Science of the SpiritS


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A Father's Love Holds One of The Greatest Powers To Influence A Child's Development

A father's love contributes as much -- and sometimes more -- to a child's development as does a mother's love. That is one of many findings in a new large-scale analysis of research about the power of parental rejection and acceptance in shaping our personalities as children and into adulthood.

Fathers Love
© PreventDisease.com
A previous study by researchers at the University of Arizona showed just how important dad's job as a role model actually is. That study showed that girls who receive lower quality fathering tend to engage in more risky sexual behavior in adolescence.

"In our half-century of international research, we've not found any other class of experience that has as strong and consistent effect on personality and personality development as does the experience of rejection, especially by parents in childhood," says Ronald Rohner of the University of Connecticut, co-authored the new study in Personality and Social Psychology Review. "Children and adults everywhere -- regardless of differences in race, culture, and gender -- tend to respond in exactly the same way when they perceived themselves to be rejected by their caregivers and other attachment figures."

Looking at 36 studies from around the world that together involved more than 10,000 participants, Rohner and co-author Abdul Khaleque found that in response to rejection by their parents, children tend to feel more anxious and insecure, as well as more hostile and aggressive toward others. The pain of rejection -- especially when it occurs over a period of time in childhood -- tends to linger into adulthood, making it more difficult for adults who were rejected as children to form secure and trusting relationships with their intimate partners. The studies are based on surveys of children and adults about their parents' degree of acceptance or rejection during their childhood, coupled with questions about their personality dispositions.

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Neuroscience: The Mind Reader

Mind Reader
© John Hryniuk
Adrian Owen still gets animated when he talks about patient 23. The patient was only 24 years old when his life was devastated by a car accident. Alive but unresponsive, he had been languishing in what neurologists refer to as a vegetative state for five years, when Owen, a neuro-scientist then at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues at the University of Liège in Belgium, put him into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and started asking him questions.

Incredibly, he provided answers. A change in blood flow to certain parts of the man's injured brain convinced Owen that patient 23 was conscious and able to communicate. It was the first time that anyone had exchanged information with someone in a vegetative state.

Patients in these states have emerged from a coma and seem awake. Some parts of their brains function, and they may be able to grind their teeth, grimace or make random eye movements. They also have sleep - wake cycles. But they show no awareness of their surroundings, and doctors have assumed that the parts of the brain needed for cognition, perception, memory and intention are fundamentally damaged. They are usually written off as lost.

Owen's discovery1, reported in 2010, caused a media furore. Medical ethicist Joseph Fins and neurologist Nicholas Schiff, both at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, called it a "potential game changer for clinical practice"2. The University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, soon lured Owen away from Cambridge with Can$20 million (US$19.5 million) in funding to make the techniques more reliable, cheaper, more accurate and more portable - all of which Owen considers essential if he is to help some of the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide in vegetative states. "It's hard to open up a channel of communication with a patient and then not be able to follow up immediately with a tool for them and their families to be able to do this routinely," he says.

Many researchers disagree with Owen's contention that these individuals are conscious. But Owen takes a practical approach to applying the technology, hoping that it will identify patients who might respond to rehabilitation, direct the dosing of analgesics and even explore some patients' feelings and desires. "Eventually we will be able to provide something that will be beneficial to patients and their families," he says.

Still, he shies away from asking patients the toughest question of all - whether they wish life support to be ended - saying that it is too early to think about such applications. "The consequences of asking are very complicated, and we need to be absolutely sure that we know what to do with the answers before we go down this road," he warns.

Magic Wand

When being scared twice is enough to remember

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© UnknownDiagram showing location of the amygdala in the human brain; there is one on each side.
One of the brain's jobs is to help us figure out what's important enough to be remembered. Scientists at Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have achieved some insight into how fleeting experiences become memories in the brain.

Their experimental system could be a way to test or refine treatments aimed at enhancing learning and memory, or interfering with troubling memories. The results were published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The researchers set up a system where rats were exposed to a light followed by a mild shock. A single light-shock event isn't enough to make the rat afraid of the light, but a repeat of the pairing of the light and shock is, even a few days later.

"I describe this effect as 'priming'," says the first author of the paper, postdoctoral fellow Ryan Parsons. "The animal experiences all sorts of things, and has to sort out what's important. If something happens just once, it doesn't register. But twice, and the animal remembers."

Yoda

How Barbara Arrowsmith-Young rebuilt her own brain

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© Sarah Lee for the GuardianArrowsmith-Young’s methods are now employed in 35 schools across Canada and the US.
She realised that part of her brain was not functioning properly so she devised a series of cognitive exercises to develop it. The results changed her life - and now she has helped thousands of children with learning disabilities

It's the kind of memory that stays with you. When she was in first grade, Barbara Arrowsmith-Young's Ontario primary school teacher told her mother - in her presence - that she had some kind of "mental block", and would never be able to learn. Now that she has helped more than 4,000 learning-disabled children overcome precisely that kind of diagnosis, of course, she can laugh at it. But she didn't at the time.

Arrowsmith-Young, now 61, talks fluently and passionately and with great erudition. She has a masters degree in school psychology. She has just published a groundbreaking, widely praised and enthralling book called The Woman Who Changed Her Brain. But back at school - indeed, up until she was in her mid-20s - she was desperate. Tormented and often depressed. She didn't know what was wrong.

On the one hand, she was brilliant. She had near-total auditory and visual memory. "I could listen to the six o'clock news, and reproduce it word-for-word at 11pm. I could open a book, read the first sentence, the second, the third, visualise them. I could memorise whole exercise books." On the other hand, she was a dolt. "I didn't understand anything," she says. "Meaning just never crystallised. Everything was fragmented, disconnected."

2 + 2 = 4

The Psychology of Stupidity

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© James Stevenson
Here's a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)

For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents - reason was our Promethean gift - Kahneman and his scientific partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrated that we're not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

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Why meditation helps you focus: Mindfulness improves brain wiring in just a month

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© Corbis
Just a month of meditation training alters brain wiring in ways that could open the door to new treatments for mental disorders, research has shown.

Scientists looked at the effects of integrative body-mind training (IBMT) on two groups of university students.

After just four weeks, or 11 hours, of training scans showed physical changes in the brains of the volunteers.

Nerve fibres, known as 'white matter', became denser, providing greater numbers of brain-signalling connections. At the same time there was an expansion of myelin, the protective fatty insulation surrounding nerve fibres.

The effects were seen in the anterior cingulate cortex region of the brain, which helps regulate behaviour.

Poor nerve activity in this part of the brain is associated with a range of mental problems, including attention deficit disorder, dementia, depression, and schizophrenia.

The study built on previous research based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans that first highlighted brain changes induced by IBMT. Scientists revisited results from two 2010 studies, taking a closer look at what the scans revealed.

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Sleep Deprivation Linked To Food Choices, Elevated Anxiety Levels

Asleep
© Photos.com
Using MRI scans, researchers have discovered how sleep deprivation can impact the parts of the brain where food-related choices are made, potentially explaining how obesity is linked to a lack of slumber.

The study, which was presented at SLEEP 2012, the 26th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS), on Sunday, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain waves of 23 otherwise healthy adults, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

Subjects were divided into two groups: one of which received a normal night's sleep, and one of which were sleep deprived for an evening. Afterwards, participants in each group rated how much they craved specific food items while inside the fMRI scanner. The study showed that the sleep deprived subjects demonstrated impaired brain activity in their frontal lobe, a region described as "critical" for behavior control and making complex choices, suggesting that sleep loss could adversely impact the food choices that people make.

"Our goal was to see if specific regions of the brain associated with food processing were disrupted by sleep deprivation," lead author Stephanie Greer, a graduate student at the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.

She added that the researchers "did not find significant differences following sleep deprivation in brain areas traditionally associated with basic reward reactivity... Instead, it seems to be about the regions higher up in the brain, specifically within the frontal lobe, failing to integrate all the different signals that help us normally make wise choices about what we should eat."

Eye 1

Is the Psychopathic Brain Hardwired to Harm?

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© Unknown
Research on some of the worst criminals suggests brain chemistry, abnormalities play a part

Can murderously depraved behaviour be biologically based, some glitch or misfiring in the brain that turns people into callous, manipulative and less-than-human monsters?

If the charges against Luka Rocco Magnotta - the Montreal porn actor accused of killing and allegedly eating parts of his victim before sending other body parts through the mail - can be proven, the question for many will be: How could a person be capable of such depravity? And is there any way to detect the psychopaths among us?

Experts say there is no neurological litmus test for psychopathy.

However, over the past decade, there has been a rush to research the brains of society's worst criminals, with a stream of studies linking psychopathic behaviour to physical abnormalities.

Eye 1

Is your child a psychopath? It's more common than you think - and you can spot the danger signs as young as three

We Need To Talk About Kevin
Bad boy: Tilda Swinton and Rock Duer in We Need To Talk About Kevin
When my sons were fighting last week, I had to disarm the five-year-old as he went into battle against his brother - wielding a cricket bat.

Like many parents who've witnessed their children being spiteful or cruel, I felt an icy chill in the stomach. Most parents want their children to be kind and considerate most, if not all, of the time.

But while nearly all youngsters have aggressive moments, for the vast majority - including mine - those moments pass and five minutes later they're demonstrating their sweet, kind natures by giving you a spontaneous hug or sneaking the cat a kitty treat.

For a few unlucky parents, that frightening chill never leaves them. Instead, it grows into a gnawing, aching certainty that something is dreadfully wrong.

Red Flag

Characteristics of Psychopaths: Watch Out For These Red Flags

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© unknown
One of the more offensive duties of being an investigative journalist is taking out the trash -- exposing liars, fraudsters, con artists and scammers for the people they truly are. Each time we investigate a sociopath, we find that they always have a little cult group following of spellbound worshippers who consider that particular sociopath to be a "guru" or "prophet."

Sociopaths are masters at influence and deception. Very little of what they say actually checks out in terms of facts or reality, but they're extremely skillful at making the things they say sound believable, even if they're just making them up out of thin air. Here, I'm going to present quotes and videos of some legendary sociopaths who convinced everyday people to participate in mass suicides. And then I'm going to demonstrate how and why similar sociopaths are operating right now... today.