A new study using text mining and artificial intelligence from Western University and University of Liège (Belgium) provides quantitative scientific proof that most people respond positively to near death experiences (NDEs).

This innovative data strategy provides an objective, unbiased approach to understanding human consciousness following these life-altering encounters that are predominantly studied elsewhere as subjective, individual phenomenon.

Andrea Soddu, a member of Western's renowned Brain and Mind Institute, collaborated with pioneering Belgian neurologist Steven Laureys and colleagues at Western and ULiège for the study, which was published today in the high impact journal PLOS ONE.

Traditionally, NDEs are explored using standardized questionnaires like the Greyson scale, which includes queries like "Did you have a feeling of peace and pleasantness?" or "Did you feel separated from your body?" This is a potentially biased approach, which may skew recollections and subsequent discoveries.

My day was completely ruined yesterday when I stumbled upon a fun fact that absolutely obliterated my mind. I saw this tweet yesterday that said that not everyone has an internal monologue in their head. All my life, I could hear my voice in my head and speak in full sentences as if I was talking out loud. I thought everyone experienced this, so I did not believe that it could be true at that time.

It's not true that people never change, but it's very hard to change an aspect of your personality simply because you want to, research suggests.
Most people have an aspect of their personality they'd like to change, but without help it may be difficult to do so, according to a study led by a University of Arizona researcher and published in the Journal of Research in Personality.

Contrary to the once-popular idea that people's personalities are more or less set in stone, research has proven that personalities do change throughout the lifespan, often in line with major life events. For example, there is evidence that people tend to be more agreeable and conscientious in college, less extroverted after they get married and more agreeable in their retirement years.

While it's well-established that personalities can change in response to life circumstances, researcher Erica Baranski wondered if people can actively and intentionally change aspects of their personalities at any given point simply because they desire to do so.

She and her colleagues studied two groups of people: approximately 500 members of the general population who ranged in age from 19 to 82 and participated in the research online; and approximately 360 college students.

In a fascinating study of the bilingual brain, Albert Costa explains exactly what is going on when we switch effortlessly from one language to another.

Probably most of the world is bilingual, or more than bilingual. It is common in many countries to speak a national language alongside an international lingua franca such as Arabic, Spanish or English. On top of that, there may be a mother tongue that is not the same as a national language. A Nigerian, for instance, may be at once one of the million speakers of Berom, one of the 64 million speakers of Hausa and one of the 1.13 billion speakers of English. The same pattern is repeated across the globe.

In my experience, one of the best places to observe a wide variety of bilingual or multilingual individuals is Geneva, where a stable Francophone society is thickly overlaid with an international society, bringing their own mother tongues and the universally accepted lingua franca of English. In this setting, the linguistic grounding of children can be dauntingly complex. One friend, Italian by birth, has a child of five who switches between Italian, French and English, the syntactic structures still sometimes a little strange. Another set of children have a Danish father and a Bosnian mother; the conversation at lunch flows impressively from Danish to English, French and Bosnian, with German somewhere in reserve too.

My life seemed to be getting busier, faster: I felt constantly short of time - so I stepped outside it for a day and a night and did nothing.

It was early summer, and I was on the verge of turning 40. I found myself entertaining a recurring daydream of escaping from time. I would be hustling my son out the door to get him to school, or walking briskly to work on the day of a deadline, or castigating myself for being online when I should have been methodically and efficiently putting words on paper, and I would have this vision of myself as a character in a video game discovering a secret level. This vision was informed by the platform games I loved as a child - Super Mario Bros, Sonic the Hedgehog and so on - in which the character you controlled moved across the screen from left to right through a scrolling landscape, encountering obstacles and adversaries as you progressed to the end of the level. In this daydream, I would see myself pushing against a wall or lowering myself down the yawning mouth of a pipe, and thereby discovering this secret level, this hidden chamber where I could exist for a time outside of time, where the clock was not forever running down to zero.

My relationship with time had always been characterised by a certain baleful anxiety, but as I approached the start of the decade in which I would have no choice but to think of myself as middle-aged, this anxiety intensified. I was always in the middle of some calculation or quantification with respect to time, and such thoughts were always predicated on an understanding of it as a precious and limited resource. What time was it right now? How much time was left for me to do the thing I was doing, and when would I have to stop doing it to do the next thing?

This resource being as limited as it was, should I not be doing something better with it, something more urgent or interesting or authentic? At some point in my late 30s, I recognised the paradoxical source of this anxiety: that every single thing in life took much longer than I expected it to, except for life itself, which went much faster, and would be over before I knew where I was.

Like happiness, confidence is one of those things you can't really get directly.

You can't just try to be confident any more than you can try to be happy. In fact, sometimes this direct approach to seeking confidence can backfire: You're so worried about being more confident, that you make yourself anxious and insecure — the opposite of confident!

What if we need a completely different approach to building confidence?

What if becoming more confident is about what you should do less of rather than more of?

As a psychologist and therapist, I work with people every day who have serious issues with low confidence and poor self-esteem. This gives me a relatively unique insight into the world of confidence and how it works: I get to see very specific patterns and habits that cause people to lose confidence and feel insecure.

If you can identify these habits in your own life and work to eliminate them, I think you'll find that confidence has a way of showing up on its own.

Early life adversity including neglect and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse is the single biggest risk factor for psychiatric disorders, new research suggests.

In what has been described as a seminal review, investigators at Dell Medical School in Austin, Texas, conclude that childhood maltreatment is "by far" the biggest contributing factor leading to impaired health in adults.

Physically, early abuse is associated with reduced life expectancy due to higher risk for heart disease, stroke, obesity, diabetes, and certain forms of cancer, study co-author Charles Nemeroff, MD, PhD, professor and chair, department of psychiatry at Dell's Mulva Clinic for the Neurosciences, and director of its Institute for Early Life Adversity Research, told Medscape Medical News.

In the early twentieth century, anthropologists and linguists including Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf (his student) developed a provocative hypothesis: that the language we speak impacts the way we see the world, and our behavior in it. Since then, scholars have been debating the validity of what became known (some say inaccurately) as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and researching the boundaries of language's influence on our cognition. In the following excerpt of the recently published Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language, Guardian writer and editor David Shariatmadari explores the latest research in the debate — and the questions it continues to raise about the links between language and behavior.

— Elizabeth Weingarten, Managing Editor

It's easier to prove or disprove a hypothesis in a well-defined area of experience that can be readily compared across languages. That's why a lot of scholars interested in Benjamin Lee Whorf's ideas focused their research on color. Because color is a physical property, determined by the wavelengths of light that are reflected or absorbed by an object, you might assume that all languages have just as many words for colors as there are colors in the world. But the human eye can distinguish around 1,000,000 different shades, and I'd be surprised if you could quickly name more than ten. Choices are evidently made about how we divide up the spectrum of visible light — and languages make those choices differently.

The exact manner in which languages slice up the spectrum — the way they happen to label colors — can have a measurable effect on our perception. Not exactly shocking. But there are more mind-boggling examples of Whorfian effects out there. Could the language you speak, for example, make you more likely to injure yourself, or even die?

Swedish is a north-Germanic language, very closely related to Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. It sits within the larger Indo-European language family, meaning it shares ancestors with English, French, Greek, Russian, and so on. Finnish, on the other hand, is part of the Finno-Ugric language family, which includes Hungarian and Estonian. The grammar and native vocabulary of these languages are completely different, despite the geographical proximity. The Swedish for "father" is far. In Finnish it's isä. In Swedish "eye" is öga, in Finnish silmä.

In therapy, psychological healing is delivered via a healing relationship.

How does talk therapy work? What are its active ingredients, the central mechanisms by which clients improve in therapy? The truth is that we don't quite know. We do know that therapy works, and that some therapies work better than others for some disorders. Yet research has tended to show that, overall, mainstream therapies are remarkably similar in their effects. This has become known as the "dodo bird verdict."

Given this, researchers have focused much attention on identifying the so-called "common factors" in therapy — those nonspecific aspects of the therapeutic encounter that may shape outcomes across techniques and theoretical perspectives. Over the years, research has identified several such factors, including the client's expectations (placebo effect), the therapist's empathy and positive regard, and client-therapist goal consensus.

While the debate over common factors continues, and while various common factor approaches differ among themselves, a broad agreement has emerged that first among the potentially potent common factors is client-therapist rapport — a trusting "therapeutic alliance." Without rapport, technical skill or theoretical coherence tend to matter little in terms of affecting change. Strong rapport, on the other hand, predicts success quite reliably, often regardless of (or over and above) the therapist's specific technique, training, theoretical orientation, or experience.

We all showed up naked, slimy and clueless in a world of inexplicable sensory input we couldn't make head or tail out of. We were then taught what's what by people who showed up under the exact same circumstances a blink of an eye earlier.

The amniotic fluid is barely washed from our tiny naked bodies before we find ourselves in a marriage and a day job, staring down at a small pair of eyes looking up to us for guidance.

This is not a good environment for developing mental sovereignty, the ownership and authorship of your own cognitive relationship with life.