Science of the SpiritS


Magic Wand

When We Forget to Remember - Failures in Prospective Memory Range From Annoying to Lethal

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© Unknown
A surgical team closes an abdominal incision, successfully completing a difficult operation. Weeks later, the patient comes into the ER complaining of abdominal pain and an X-ray reveals that one of the forceps used in the operation was left inside the patient. Why would highly skilled professionals forget to perform a simple task they have executed without difficulty thousands of times before?

These kinds of oversights occur in professions as diverse as aviation and computer programming, but research from psychological science reveals that these lapses may not reflect carelessness or lack of skill but failures of prospective memory.

In an article in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, R. Key Dismukes, a scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, reviews the rapidly growing field of research on prospective memory, highlighting the various ways in which characteristics of everyday tasks interact with normal cognitive processes to produce memory failures that sometimes have disastrous consequences.

Failures of prospective memory typically occur when we form an intention to do something later, become engaged with various other tasks, and lose focus on the thing we originally intended to do. Despite the name, prospective memory actually depends on several cognitive processes, including planning, attention, and task management. Common in everyday life, these memory lapses are mostly annoying, but can have tragic consequences. "Every summer several infants die in hot cars when parents leave the car, forgetting the child is sleeping quietly in the back seat," Dismukes points out.

Info

How Men and Women Focus Differently

Couple at Beach
© Hanna Monika Cybulko | Dreamstime
During conversation, men and women fix their eyes on different things and their gaze is pulled away by different types of distractions, finds a new study that examines how men and women focus.

Researchers at the University of Southern California studied 34 participants as they watched videos of people being interviewed. Distractions such as pedestrians, bicycles and cars passed in the background within the video frame.

The researchers tracked the movement of the participants' pupils as they looked at the screen, and found that men, when focused on the person being interviewed, fixed their eyes on the speaker's mouth. They were most likely to be distracted by conspicuous movement behind the interview subjects.

Meanwhile, women altered their gaze between the speaker's eyes and body and they were more likely to be distracted by other people entering the video frame.

Bandaid

How Psychological Abuse is as Harmful as Physical Abuse


Physical abuse of children carries undeniable marks of pain, but in many cases the hidden scars associated with psychological abuse may be more detrimental in the long run, according to an American Academy of Pediatrics position statement published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

Psychological abuse may be the most common form of child abuse and often the hardest to treat, according to the paper.

"This is an area easily overlooked because it's hard to articulate," said Ruth Anan, director of the early childhood program at the Center for Human Development at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich.

Many child health experts have grappled with properly identifying and defining the threshold for psychological abuse.

Book

Brains Falter When Rules Change Making Learning More Difficult

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© G.L. KohuthA cap worn by subjects in a Michigan State University experiment picks up EEG signals at the scalp; the signals are then transmitted via optical cable to a computer where the data is stored for analysis.
For the human brain, learning a new task when rules change can be a surprisingly difficult process marred by repeated mistakes, according to a new study by Michigan State University psychology researchers.

Imagine traveling to Ireland and suddenly having to drive on the left side of the road. The brain, trained for right-side driving, becomes overburdened trying to suppress the old rules while simultaneously focusing on the new rules, said Hans Schroder, primary researcher on the study.

"There's so much conflict in your brain," said Schroder, "that when you make a mistake like forgetting to turn on your blinker you don't even realize it and make the same mistake again. What you learned initially is hard to overcome when rules change."

The study, in the research journal Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, is one of the first to show how the brain responds to mistakes that occur after rules change.

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New Pleasure Circuit Identified In Brain, Could Change Addiction Treatments

Brain
© Reuters
An article in the August edition of Scientific American by psychologists Morten Kringelbach and Kent Berridge details their discovery of a new pleasure circuit in the brain. The circuit is actually a series of hotspots in the brain that enhance sensations of pleasure beyond mere enjoyment.

The research uncovered that the existing pleasure centers of the brain, which have been established science for decades, actually create desires, not pleasures. Researchers are looking into how the stimulation of the newly discovered hotspots of pleasure can be used to treat mental illness and addiction.

"Higher brain regions receive information from these pleasure and reward circuits to consciously represent the warm glow we associate with joy," the article states.The research is also revealing how the brain processes wanting something, and alternately, how it processes liking something.

This can potentially lead to more effective treatments for people suffering from various addictions. Kringlebach and Berridge have been studying pleasure centers and their affect on addicts for years. They described the role the liking/wanting region of the brain plays in drug addiction for in an article for the academic journal Social Research two years ago.

Magic Wand

Study Shows Why Some Types Of Multitasking Are More Dangerous Than Others

In a new study that has implications for distracted drivers, researchers found that people are better at juggling some types of multitasking than they are at others.

Trying to do two visual tasks at once hurt performance in both tasks significantly more than combining a visual and an audio task, the research found.

Alarmingly, though, people who tried to do two visual tasks at the same time rated their performance as better than did those who combined a visual and an audio task - even though their actual performance was worse.

"Many people have this overconfidence in how well they can multitask, and our study shows that this particularly is the case when they combine two visual tasks," said Zheng Wang, lead author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.

"People's perception about how well they're doing doesn't match up with how they actually perform."

Magic Wand

The seat of meta-consciousness in the brain

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© MPI of Psychiatry Brain regions activated more strongly during lucid dreaming than in a normal dream.
Studies of lucid dreamers visualise which centres of the brain become active when we become aware of ourselves.


Which areas of the brain help us to perceive our world in a self-reflective manner is difficult to measure. During wakefulness, we are always conscious of ourselves. In sleep, however, we are not. But there are people, known as lucid dreamers, who can become aware of dreaming during sleep. Studies employing magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) have now been able to demonstrate that a specific cortical network consisting of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the frontopolar regions and the precuneus is activated when this lucid consciousness is attained. All of these regions are associated with self-reflective functions. This research into lucid dreaming gives the authors of the latest study insight into the neural basis of human consciousness.

The human capacity of self-perception, self-reflection and consciousness development are among the unsolved mysteries of neuroscience. Despite modern imaging techniques, it is still impossible to fully visualise what goes on in the brain when people move to consciousness from an unconscious state. The problem lies in the fact that it is difficult to watch our brain during this transitional change. Although this process is the same, every time a person awakens from sleep, the basic activity of our brain is usually greatly reduced during deep sleep. This makes it impossible to clearly delineate the specific brain activity underlying the regained self-perception and consciousness during the transition to wakefulness from the global changes in brain activity that takes place at the same time.

Bulb

To Soothe Chronic Pain, Meditation Proves Better Than Pills

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© rodale.comMind power: Mediation's effects on your brain could ease your pain.
Could honing your meditation technique cure chronic pain? It's worth contemplating.

Chronic pain is estimated to affect over 76 million people, more than diabetes and heart disease combined, and back pain is our country's leading cause of disability for people under 45. And though the pharmaceutical industry seems very adept at introducing one new painkiller after another, the pills don't always help. A new study in the Journal of Neuroscience, however, suggests something else might: meditation. It seems that improving your meditation technique could very well be more effective than painkillers at cutting down on pain, and that could save you hundreds in prescription drug costs.

THE DETAILS: This was a small study that looked at just 15 adults who sat through four 20-minute training sessions on mindfulness meditation. However, before and after the training, the participants' brains were scanned using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and during each scan, the researchers put a heating device that induced pain for a five-minute period on each of the meditators' right leg at varying intervals. The brain scans revealed that before meditation, the section of the brain that processes pain was very active, while after meditation training, activity levels were virtually undetectable. Furthermore, after the meditation training, the study participants reported an average 40 percent reduction in pain intensity and an average 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness. The study authors noted that morphine and other pain-relieving drugs usually reduce pain perception and unpleasantness by just 25 percent.

Comment: To learn more about the numerous mental, emotional and spiritual health benefits of meditation and breathing exercises visit the Éiriú Eolas Stress Control, Healing and Rejuvenation Program website, and try out the entire program here for free.

Read the following articles listed below for additional data on how meditation can help reduce chronic pain:


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Brain Is Biased When Learning New Information

Remembering
© Alexander Kirch, ShutterstockTrying to remember if you've seen something before? The brain's processing doesn't happen in a vacuum.
Your brain may be more likely to recognize new things as new when the unknown is already on your mind, according to new research.

The findings suggest that memories are not made or recalled in a vacuum, said study researcher Lila Davachi, a psychologist at New York University. Instead, memories are built with the influence of what your brain has just been exposed to, she said.

"Your previous state of mind can influence the way you see the world and what sort of decisions you make," Davachi told LiveScience.

In fact, the research suggests that the hippocampus, the part of the brain that encodes memories, may have two jobs that it can't perform at the same time: building new memories and recognizing old ones. The time it takes to switch between these two tasks may explain why the brain is better at recognizing new things when it's already in "new thing" mode.

Hourglass

SOTT Focus: 2012 - Collective Awakening or End of the World?

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© veilofreality.com
We're half way through 2012. Many prophecies have hinted at this time as The Shift of the Ages and The Time of Transition. If you take a look at the shelves of any spiritual/new age bookstore, you'll see dozens of books with 2012 in the title. It certainly has become a good marketing bit. There are many theories of what 2012 is supposedly all about. From the end of the world to global mass enlightenment. If you type "2012″ into Google, 25,270,000,000 results come up.

Much of it is based on the Mayan Calendar which is presumably ending on 12/21 2012. Many people seem to be fixated on this date. I don't want to get into the technicality of the Mayan Calendar. Lies are mixed with truth and there are all kinds of theories from historians, experts, channeled material and authors who make various claims about this date and the Mayan Calendar, many of them contradicting each other. Instead, I'd like to look into some overlooked issues our world is facing, examining the possibility of a cataclysmic "end time" scenario or a "collective awakening" from a different perspective. But let's backtrack first.