Science of the SpiritS


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Analytic Thinking Can Promote Atheism

Praying Man
© Kevin Carden, ShutterstockReligious beliefs can be disrupted by analytical thinking.

Deliberate analytical thinking can cause people to believe less in God, according to a new study.

The researchers, who found that religious belief arises from gut feelings, were quick to say their study was not a referendum on the value of religion. Both analytical thinking and the intuitive processing that seems to promote religious beliefs are important, said study researcher Will Gervais.

"Both are useful tools," said Gervais, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of British Columbia. "Ultimately, these studies are looking at cognitive factors that might influence belief or disbelief, but they don't have anything to say about the inherent rationality or worth of religion."

Head versus heart

Psychologists have found that people process information through two distinct systems. One is the analytical system, marked by deliberate, logical processing. The intuitive system, on the other hand, uses mental shortcuts and gut feelings, Gervais said.

Earlier studies have shown that people who tend to go with their gut are more likely to believe in God than analytical types are. Gervais and his UBC colleague Ara Norenzayan reached the same finding by giving people a test to determine whether they were more analytical or more intuitive. For example, one question asked, "If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?"

The intuitive, go-with-your-gut answer would be "100." But the analytical, do-the-math process gets you the correct answer of five minutes. People who came to the analytical answer also reported less religious belief than those who offered the intuitive response.

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The adaptive unconscious makes your everyday decisions

The snap judgment. The song that constantly runs through your head whenever you close your office door. The desire to drink Coke rather than Pepsi or to drive a Mustang rather than a Prius. The expression on your spouse's face that inexplicably makes you feel either amorous or enraged. Or how about the now incomprehensible reasons you married your spouse in the first place?

Welcome to evidence of your robust unconscious at work.

While these events are all superficially unrelated, each reveals an aspect of a rich inner life that is not a part of conscious, much less rational, thought. Today, long after Sigmund Freud introduced the world to the fact that much of what we do is determined by mysterious memories and emotional forces, the depths of the mind and the brain are being explored anew. "Most of what we do every minute of every day is unconscious, " says University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Paul Whelan. "Life would be chaos if everything were on the forefront of our consciousness."

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Trouble Sleeping? Blame Aging Brain Cells

Man Yawning
© Corbis
Know an older adult who has trouble sleeping through the night but dozes off every afternoon? Most likely you do, and now researchers have some clues as to why the brain's sleeping clock seems to change with age.

In a study published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, research shows that changes occurring in individual brain cells may play a greater role in changing sleep cycles than previously thought.

Before this study, changes were attributed to weakened brain network activity in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), an area of the brain responsible for setting sleep-wake cycles.

"In fact, the changes at the single-cell level were more severe than the changes at the network level," said Johanna Meijer, PhD, at the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, who directed the study.

What does this mean for the elderly? The research may make it easier to find treatments that would allow older adults to maintain a more regular sleep cycle.

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Violence puts wear and tear on kids' DNA

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© Unknown
Children who have experienced violence might really be older than their years. The DNA of 10-year-olds who experienced violence in their young lives has been found to show wear and tear normally associated with aging, a Duke University study has found.

"This is the first time it has been shown that our telomeres can shorten at a faster rate even at a really young age, while kids are still experiencing stress," said Idan Shalev, a post-doctoral researcher in psychology and neuroscience at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy.

Telomeres are special DNA sequences found at the tips of chromosomes; much like the plastic tips of shoelaces, they prevent DNA from unraveling. Emerging evidence suggests that telomeres are "master integrators," connecting stress to biological age and associated diseases.

Telomeres are known to get shorter each time cells divide, putting a limit on the number of times a given cell can go on dividing. Smoking, obesity, psychological disorders and stress have been found to possibly accelerate that process of telomere loss. In that sense, our telomeres may reflect biological age, not just chronological age.

Previous studies of telomeres and stress had primarily looked at telomeres in adults as they recalled experiences much earlier in their lives.

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How Psychiatry Stigmatizes Depression Sufferers

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© Alternet
Viewing depression as a "brain defect" has resulted in the glorification of insipid happiness, particularly among our politicians.

Viewing depression as a "brain defect" rather than a "character defect" is supposed to reduce the stigma of depression, according to the American Psychiatric Association, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and the rest of the mental health establishment. But any defect can be stigmatizing. What if depression is the result of neither a brain defect nor a character defect?

At one time in U.S. history, Americans actually elected a known depression sufferer as president. In Lincoln's Melancholy, Joshua Wolf Shenk reports that Abraham Lincoln's long-time law partner William Herndon observed about Lincoln that "gloom and sadness were his predominant state." And Shenk reports that Lincoln experienced two major depressive breakdowns which included suicidal statements that frightened friends enough to form a suicide watch. However, in Lincoln's era, when depression was seen as neither a character defect nor a brain defect, Lincoln's depression actually helped him politically more than it hurt him. Lincoln's depression gained him sympathy and compassion, and drew people toward him, as it "seemed not a matter of shame but an intriguing aspect of his character, and indeed an aspect of his grand nature," according to Shenk.

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How to tell if there is a psychopath in your life and what to do about it

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© APLife is a scream: Janet Leigh in Hitchcock's Psycho
You've met a man who seems too good to be true: he's charming, confident and you have endless things in common. But you soon realise things aren't quite as they seem.

He vanishes for days on end and has a string of exes. You should move on, but it's hard to put him out of your mind.

Or perhaps it's your boss who dominates your thoughts. She takes too many big risks at work and treats you like a pawn in her game. Or a friend who's always asking favours of you and borrowing your clothes, then moves into your spare room - and next moves in on your man.

What have they got in common? The tell-tale symptoms of being a psychopath.Most of us have referred to a 'psycho ex' or a 'psycho boss' at one time or another, but few really understand what the term means. Fundamentally. the word psychopath describes people who are utterly selfish, with no concern for others. Life to them is a game, and all that matters is they win.

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Memento Mori: How thinking about death can lead to a good life

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© Alexander Mair
Thinking about death can actually be a good thing. An awareness of mortality can improve physical health and help us re-prioritize our goals and values, according to a new analysis of recent scientific studies. Even non-conscious thinking about death - say walking by a cemetery - could prompt positive changes and promote helping others.

Past research suggests that thinking about death is destructive and dangerous, fueling everything from prejudice and greed to violence. Such studies related to terror management theory (TMT), which posits that we uphold certain cultural beliefs to manage our feelings of mortality, have rarely explored the potential benefits of death awareness.

"This tendency for TMT research to primarily deal with negative attitudes and harmful behaviors has become so deeply entrenched in our field that some have recently suggested that death awareness is simply a bleak force of social destruction," says Kenneth Vail of the University of Missouri, lead author of the new study in the online edition of Personality and Social Psychology Review this month. "There has been very little integrative understanding of how subtle, day-to-day, death awareness might be capable of motivating attitudes and behaviors that can minimize harm to oneself and others, and can promote well-being."

In constructing a new model for how we think about our own mortality, Vail and colleagues performed an extensive review of recent studies on the topic. They found numerous examples of experiments both in the lab and field that suggest a positive side to natural reminders about mortality.

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Childhood Trauma Increases Chance of Schizophrenia

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© Unknown
Researchers at the University of Liverpool have found that children who have experienced severe trauma are three times as likely to develop schizophrenia in later life.

The findings shed new light on the debate about the importance of genetic and environmental triggers of psychotic disorders. For many years research in mental health has focused on the biological factors behind conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and psychotic depression, but there is now increasing evidence to suggest these conditions cannot be fully understood without first looking at the life experiences of individual patients.

The research, conducted by teams at Liverpool and Maastricht University in the Netherlands, is the first of its kind to bring together and analyse the findings from more than 30 years of studies looking at the association between childhood trauma and the development of psychosis. The researchers looked at more than 27,000 research papers to extract data from three types of studies; those addressing the progress of children known to have experienced adversity; studies of randomly selected members of the population; and research on psychotic patients who were asked about their early childhood.

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Talking to Yourself Helps you Focus

talking to yourself
© Mail OnlineNow a new University of Pennsylvania study shows that wandering along muttering, 'keys, keys, keys' can actually help (normal, sane) people find lost objects
Talking to yourself is supposed to be the first sign of madness - but a new study suggests it has practical uses.

Most of us have ducked away from a 'madman' in the street, only to realise they are in fact using a Bluetooth headset.

Now a new University of Pennsylvania study shows that wandering along muttering, 'keys, keys, keys' can actually help (normal, sane) people find lost objects.

Saying a word helps focus the mind on something people are looking for - and it works more effectively than seeing a written description.

Repeating the word over and over again helps even more.

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Memory Foraging: Bee-Like Behavior of the Brain

Memory Foraging: Bee-Like Behavior of the Brain
Memory seeker: Sometimes, when we actively remember something, our attention seems to strategically shift from cluster to cluster of stored information, like a bee flitting from one patch of flowers to another.
(Image adapted from photos by Wolfgang Hagele and John A Beal, Wikimedia Commons)
In search of nectar, a honeybee flies into a well-manicured suburban garden and lands on one of several camellia bushes planted in a row. After rummaging through the ruffled pink petals of several flowers, the bee leaves the first bush for another. Finding hardly any nectar in the flowers of the second bush, the bee flies to a third. And so on.

Our brains may have evolved to forage for some kinds of memories in the same way, shifting our attention from one cluster of stored information to another depending on what each patch has to offer. Recently, Thomas Hills of the University of Warwick in England and his colleagues found experimental evidence for this potential parallel. "Memory foraging" is only one way of thinking about memory - and it does not apply universally to all types of information retained in the brain - but, so far, the analogy seems to work well for particular cases of active remembering.