Imagine that you're in a bar and you accidentally knock over your neighbor's beer. He turns around and stares at you, looking for confrontation. Do you buy him a new drink, or do you try to outstare him to make him back off? New research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that the dominance behavior exhibited by staring someone down can be reflexive.

Our primate relatives certainly get into dominance battles; they mostly resolve the dominance hierarchy not through fighting, but through staring contests. And humans are like that, too. David Terburg, Nicole Hooiveld, Henk Aarts, J. Leon Kenemans, and Jack van Honk of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands wanted to examine something that's been assumed in a lot of research: that staring for dominance is automatic for humans.

He - the person is usually depicted as a "he" - turns off the alarm, stares into a bowl of soggy cereal, puts on a tired-looking suit and goes to the office for more of the same drab routine. And so it continues until one day, usually the day he realizes he is mortal (or starting to lose his hair), he goes berserk: He bangs his secretary, quits his job and buys a red convertible.

And we all nod, acknowledging the inevitable midlife crisis. One made Monica Lewinsky famous, another won an Academy Award for "American Beauty," and the concept is as embedded in our culture as the belief in the power of positive thinking.

But the idea that midlife crises are common is a myth, experts say.

"It makes for good novels or good movies, but it is not really accurate," said psychologist Margie Lachman of Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

"There is no specific time in life that predisposes you to crisis," said Alexandra Freund, a life-span researcher at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

"There can be times when things crystallize as very problematic, a very deep disturbance in your life," Freund told LiveScience. "People experience these types of crises, but they are not at all related to age."

Instead, Lachman said, crises are usually spurred by some event that can happen at most any age, such as a career setback, the death of a friend or relative, or an illness.

Epidemiologists have found no spike in negative events - such as career disillusionment - in middle age, Freund explained.

So if the revitalized libido and sudden hankerings for sports cars are purely the stuff of Hollywood, then what does happen to a person during these years?

View videos (video1, video2) showing examples of deaf Nicaraguans communicating with self-developed gestures called "homesigns."

New research conducted with deaf people in Nicaragua shows that language may play an important role in learning the meanings of numbers.

Field studies by University of Chicago psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow and a team of researchers found deaf people in Nicaragua, who had not learned formal sign language, do not have a complete understanding of numbers greater than three.

Researchers surmised the lack of large number comprehension was because the deaf Nicaraguans were not being taught numbers or number words. Instead they learned to communicate using self-developed gestures called "homesigns," a language developed in the absence of formal education and exposure to formal sign language.

"The research doesn't determine which aspects of language are doing the work, but it does suggest that language is an important player in number acquisition," said Betty Tuller, a program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, which funded the research.

When disaster strikes, people often claim that they foresaw the tragedy. But are such premonitions really possible? In an extract from his new book Paranormality, psychologist Richard Wiseman explains how our sleeping minds can trick us.

Aberfan is a small village in south Wales. In the 1960s, many of those living there worked at a nearby colliery that had been built to exploit the large amount of high-quality coal in the area. Although some of the waste from the mining operation had been stored underground, much of it had been piled on the steep hillsides surrounding the village. Throughout October 1966 heavy rain lashed down on the area and seeped into the porous sandstone of the hills. Unfortunately, no one realised that the water was then flowing into several hidden springs and slowly transforming the pit waste into soft slurry.

Just after nine o'clock on the morning of 21 October, the side of the hill subsided and half a million tonnes of debris started to move rapidly towards the village. Although some of the material came to a halt on the lower parts of the hill, much of it slid into Aberfan and smashed into the village school. A handful of children were pulled out alive during the first hour or so of the rescue effort, but no other survivors emerged. One hundred and thirty-nine schoolchildren and five teachers lost their lives in the tragedy.

Psychiatrist John Barker visited the village the day after the landslide. Barker had a longstanding interest in the paranormal and wondered whether the extreme nature of events in Aberfan might have caused large numbers of people to experience a premonition about the tragedy. To find out, Barker arranged for a newspaper to ask any readers who thought they had foreseen the Aberfan disaster to get in touch. He received 60 letters from across England and Wales, with over half of the respondents claiming that their apparent premonition had come to them during a dream.

The concepts in the following video, even the term "Pathocrat", is taken from the seminal book Political Ponerology: A Science of Evil Adjusted for Political Purpose by Andrew Lobaczewski. We find it curious that this book is not even mentioned in the video.


An evolutionary perspective on psychopaths in power.
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Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes, by Dr. Andrew Lobaczewski

Here's a link that discusses the book.

Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes by Andrew M. Lobaczewski with commentary and additional quoted material by Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements as well as the accompanying ideologies and turned them into caricatures of themselves. This occurred as a result of the participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are, and have been, so similar in their essential properties.

Identifying these phenomena through history and properly qualifying them according to their true nature and contents - not according to the ideology in question, which succumbed to the process of caricaturization - is a job for historians.

The actions of [pathocracy] affect an entire society, starting with the leaders and infiltrating every town, business, and institution. The pathological social structure gradually covers the entire country creating a "new class" within that nation. This privileged class [of pathocrats] feels permanently threatened by the "others", i.e. by the majority of normal people. Neither do the pathocrats entertain any illusions about their personal fate should there be a return to the system of normal man.

- Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes

Last month, I read a study showing that just eight weeks of daily meditation leads to increased grey matter densities in areas of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress-regulation. I shared this with some friends, and we immediately formed a meditation group, committed to meditating for eight weeks straight in order to duplicate the results.

In just one day of meditation I saw improvements, but I feared writing about them due to possible placebo effects. But now, I'm becoming more and more confident in the power of meditation. I'm four weeks into the program, and here's what I've noticed:

The seeds of criminal and anti-social behaviour can be found in children as young as three, scientists have claimed.

More researchers believe that violent tendencies have a biological basis and that tests and brain imaging can pick them up in children.

They argue that, by predicting which children have the potential to be trouble, treatments could be introduced to keep them on the straight and narrow. If the tests are accurate enough then a form of screening could be introduced in the same way we test for some diseases.

The theories were put forward by two leading criminologists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.

Prof Adrian Raine, a British criminologist, argued that abnormal physical brain make-up could be a cause of criminality, as well as helping to predict it.

His studies have shown that psychopaths and criminals have smaller areas of the brain such as the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, both of which regulate and control emotion and behaviour. He also believes that a lack of conditioning to fear punishment, which can be measured in toddlers before disruptive behaviour is apparent, could also be a strong indicator.

I hope you are all getting the point of this series so far: psychopaths are a big problem in our world! But it's not that simple. Take an analogy. Timmy is sick. He caught a bug at school the other week and is down for the count. Thankfully for his parents, they're somewhat eccentrically obsessed with health and cleanliness and had immediately placed Timmy in a microbiologically sterile bubble in their guest bedroom, before proceeding to decontaminate the entire house and its occupants. The pathogen that threatens the health of those he might come in contact with is successfully locked in. (Unfortunately for Timmy, so is he!) However, Timmy's parents didn't factor Sunshine, the family's pet pit-bull, into their anti-infection equation.

So, one afternoon, while Timmy is reminiscing about his former life outside the bubble, along comes Sunshine who pokes a hole in the bubble's protective layer with his favorite stick. The highly contagious, airborne infection is now free to surf the air waves of 21st century climate control, and through a series of highly improbable events, Timmy's sister, parents, dog and goldfish all come down with the nasty bug. The infection then spreads throughout the neighborhood, city, and eventually, the world, as local businessmen who don't mind an aggressive pat down from the TSA and exposing their genitals to puerile airport security personnel via Peeping-Tom-Technology, travel to very serious and important business meetings. So, what's the point of this? Simply put, psychopaths need a number of things to have their effect in lieu of the direct interaction of personal relationships. Among a psychopath's best tools to spread his malevolence are fanatic bulldogs and the cold theories of human nature that determine the intellectual climate of a society. It's through these intermediaries that our bodies and minds are systematically infected - ponerized.

In the past ten days, the news on spaceweather.com has been all about increased solar activity and appearance of gigantic sunspots on our Sun.

Coincidentally reading through and amending my translation of Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, I accidentally reached the explanation of a cosmic phenomenon which he calls Law of Solioonensius, emerging as the result of increasing tension in our Sun spreading naturally to all its planet, with the resulting effect that 'feeling of religiousness' increases in us. This is when we can use the opportunity to accelerate the development of Objective Reason in us through our own desires and efforts to be what we are supposed to be, Humans, distinguished from other creatures solely by virtue of this Reason. It is like a booty given to all to strive in this direction. This is what our far far ancestors, before our division to casts and classes knew and thus used the opportunity in the corresponding way. With the dawn of history and our divisions to classes, when this same cosmic phenomenon happens, and we recognize a strange 'feeling' in ourselves as a result, we apparently take it as a symptom of 'nervousness' leading to another feeling which Gurdjieff calls the 'Need of Freedom.'

With this introduction, all of a sudden remembering the fact that this state of affairs has been going on almost continuously with only short periods of 'peace' among and within nations inhabiting this part of our Mother Earth since WWII and Communist Revolution and later Islamic Revolution, and the coincidence of higher activity of our Sun these days with mass movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, Libya, and the persistence of 'Silent Green Movement' in Iran, all manifesting the "need of freedom", I thought this sharing may open a new window as it did for me.