Infants have a conscious experience of the world at as early as 5 months of age, new research finds.

New parents may raise an eyebrow at the idea that their baby might not be a conscious being, but scientists have, until now, not been able to clearly show that infants react with awareness rather than reflexively.

Even in adults, much of the brain's processing of the world occurs without conscious awareness, said Sid Kouider, a neuroscientist at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique in Paris and the Technical University of Denmark.

One odd phenomenon, "blindsight," occurs in people with damage to part of their visual cortex. Although they cannot consciously see, they're able to "guess" the location of a visual stimulus or even catch objects tossed at them. Blindsight reveals that even unconscious processing in the brain can result in seemingly goal-directed behavior.

So when babies look toward a face or grasp an object, they, too, might be doing so without a conscious experience of what they're seeing.

"Infants might be responding in a kind of automatic manner," Kouider told LiveScience. Unfortunately, since babies don't talk, scientists can't test consciousness by asking infants what they experience.

Antonio Zadra of the University of Montreal discusses his Lancet Neurology article.

Three myths about sleepwalking - sleepwalkers have no memory of their actions, sleepwalkers' behaviour is without motivation, and sleepwalking has no daytime impact - are dispelled in a recent study led by Antonio Zadra of the University of Montreal and its affiliated Sacré-Coeur Hospital. Working from numerous studies over the last 15 years at the hospital's Centre for Advanced Studies in Sleep Medicine at the Hôpital du Sacré-Cœur de Montréal and a thorough analysis of the literature, Zadra and his colleagues have raised the veil on sleepwalking and clarified the diagnostic criteria for researchers and clinicians. Their findings were published in Lancet Neurology.

Journalists are welcome to use the following responses in their own reports. Interviews and further information (including the original French text of this document) can be obtained by contacting media relations at the University of Montreal. The University of Montreal is officially known as Université de Montréal.

Question: What are the causes and consequences of sleepwalking?

A.Z.: "Several indicators suggest that a genetic factor is involved. In 80% of sleepwalkers, a family history of sleepwalking exists. The concordance of sleepwalking is five times higher in monozygotic twins compared to non-identical twins. Our studies have also shown that lack of sleep and stress can lead to sleepwalking. Any situation that disrupts sleep can result in sleepwalking episodes in predisposed individuals."

A.Z.: "Most sleepwalking episodes are harmless. Apart from the fact that the deep slow-wave sleep of sleepwalkers is fragmented, wanderings are usually brief and pose no danger, or when they do, it is minimal. In rare cases, wandering episodes may be longer, and sleepwalkers may injure themselves and put themselves or others in danger: some have even gone as far as driving a car!"

Question: It is said that the sleep disorder mainly affects children. Is this true?

A.Z.: "Many children transitionally sleepwalk between 6 and 12 years of age. It is thought that passing from sleep to wakefulness requires a certain maturation of the brain. In some children, the brain may have difficulty making this transition. Often, the problem disappears after puberty. But sleepwalking may persist into adulthood in almost 25% of cases. It decreases with age, however, because the older you get, the fewer hours of deep slow-wave sleep you enjoy, which is the stage in which sleepwalking episodes occur."

Memory rehearsal during sleep can make a big difference in remembering later.

Why do some memories last a lifetime while others disappear quickly?

A new study suggests that memories rehearsed, during either sleep or waking, can have an impact on memory consolidation and on what is remembered later.

The new Northwestern University study shows that when the information that makes up a memory has a high value (associated with, for example, making more money), the memory is more likely to be rehearsed and consolidated during sleep and, thus, be remembered later.

Also, through the use of a direct manipulation of sleep, the research demonstrated a way to encourage the reactivation of low-value memories so they too were remembered later.

Delphine Oudiette, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychology at Northwestern and lead author of the study, designed the experiment to study how participants remembered locations of objects on a computer screen. A value assigned to each object informed participants how much money they could make if they remembered it later on the test.

"The pay-off was much higher for some of the objects than for others," explained Ken Paller, professor of psychology at Northwestern and co-author of the study. "In other words, we manipulated the value of the memories -- some were valuable memories and others not so much, just as the things we experience each day vary in the extent to which we'd like to be able to remember them later."

People believe they'll be happy in the future, even when they imagine the many bad things that could happen, because they discount the possibility that those bad things will actually occur, according to a new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"I've always been fascinated by the changeability of people's perceptions of happiness," says psychological scientist Ed O'Brien of the University of Michigan. "On some days our futures seem bright and exciting, but on other days the same exact future event can feel stressful and terrifying."

With this new research, O'Brien wanted to explore whether fluency - how easy or difficult it feels to think about different events - might play a role in how people think about well-being.

He conducted five studies, asking participants to complete online surveys with questions that addressed past and possible future experiences and perceptions of well-being.

In line with previous research, fluency amplified the effects of past events on participants' reports of well-being: The easier it was for people to generate positive past experiences, the happier they said they were in those times. Likewise, the easier it was to come up with negative past experiences, the more unhappy people said they were.

In the highly-competitive, multi-million dollar advertising industry, science is increasingly becoming an important tool in determining exactly what kinds of marketing campaigns and products appeal to a potential consumer - so much so that there is an emerging field dedicated solely to getting inside our brains to figure out what we really want.

This hybrid of science and advertising is known as neuromarketing, and according to Alex Hannaford of The Telegraph, it has actually been around for more than two decades.

Experts, such as Steve Sands of El Paso, Texas, use electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and eye-tracking technology to help measure biological changes experienced by a person in response to marketing-related stimuli, he explained. The technology measures an individual's brain signals, changes in blood flow and other physiological reactions to determine what really interests people on a subconscious level.

Sands uses his equipment to monitor people's reactions to a test-screening of Super Bowl commercials each year. He recruits approximately 30 people, has them don eye-tracking glasses and hooks them up to an EEG machine to monitor their brain waves as they watch the ads scheduled to air during the most expensive time slots in the advertising industry, Hannaford said.

Researchers in Sweden have discovered a clever way to trick partisan voters into switching parties, through the application of a simple survey and some slight of hand.

Exploiting a known defect in human psychology called "choice blindness," researchers writing for the journal PLoS One got 162 voters to fill out surveys pinpointing their views on key issues like taxes and energy, then covertly switched the survey with one created to show the exact opposite answers. Participants were then confronted on why they gave the faux responses.

What the researchers found is astonishing: A whopping 92 percent of respondents did not catch that their answers were manipulated, and only 22 percent of the switched answers were noticed by participants. During questioning after the survey, 10 percent of the subjects actually switched their preference in political party, while another 19 percent of previously partisan voters said they'd become undecided.

Since 18 percent of the participants went into the study saying they were undecided to begin with, researchers noted that their findings suggest a full 47 percent were open to changing their vote. They also noted their findings seem to run contrary to the political wisdom of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), who suggested months before election day that 47 percent of the country had already ruled him out.

Music may truly be a universal language. When listening to the same piece, different listeners will show very similar patterns of brain activity, a new study of brain scans suggests.

Untrained listeners in the study responded very similarly to a 10-minute symphony, and the similarities cropped up not only in brain areas linked with sound processing, but also in regions responsible for attention, memory and movement planning.

The findings may help explain why music is such a powerful group experience, said study researcher Daniel Abrams, a neuroscientist at Stanford University.

"Evolutionarily, music is something people came together to do. People chanted when they worked together. It was to bring us together for rituals, and to some degree, that still happens when we go to concerts or a club," Abrams said.

Having the same brain response to music may facilitate collective activities.

I've been an enthusiastic student of 9/11 Truth for several years now. The evidence that no Boeing airliners crashed at any of the four sites is very compelling. One of the big questions that arises when you suggest this idea to someone is "What happened to the passengers?"

The facts suggest that there were far fewer passengers than even the surprisingly short and unrealistic passenger manifests presented. Flights are not usually carried out with such low load factors.

Many of the names don't seem to correspond to positively identifiable people. Additionally, at least seven of the alleged hijackers were seen alive after 9/11. Sadly, we may not ever know exactly who was on the planes.

Two "passengers" that we know for sure were real people and did die on 9/11 were David Angell along with his wife Lynn. David Angell was a writer for the sitcom Cheers and the co-creator of the hit shows Frasier and Wings. All three happen to be favorites of mine, especially Wings (coincidentally named, tragically).I watch Wings nightly on Netflix and as I viewed David Angell's name on the credits, an idea came to me.

Dr. Ross is an internationally renowned clinician, researcher, author and lecturer in the field of trauma-related disorders. He is the founder and President of the Colin A. Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma.

Dr. Ross is the Executive Medical Director of three trauma programs located at Timberlawn Mental Health System in Dallas, Texas, Forest View Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Del Amo Hospital in Torrance, California. Dr. Ross provides treatment for patients with trauma related disorders and symptoms. This would include treatment for: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Dissociative Disorders, Borderline Personality Disorder, Addictive Disorders, Anxiety Disorders, Depression, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The symptoms treated and the admission criteria are: suicidal ideation, homicidal ideation, self-destructive and addictive behaviors, and inability to function.

You're about to go to "heaven" and live to tell about it. And your story will become the subject of scientific research.

It's the perfect day. You're strolling down a sidewalk, listening to an ensemble of bird songs, soaking up a balmy breeze fragranced with fresh spring flowers, and gazing up at a cloudless sky of pure azure.

Pleasantly distracted, you step off the sidewalk into the street. Brakes screech; horns blare; people shriek in horror. You snap back to reality ... just as the truck hits you.

You fly for yards like a rag doll; you land hard. You're numb all over and fading fast. It's all over; you know it. Your life flashes before you like an epic movie. The End.

You leave your body and look down at it. People are bending over it. Someone is sobbing uncontrollably. As the ambulance rushes up, a blinding light surges above you. It beckons you softly.

You follow it through a tunnel to a place much more vividly real and spectacular than the banner Sunday afternoon you just left behind. You are sure you have arrived in the hereafter.

Weeks later, you wake up to the steady beeps of an EKG monitor next to your hospital bed.