be a terribly powerful emotion which affects our behaviour in the here and now. That's because we also have the power to anticipate feeling regret in the future, which we naturally try to avoid. My favourite example involves a simple study about lottery tickets and pens. Would you swap the ticket? In this study participants were given lottery tickets - not real ones, but organised by the researchers so that one person could win. Then they were asked if they would be willing to exchange them for another one which had an identical chance of winning (Bar-Hillel & Neter, 1996). To encourage them to switch tickets, they were offered a tasty truffle. Even though there was no difference between the tickets and there was a treat as an incentive, less than 50% of participants agreed. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240206-The-Amazing-Power-of-Regret-to-Shape-Our-Future Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:01:40 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240201-Twelve-Things-You-Were-Not-Taught-in-School-About-Creative-Thinking Aspects of creative thinking that are not usually taught. You are creative. The artist is not a special person, each one of us is a special kind of artist. Every one of us is born a creative, spontaneous thinker. The only difference between people who are creative and people who are not is a simple belief. Creative people believe they are creative. People who believe they are not creative, are not. Once you have a particular identity and set of beliefs about yourself, you become interested in seeking out the skills needed to express your identity and beliefs. This is why people who believe they are creative become creative. If you believe you are not creative, then there is no need to learn how to become creative and you don't. The reality is that believing you are not creative excuses you from trying or attempting anything new. When someone tells you that they are not creative, you are talking to someone who has no interest and will make no effort to be a creative thinker. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240201-Twelve-Things-You-Were-Not-Taught-in-School-About-Creative-Thinking Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:51:12 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240191-Imagine-that-How-you-envision-others-says-a-lot-about-you-in-real-life Employees who imagine confident, positive coworkers are more productive in real life, study finds. Quick, come up with an imaginary co-worker. Did you imagine someone who is positive, confident, and resourceful? Who rises to the occasion in times of trouble? If so, then chances are that you also display those traits in your own life, a new study finds. University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers have found that study participants who conjured positive imaginary co-workers contributed more in the actual workplace, both in job performance and going above and beyond their job descriptions to help others. The results showed that your perceptions of others - even ones that are made up - says a lot about what kind of person you really are, said Peter Harms, UNL assistant professor of management and the study's lead author. Imagining coworkers instead of reporting on how you perceive your actual coworkers produces more accurate ratings of having a positive worldview, he said, because it strips away the unique relational baggage that one may have with the people they know. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240191-Imagine-that-How-you-envision-others-says-a-lot-about-you-in-real-life Fri, 13 Jan 2012 05:43:29 -0600 https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240153-Unplug-Yourself-How-Advertising-and-Entertainment-Shapes-Your-Subconscious They say the subconscious is more powerful than the conscious. Usually, people are more influenced by their innate subconscious desires or intent than a rational and planned decision. This aspect of human nature is heavily influenced by your daily activity. How Corporations Influence Your Subconscious In western society, the subconscious mind of the individual is often subject to a number of heavy influences, through entertainment mediums especially. Television, movies, and music create a profound subconscious effect on the human mind that influences and dictates the choices that they will make to at least some degree. If you see a certain car advertisement, whether or not you rationally decide your stance on it, you are being pre-programmed to at least accept or acknowledge any claims made by the advertisement itself. Likewise, the choice of television shows and dramatic elements appearing on TV have a psychological influence on those who watch them. According to statistics, by age 18 the average American youth will have seen over 200,000 simulated acts of violence. The glorification of drug and alcohol use predisposes an individual to rationally accept and sometimes consent to these actions. https://www.sott.net/articles/show/240153-Unplug-Yourself-How-Advertising-and-Entertainment-Shapes-Your-Subconscious Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:58:19 -0600