Science of the SpiritS


Snakes in Suits

A psychopathic trait: The science of 'charismatic voices'


phys.org
Wed, 29 Oct 2014 11:43 UTC
liar in chief
A charismatic voice perhaps - but a psychopath nonetheless!
When a right-wing Italian politician named Umberto Bossi suffered a severe stroke in 2004, his speech became permanently impaired. Strangely, this change impacted Bossi's perception among his party's followers - from appearing authoritarian to benevolent.

Now researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles think they know why. Probing the vocal presence of charisma across cultural divides, the scientists found speakers with a wide range of frequency variation in their voices were more likely to be perceived as dominant. They also found that speakers with a low fundamental rate of vocal fold vibration, called fundamental frequency or F0, are perceived as more dominant than speakers with a high fundamental frequency.

Charismatic voices are made up of two fundamental components, said Rosario Signorello: one biological and one based on language and culture. Signorello is a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA's Bureau of Glottal Affairs who will be speaking on Thursday about his current research at the 168th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), which will be held October 27-31, 2014, at the Indianapolis Marriott Downtown Hotel.

The biological component of charismatic voice is innate, Signorello said, and consists of a speaker's manipulation of changes in fundamental frequency to be recognized as a group leader. By using a process of speech synthesis called 'delexicalization,' it is possible to remove the subjective influence of a speech's content, allowing a researcher to study the biological component in a controlled fashion.

Comment: For crucial information on psychopathy and the resulting ponerology read Political Ponerology:

Political Ponerology
© © Red Pill Press Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes


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Family

To reap the brain benefits of physical activity, just get moving


ScienceDaily
Wed, 29 Oct 2014 22:04 UTC
Image
Everyone knows that exercise makes you feel more mentally alert at any age. But do you need to follow a specific training program to improve your cognitive function? Science has shown that the important thing is to just get moving. It's that simple.
Everyone knows that exercise makes you feel more mentally alert at any age. But do you need to follow a specific training program to improve your cognitive function? Science has shown that the important thing is to just get moving. It's that simple. In fact, this was the finding of a study conducted at the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal (IUGM), an institution affiliated with Université de Montréal, by Dr. Nicolas Berryman, PhD, Exercise Physiologist, under the supervision of Dr. Louis Bherer, PhD, and Dr. Laurent Bosquet, PhD, that was published in the journal AGE (American Aging Association) in October.

The study compared the effects of different training methods on the cognitive functions of people aged 62 to 84 years. Two groups were assigned a high-intensity aerobic and strength-training program, whereas the third group performed tasks that targeted gross motor activities (coordination, balance, ball games, locomotive tasks, and flexibility). While the aerobics and strength-training were the only exercises that led to physical fitness improvements after 10 weeks (in terms of body composition, VO2 max, and maximum strength), all three groups showed equivalent improvement in cognitive performance.
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Magnify

Sleep apnea may affect memory of everyday events


ScienceDaily
Wed, 29 Oct 2014 22:00 UTC
Image
© Sleep Apnea Health Center
Sleep apnea may affect your ability to form new spatial memories, such as remembering where you parked your car, new research led by NYU Langone Medical Center sleep specialists suggests.

The study, published online Oct. 29 in Journal of Neuroscience, demonstrates through the playing of a specific video game that disruption of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep as a consequence of sleep apnea impairs spatial memory in humans even when other sleep stages are intact.

Spatial memory is utilized for everyday tasks, such as remembering the location of a favorite restaurant, remembering how to get home even if you are required to take a detour from your typical route, or remembering where you left an item in your house. This type of memory is particularly affected in Alzheimer disease, and often is the root cause of why afflicted individuals are often found wandering lost by caregivers.
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Blackbox

When authors "channel" their books, what can we believe?

Benjamin Radford
Discovery News
Tue, 28 Oct 2014 23:09 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Just in time for Halloween, there are several recent books out that are claimed to have been written by dead people through living writers. One is by musician David Young called Channeling Harrison, in which he claims that the spirit of ex-Beatle George Harrison is in contact with him, guiding his songwriting and teaching him life lessons.

There is nothing new about this; so-called "channeled" books were very popular in New Age circles in the 1970s and 1980s. Among the most popular was the 1970s book series Seth Speaks, dictated by Jane Roberts, who claimed that an energy named Seth possessed her body and dictated esoteric information through her about the soul, the nature of consciousness, spiritual truths, higher planes of reality, and so on.

Channeling remains immensely popular among New Agers; hundreds of books, audiotapes, seminars, and DVDs are devoted to the practice.

Comment: It's vital to retain critical faculties when reading any sort of "channeled" material, and there's no reason to run to ghosts or spirits for answers that one can find for one's self.

But mainstream science has gone overboard and proclaimed there is no evidence for channeling, near-death experiences, or anything "higher" than materialism. This is based on a belief system, not the scientific method. See Rupert Sheldrake's "The Science Delusion" talk, and check out the subsequent fallout for his attempt to set science free.



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Chess

Politics can interact with evolution to shape human destiny: Just look at the horrible decline of society under the rule of psychopaths

Matt Swayne
Penn State
Tue, 28 Oct 2014 20:47 UTC
Image
© Ninjin ClubThe Human Condition
Politics can have unintentional evolutionary consequences that may cause hastily issued policies to cascade into global, multigenerational problems, according to political scientists.

"Most western democracies look at policies as if they are bandages, we fix what we can and then move on," said Pete Hatemi, associate professor of political science, Penn State. "But we need to consider generational policies so that we can fix what we can now, but also be prepared for what comes next."

The researchers said that there is an interaction between political and cultural forces and evolutionary results. Genes can shape culture and political institutions, which in turn can shape biology and physiology, passing on certain traits to future generations. The environment's influence on adaptation and how it changes biology is better known and often easier to observe, said Hatemi, but the way culture can affect gene expressions in future generations is often harder to show and may take longer to reveal itself.

One more obvious way to see how culture affects natural selection is the effect that politically inspired atrocities -- for example, Communist purges in China and USSR and the Nazi Holocaust -- have on genetic diversity, according to the researchers, who released their findings in a recent issue of Advances in Political Psychology.

Comment: Everything is interconnected, and now there is a scientific explanation to the enormous mess we find ourselves in, due to the global infestation by psychopaths. Consider the following information:

The transcript: Well this is something the Cassiopeans have told us. We don't have a full theoretical explanation for all of this. What we have are observations. We can observe that all the planets in our solar system are heating up, the same as our earth is. Now we have the global warming alarmist who say that we have human caused global warming. Well if we have human caused global warming on planet Earth, who is causing it on Mars and Jupiter, on Saturn, on Uranus, on Neptune...the other planets in our solar system? How is that happening? So we have evidence of that.

We also have evidence of great shifts in the magnetic field of our planet. It's fluctuating wildly. We have evidence of strange things going on on our planet. We have sink holes. We have volcanic eruptions. We have the gulf stream behaving irrationally or crazy. I don't know if you saw the picture of those cyclones over the U.S. and the fact that nearly the entire U.S. was covered with snow except for the state of Florida and Hawaii, I believe. Well, I think Hawaii even had snow.

And if you just read the articles we post on SOTT.NET every day and we have categories for these articles. We have a category for earth changes. We have categories for things happening in the sky and cosmos. If you read the scientific reports that come through and put the pieces together, you can see Something BIG is happening. Something BIG is happening!

And we have the Cassiopaeans telling us this explanation for it - this Wave, this change in the cosmic environment. They've talked about the fact that there is a companion star involved and swarms of comets that may or may not devastate the earth. We may get a few; we may get a lot. And I think a lot of that depends on the state of humanity itself at the time of the event. So we have all of that. But what we still need, is that we still need a real theoretical structure into which to place all of these things that we can observe with our eyes.

So that's where science really needs to come in. And, we need to get psychopaths out of science. We need to get science able to really do what they should be doing, which is exploring our reality and our universe and coming up with answers for what is going on. I mean I have my husband...you know he is a scientist. We have numerous scientists in our research team. We do the best we can to produce the best work we can, but we need help. There are other kinds of sciences that we don't have necessarily represented in our group. There are things that need to be studied, that need to be researched; tests that need to be done and we don't have the time now. This should have all been done and it's been prevented for millennia by psychopaths.

We are in the condition we are in, in the state of ignorance we are in, in the state of war, the state of economic depression and the state of depletion of the resources of our planet because of the greed of the psychopaths who thought that they could create their own reality - Well look at the reality they created! Just look at it.


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People

Murderers may be hardwired to kill

Jennifer Vegas
Discovery News
Tue, 28 Oct 2014 17:52 UTC
Image
© CORBISCharles Manson, convicted serial killer, is escorted by police in 1969.
Serial killers and other people who repeatedly commit violent crimes, such as assault and battery, may be hardwired to hurt others, suggests a new study that identifies two genetic variants tied to extreme violent behavior.

The findings, published in the latest issue of the journal Molecular Psychiatry, could help to explain why the majority of violent crimes are committed by a small group of antisocial, repeat offenders. The extensive study represents the first effort to investigate the genetic background of people exhibiting such repetitive, brutal behavior.

"I think that we have found two genes that have the largest effect in aggressive behavior, and that there are probably tens or hundreds of other genes having smaller effects," lead author Jari Tiihonen told Discovery News.

Comment: But it's important to remember, that there is a kind of predator, that may not murder, but still cause tremendous damage, ruin lives and inflict pain on others around them.

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Info

Unconscious mind influences accuracy of decisions

Anna Salleh
ABC Science, Australia
Tue, 28 Oct 2014 01:42 UTC
Unconscious information
© alphaspirit/iStockphotoThe idea that unconscious information can influence our decisions has been an intriguing but controversial idea in psychology.
Information processed unconsciously can influence the accuracy of our decisions without us knowing it, new research has found.

"People tend to think the decisions they make are based on deliberation but there are elements in every type of decision we make that are unconscious -- a lot more than people think," says PhD candidate Alexandra Vlassova, of the University of New South Wales.

"Unconscious information could make your decisions better but it could also make them worse."

The idea that unconscious information can influence our decisions has been an intriguing but controversial idea in psychology, says Vlassova.

In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she and colleagues report on a study designed to overcome the limitations of previous research into this question.

Participants were given the task of deciding whether a group of grey dots were moving left or right across a computer screen.

"The longer you look at the dots, the more evidence you get and at a certain point you have enough evidence to make your decision," says Vlassova.

"That's quite similar to how we make any type of decision. We accumulate information over time until we have enough to make a decision."
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Magnify

It's better for memory to make mistakes while learning

Kelly Connelly
EurekAlert!
Mon, 27 Oct 2014 11:00 UTC
...but only if the guesses are 'close-but-no-cigar'

Memory
© iStockphoto
Making mistakes while learning can benefit memory and lead to the correct answer, but only if the guesses are close-but-no-cigar, according to new research findings from Baycrest Health Sciences.

"Making random guesses does not appear to benefit later memory for the right answer , but near-miss guesses act as stepping stones for retrieval of the correct information - and this benefit is seen in younger and older adults," says lead investigator Andrée-Ann Cyr, a graduate student with Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute and the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto.

Cyr's paper is posted online today in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (ahead of print publication). The study expands upon a previous paper she published in Psychology and Aging in 2012 that found that learning information the hard way by making mistakes (as opposed to just being told the correct answer) may be the best boot camp for older brains.
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Cupcake Choco

Sex, chocolate... new language? Same pleasure for human brain, scientists say


RT.com
Sun, 26 Oct 2014 12:25 UTC
In the Park
© Reuters/Christian Hartmann
Learning new words stimulates the same brain center as such long-proven means of deriving pleasure, as having sex, gambling or eating chocolate, a new study says.

A team of Spanish and German researchers at Barcelona's Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute and Otto von Guericke University has found that successful learning of the meanings of new words activates a core reward center in the adult brain. They have recently published their findings in the Current Biology journal.

The ventral striatum is a part of the brain activated by actions that trigger positive emotions, should it be sugary food, sex or drugs.

Traditionally, the process of learning of a new language was associated with a boost in the number of connections between neurons, but it wasn't proven that emotions are also involved.

"The purpose of the study was to find out to what extent learning a language could activate these pleasure-and-reward circuits," study author Antoni Rodríguez Fornells told La Vanguardia, Catalan daily newspaper.
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Books

Learning is fun! Study shows the pleasure of learning new words


Science Daily
Fri, 24 Oct 2014 10:38 UTC
reading
© Unknownlearning is fun - results confirm that the motivation to learn is preserved throughout the lifespan
From our very first years, we are intrinsically motivated to learn new words and their meanings. First language acquisition occurs within a permanent emotional interaction between parents and children. However, the exact mechanism behind the human drive to acquire communicative linguistic skills is yet to be established.

In a study published in the journal Current Biology, researchers from the University of Barcelona (UB), the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg (Germany) have experimentally proved that human adult word learning exhibit activation not only of cortical language regions but also of the ventral striatum, a core region of reward processing. Results confirm that the motivation to learn is preserved throughout the lifespan, helping adults to acquire a second language.

Researchers determined that the reward region that is activated is the same that answers to a wide range of stimuli, including food, sex, drugs or game. "The main objective of the study was to know to what extent language learning activates subcortical reward and motivational systems," explains Pablo Ripollés, PhD student at UB-IDIBELL and first author of the article. "Moreover, the fact that language could be favoured by this type of circuitries is an interesting hypothesis from an evolutionary point of view," points out the expert.

According to Antoni Rodríguez Fornells, UB lecturer and ICREA researcher at IDIBELL, "the language region has been traditionally located at an apparently encapsulated cortical structure which has never been related to reward circuitries, which are considered much older from an evolutionary perspective." "The study -- he adds -- questions whether language only comes from cortical evolution or structured mechanisms and suggests that emotions may influence language acquisition processes."

Subcortical areas are closely related to those that help to store information. Therefore, those facts or pieces of information that awake an emotion are more easily to remember and learn.
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