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Thank you for being a friend: Friendship more important for health than family as we age, study finds

Daniel Steingold
StudyFinds
Wed, 07 Jun 2017 19:21 UTC
Friendship
We may have less time to spend with friends as we get older, but that doesn't mean that close companionship becomes any less important to our well-being. That's because our social circle has a greater impact on our health and well-being than family does, a new study finds.

Researchers at Michigan State University conducted two separate, yet related studies, hoping to find the empirical value of friendship.

The first study analyzed a survey that provided self-reported measures of health and happiness from over 270,000 participants of all ages worldwide. Meanwhile, the second study derived its data on relationships and chronic illness from a survey of nearly 7,500 American adults.

Via the first study, the researchers found that both having healthy relations with family and friends were determinants of good health and happiness in general, but friendship alone was seen to be a solid predictor of positive overall health at later ages.
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Bulb

Dying patients study reveals 'brain surge' in final moments of life

Jordan Baker
Couriier Mail
Sat, 03 Jun 2017 10:30 UTC
Michael Barbato
© Adam Knott
Michael Barbato is a retired palliative care expert who has seen hundreds of patients die during his decades in medicine.
Patrick Coghlan was dying. He was peaceful and motionless, and his daughter, Mairead O'Connor, sat by his bedside, knowing the end was not far.

Suddenly — shockingly — he roused from his unconscious state, sat bolt upright, opened his eyes wide, and waved at something or someone only he could see.

Mrs O'Connor likes to think it was her late mother.

"His face looked radiant and happy," she remembers.

"I knew I was witnessing something special."

Moments later, he died.
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2 + 2 = 4

Psychotherapy for your body: The role of somatic psychology today

Christopher G. Walling, PsyD, MBA
Good Therapy
Mon, 05 Jun 2017 16:31 UTC
stretching
A racing heart and a roiling stomach. Panic attacks, nightmares, or fatigue. The body has myriad ways to manifest the many faces of trauma and fear. And for many people, getting help to cope with the symptoms of emotional distress means going through "talk therapy"—a kind of psychotherapy based on verbally processing thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

Now, though, the rapidly growing field of somatic psychotherapy is shifting the paradigm from talking to feeling—and this approach is offering new promise for healing trauma through body-centered techniques, such as Somatic Experiencing.

Comment: Éiriú Eolas may also be a great support. It may help relieve you from stress and gently let go of repressed emotions in the body.

Face life with Éiriú Eolas, a stress relief program

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Cell Phone

The tech world's dirty secret: It's no accident we're addicted to our devices

Robby Berman
Big Think
Sun, 04 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
cell phone addiction, screen addiction
There's probably never been such a large population of addicts before. With our phones, tablets, and social media, we can't look away for more than a few minutes at a time without feeling antsy. No meal is worth eating without an Instagram or Facebook snap, and couples text each other from different rooms in the same house, sending their messages up to satellites, around the world and back, just to travel a few yards. What's wrong with us? Well, according to former Google product manager Tristan Harris, this didn't just happen — programmers have been deliberately playing with the way our brains operate to turn us into addicts for some time. He calls it "race to the bottom of the brain stem."

Talking to Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes, Harris explains that it's sometimes called "brain hacking." It's the dirty little secret of the tech world. If you remember those old stories about movie theaters inserting a few frames of a delicious-loooking iced beverage into a movie to subliminally make you crave a drink from their concession stand, you'll understand that it's just a new wrinkle on an old idea: Making customers want a product. But this seems to work, and its effect has been insidious and widespread, with consequences that go beyond selling products, to the way we interact with each other, ideas, and the world.

Comment: Tech addiction: Why we can't look away from our screens
We're biologically prone to getting hooked on these sorts of experiences. If you put someone in front of a slot machine, their brain will look qualitatively the same as when they take heroin. If you're someone who compulsively plays video games — not everyone, but people who are addicted to a particular game — the minute you load up your computer, your brain will look like that of a substance abuser.

We are engineered in such a way that as long as an experience hits the right buttons, our brains will release the neurotransmitter dopamine. We'll get a flood of dopamine that makes us feel wonderful in the short term, though in the long term you build a tolerance and want more.

Where's the harm in this?

If you're on the phone for three hours daily, that's time you're not spending on face-to-face interactions with people. Smartphones give everything you need to enjoy the moment you're in, but they don't require much initiative.

You never have to remember anything because everything is right in front of you. You don't have to develop the ability to memorize or to come up with new ideas.
See also:

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Info

Atheists generally smarter than religious people, new study says

Laura Geggel
Live Science patrice6000/Shutterstock
Mon, 05 Jun 2017 12:21 UTC
Atheists
© patrice6000/Shutterstock
For more than a millennium, scholars have noticed a curious correlation: Atheists tend to be more intelligent than religious people.

It's unclear why this trend persists, but researchers of a new study have an idea: Religion is an instinct, they say, and people who can rise above instincts are more intelligent than those who rely on them.

"Intelligence — in rationally solving problems — can be understood as involving overcoming instinct and being intellectually curious and thus open to non-instinctive possibilities," study lead author Edward Dutton, a research fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.
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Music

Why creating music leads to enhanced brain activity


Science Daily
Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
Musical training
© Baycrest Health Sciences
The study found that learning to play a sound on a musical instrument alters the brain waves in a way that improves a person's listening and hearing skills over a short time frame.
A recent study conducted at Baycrest Health Sciences has uncovered a crucial piece into why playing a musical instrument can help older adults retain their listening skills and ward off age-related cognitive declines. This finding could lead to the development of brain rehabilitation interventions through musical training.

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience on May 24, found that learning to play a sound on a musical instrument alters the brain waves in a way that improves a person's listening and hearing skills over a short time frame. This change in brain activity demonstrates the brain's ability to rewire itself and compensate for injuries or diseases that may hamper a person's capacity to perform tasks.

"Music has been known to have beneficial effects on the brain, but there has been limited understanding into what about music makes a difference," says Dr. Bernhard Ross, senior scientist at Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute (RRI) and senior author on the study. "This is the first study demonstrating that learning the fine movement needed to reproduce a sound on an instrument changes the brain's perception of sound in a way that is not seen when listening to music."

Comment: 'Train your brain': Forget apps, learn to play a musical instrument

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Blue Planet

Do creative people really see the world differently?

Luke Smillie & Anna Antinori
The Conversation
Sun, 28 May 2017 16:41 UTC
seeing the world
What is it about a creative work such as a painting or piece of music that elicits our awe and admiration? Is it the thrill of being shown something new, something different, something the artist saw that we did not?

As Pablo Picasso put it:
Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.
The idea that some people see more possibilities than others is central to the concept of creativity.

Psychologists often measure creativity using divergent thinking tasks. These require you to generate as many uses as possible for mundane objects, such as a brick. People who can see numerous and diverse uses for a brick (say, a coffin for a Barbie doll funeral diorama) are rated as more creative than people who can only think of a few common uses (say, for building a wall).

The aspect of our personality that appears to drive our creativity is called openness to experience, or openness. Among the five major personality traits, it is openness that best predicts performance on divergent thinking tasks. Openness also predicts real-world creative achievements, as well as engagement in everyday creative pursuits.
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Brain

The link between opioid receptors and 'feeling' another person's pain

Dan Modano
Reliawire
Wed, 31 May 2017 16:23 UTC
human pain
© scientificamerican.com
The way in which the human brain's opioid system modulates responses to other people's pain has been elucidated by a recent study from researchers at Turku PET Centre and Aalto University.

Seeing others experiencing pain activated brain circuits that are known to support actual first-hand experience of pain. The fewer opioid receptors in the participants' brains, the stronger were their emotion and pain circuits' response to seeing others in distress.

Similar association was not found for the dopamine system despite its known importance in pain management.
"Capacity for vicarious experiences is a fundamental aspect of human social behaviour. Our results demonstrate the importance of the endogenous opioid system in helping us to relate with others' feelings. Interindividual differences in the opioid system could explain why some individuals react more strongly than others to someone else's distress,"
says Researcher Tomi Karjalainen from Turku PET Centre.

Comment: Other researchers have reached the same conclusion that 'turning on the opioid pathways in the brain—as both placebo painkillers and true opioids do—can simultaneously dampen both pain and empathy'.

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Health

Narcissistic abuse: A public health scourge

Bree Bonchay, LCSW
Psych Central
Sat, 03 Jun 2017 16:34 UTC
chaos fear
World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day is June 1, and everyone, unless you're living under a rock, has heard the word narcissist. In fact, the word is tossed around so liberally these days, its meaning becoming so diluted, that posting an occasional selfie can make people suspect you of being a narcissist.

Ironically, despite the popularity of the word, most people have never heard of the phrase "narcissistic abuse."

Narcissistic abuse is a form of emotional and psychological abuse. It is primarily inflicted by individuals who have either narcissistic personality disorder (NPD, which is characterized by a lack of empathy), or antisocial personality disorder (ASPD, also known as sociopaths or psychopaths), and is associated with the absence of a conscience.

You may be wondering if most people haven't even heard of narcissistic abuse, then why is it so important to raise awareness about it? Unfortunately, since it's such an under recognized, understudied public health issue, statistics are hard to come by regarding this form of abuse.

So, how do I justify the need to raise awareness about a major public health issue when there are no statistics regarding its prevalence? Sandra L. Brown, founder of the Institute for Relational Harm Reduction and Public Pathology Education, describes in her article, 60 Million Persons in the U.S. Negatively Affected by Someone Else's Pathology, how she arrived at this staggering figure:
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Hearts

Why curious People have stronger relationships

Jill Suttie
Greater Good
Wed, 31 May 2017 00:00 UTC
relationships
Research suggests that being curious might be a social glue that strengthens our relationships.

There's an old saying: "Curiosity killed the cat." It implies curiosity is bad for you and leads to dangerous risk-taking behavior. But this idea of curiosity is pretty outdated—in humans, at least.

Curiosity—the desire to approach novel and challenging ideas and experiences in order to increase one's knowledge—has long been associated with intellectual pursuit, engagement with the world, memory, and learning. Now, more recent research suggests that curiosity may also play a role in our social relationships.

Studies have found that people who are curious are often viewed in social encounters as more interesting and engaging, and they are more apt to reach out to a wider variety of people. In addition, being curious seems to protect people from negative social experiences, like rejection, which could lead to better connection with others over time.

Comment: See also: Awe engages your vagus nerve

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