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Wed, 21 Nov 2018
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Seeing and transforming the most negative parts of ourselves into something constructive

Gary Z McGee
Waking Times
Mon, 19 Nov 2018 00:00 UTC
insight
A fully integrated human is in touch with their wholeness, whether good or bad, light or dark, ugly or beautiful. Balancing these energies can be counterintuitive. Integrating the whole leads to the holistic experience of self-actualization. But it's not easy to achieve. It does not come naturally. Yet if we can practice such integration, no matter how counterintuitive, it can be the source of tremendous power and self-fulfillment.

1. Practical Grandiosity Over Grandiosity
"To learn to creatively live with the daemonic or be violently devoured by it. We will decide our own destiny. Let us choose wisely." ~Stephen Diamond
What is practical grandiosity? It's being honest about the fact that you are a unique being, but not going too far by imagining that you are better than others. It's taking your natural grandiose energy and channeling it into a real project rather than basing it on an unreal fantasy. It's about being honest with your limits and then having the wherewithal to stretch those limits through self-improvement rather than self-embellishment.
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Evil Rays

Study: People posting lots of pictures to social media became 25% more narcissistic in four months


PsyBlog
Mon, 19 Nov 2018 00:01 UTC
phone millennial


The modern way to develop a personality disorder.

Posting too many pictures to social media can turn you into a narcissist, new research reveals.

People posting pictures heavily to social media became 25% more narcissistic in the four months of the study.

The increase pushed many across the cut-off for having a narcissistic personality disorder.

Comment: The results of this study aren't really surprising. Anyone posting lots of pictures to social media has too much brain real-estate being taken up by these platforms, mistaking the vain, shallow shell for reality. If you're basing your self-worth on how many 'likes' you get on a picture, how could you not become a total narcissist?

See also:

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Info

'Human-like' brain waves produced in lab-grown mini-brains

Daniel Oberhaus
Motherboard
Mon, 19 Nov 2018 15:36 UTC
Slice thru brain
© Muotri Lab/UC San Diego
A slice through a brain organoid shows more mature cortical neurons on the outer edge of the structure.
Neuroscientists from the University of California San Diego observed spontaneous electrical activity that resembles human brain waves in a lab-grown "mini-brain" for the first time. They hope this breakthrough will allow researchers to study the early stages of brain disorders like epilepsy in infants, which is usually difficult or impossible due to the difficulty of analyzing a fetus in utero.

As detailed in a preprint research paper presented at the Society for Neuroscience Meeting earlier this month, a research team led by the neuroscientist Alysson Muotri used stem cells to grow hundreds of mini-brains, also known as brain "organoids," over the course of 10 months. Muotri and his colleagues grew these stem cells so that they would form cortical tissue, which is found in the region of the brain responsible for cognition and analyzing sensory data.

After the brain organoids had been growing in petri dishes for about six months, the researchers noticed that the electrical activity they were measuring was occuring at a higher rate than had ever been documented before in lab-grown organoids. Even more surprising, however, was that this electrical activity didn't resemble the synchronized activity seen in mature human brains. Instead, the electrical patterns were chaotic, a hallmark of a developing brain.
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Books

The meaning of monstrosity has morphed dramatically over the course of history

Natalie Lawrence
Aeon
Wed, 31 Oct 2018 15:00 UTC
monsters
© Courtesy Amherst College Archives
A Colossal Octopus [Pierre Denys de Montfort] (1828-40) by Orra White Hitchcock, who was one of the first female scientific illustrators in the US.
In 2003, a team of scientists in China managed to create embryos containing a mix of rabbit and human DNA. Most of the biological matter was human, while the rabbit DNA was present only in the mitochondria, the energy-generators of the cells. The aim was to try to find new ways of growing and harvesting the stem cells present in early human development, which were (and are) a promising avenue for medical study and treatment.

It wasn't long, however, before controversy erupted over these so-called 'chimeras', as they were dubbed by some researchers. Were they human? What would happen if they were allowed to develop? Soon activists mobilized to restrict or quash the research. In 2005, the US outlawed patents on human embryos; in 2007, the Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act was proposed in Congress (although ultimately it failed to pass into law). According to the bill, research into hybrids was said to compromise 'human dignity and the integrity of the human species'. Pig heart transplants or the administration of animal-based insulin were acceptable, but the threat of potentially viable, cellular hybrids was too strong, despite the myriad social benefits it could yield.
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SOTT Logo Radio

The Truth Perspective: 5 Easy Pieces: How the Big 5 Personality Traits Impact Who We Are, and Who We Can Become

Harrison Koehli and Corey Schink
Sott.net
Sat, 17 Nov 2018 17:00 UTC
man cliff landscape
Every single individual varies along a range of five personality traits. We don't know why, or how, only that we do. Agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, openness: these five traits, and the variations within them, capture the range of human personality, and they do it quite well. They capture differences between men and women, between liberals and conservatives, between emotionally unstable artists and hard-working manager types, and everyone in between.

Not only do the traits help us know ourselves a bit better - like what careers or environments are best suited to our personality and what aspects of our personality are most likely to bring us into conflict with others - they help us gain a better understand of just how different other people can be from us, and why. And they point out the aspects of our personality that might need some work: like when to be more assertive, harder-working, kinder, cautious, or adventurous.

Today on the Truth Perspective we discuss all this and more, with reference to Jordan Peterson's Big 5 personality test: Understand Myself.

Running Time: 01:17:45

Download: OGG, MP3


Listen live, chat, and call in to future shows on the SOTT Radio Network!
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Headphones

Soundscape: The importance of sound and silence

Dr. Weil
drweil.com
Fri, 16 Nov 2018 20:37 UTC
soundscape
Sound and silence have a direct, powerful influence on emotions. We seldom acknowledge this fact, yet it is self-evident - we become anxious when we hear sirens or people arguing, sleepy when we hear a lullaby, focused by the hypnotic repetition of chanting.

Most people are unaware of the effects of sound and silence on the body and mind, even in the midst of the noise pollution so characteristic of cities. It is vital for your emotional health to take control of the soundscape that surrounds you. If you cannot escape disturbing sounds, the new technology of noise cancellation gives you a way to protect yourself from them. Noise-canceling headphones detect environmental noise with built-in microphones and generate signals that neutralize it; they are readily available and affordable.

Comment: Noisy busyness and the disappearance of silence

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Fire

Shamans: 'Astronauts of inner space'

Thomas T. Hills
Aeon
Thu, 01 Nov 2018 12:55 UTC
Shamans
© Kevin Frayer/Getty
A Mongolian shaman or böö sits with his child before a fire ritual during the summer solstice in June 2018 outside Ulaanbaatar. Banned under communist rule, shamanism has seen a resurgence in Mongolia since 1992, when the ancient practice became protected by the country's Constitution.
The trances and healing powers of shamans are so widespread that they can be counted a human universal. Why did they evolve?

Shamanism is as varied as those who practice it. Its practitioners range from indigenous lineages who have passed down their craft over thousands of years to the modern 'plastic shamans', who represent no specific culture but have adapted shamanism to meet the demands of metropolitan markets. However, there is a common theme to shamanism wherever it is practised: the use of spiritual (or shamanic) trance to facilitate journeys to a non-ordinary reality. Here, in this non-ordinary reality, the shamans do their work. According to the historian of religion Mircea Eliade writing in 1951, shamanism is the 'technique of ecstasy', involving the purposeful invocation and use of dreams and visions to solve problems.

By this definition, shamanism is the landscape of the spirit-journey, populated by good and evil spirits and the souls of the deceased and yet-to-be-born. It is the place where mountains speak and Grandmother Skeleton points out which plants to eat when the dry season lasts too long. In this form, shamanism is everywhere in the old ways of humans. Every tribal culture - alive or dead - has some broker of spiritual capital. The Indonesian Mentawai have their sikerei. The Inuit have their angakok. The Columbian Desana have their paye. The Mongolian Buryat have their böö. The American Sioux have their heyoka.
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Brain

New study on schadenfreude sheds light on darker side of humanity


Science Daily
Mon, 22 Oct 2018 19:36 UTC
Schadenfreude cartoon
© Torodo
'Dehumanization appears to be at the core of schadenfreude'

Schadenfreude, the sense of pleasure people derive from the misfortune of others, is a familiar feeling to many -- perhaps especially during these times of pervasive social media.

This common, yet poorly understood, emotion may provide a valuable window into the darker side of humanity, finds a review article by psychologists at Emory University.

New Ideas in Psychology published the review, which drew upon evidence from three decades of social, developmental, personality and clinical research to devise a novel framework to systematically explain schadenfreude. The authors propose that schadenfreude comprises three separable but interrelated subforms -- aggression, rivalry and justice -- which have distinct developmental origins and personality correlates.
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Brain

Loneliness is bad for the brain

Laura Sanders
Science News
Tue, 06 Nov 2018 22:25 UTC
Loneliness is bad for the brain
© RawPixel/iStock
Mice yanked out of their community and held in solitary isolation show signs of brain damage.

After a month of being alone, the mice had smaller nerve cells in certain parts of the brain. Other brain changes followed, scientists reported at a news briefing November 4 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

It's not known whether similar damage happens in the brains of isolated humans. If so, the results have implications for the health of people who spend much of their time alone, including the estimated tens of thousands of inmates in solitary confinement in the United States and elderly people in institutionalized care facilities.

The new results, along with other recent brain studies, clearly show that for social species, isolation is damaging, says neurobiologist Huda Akil of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "There is no question that this is changing the basic architecture of the brain," Akil says.

Comment: See also:

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Info

The 'hard problem' of consciousness - Could consciousness all come down to the way things vibrate?

Tam Hunt
The Conversation
Fri, 09 Nov 2018 21:32 UTC
Vibrations
© agsandrew/Shutterstock
What do synchronized vibrations add to the mind/body question?
Why is my awareness here, while yours is over there? Why is the universe split in two for each of us, into a subject and an infinity of objects? How is each of us our own center of experience, receiving information about the rest of the world out there? Why are some things conscious and others apparently not? Is a rat conscious? A gnat? A bacterium?

These questions are all aspects of the ancient "mind-body problem," which asks, essentially: What is the relationship between mind and matter? It's resisted a generally satisfying conclusion for thousands of years.

The mind-body problem enjoyed a major rebranding over the last two decades. Now it's generally known as the "hard problem" of consciousness, after philosopher David Chalmers coined this term in a now classic paper and further explored it in his 1996 book, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.

Chalmers thought the mind-body problem should be called "hard" in comparison to what, with tongue in cheek, he called the "easy" problems of neuroscience: How do neurons and the brain work at the physical level? Of course they're not actually easy at all. But his point was that they're relatively easy compared to the truly difficult problem of explaining how consciousness relates to matter.

Over the last decade, my colleague, University of California, Santa Barbara psychology professor Jonathan Schooler and I have developed what we call a "resonance theory of consciousness." We suggest that resonance - another word for synchronized vibrations - is at the heart of not only human consciousness but also animal consciousness and of physical reality more generally. It sounds like something the hippies might have dreamed up - it's all vibrations, man! - but stick with me.
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