Science of the SpiritS


Brain

Brains of youth with conduct disorder have brains that are 'wired differently'


BT
Tue, 01 May 2018 15:36 UTC
brain
The brains of young people with the most severe forms of antisocial behaviour are "wired differently" to others - providing clues as to why they struggle to control and regulate their emotions, researchers say.

In a study, published today, neuroimaging methods were used to examine young people with the condition conduct disorder - which has symptoms ranging from lying and truancy to physical violence and weapon use.

Researchers from the universities of Bath, Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology set out to understand more about the wiring of the brain in adolescents with conduct disorder.
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People 2

Psychologist lists the 4 behaviors that will kill relationships


PsyBlog
Mon, 30 Apr 2018 20:55 UTC
couple arguing
Four things that kill a relationship stone dead.

When someone has contempt for their partner, this is the single greatest predictor of divorce.

The conclusion comes from psychologist Professor John Gottman, who has been analysing relationships, both good and bad for over 40 years.

He's followed couples across decades in many psychological studies to see what kinds of behaviours predict whether they would stay together in the long-term or were soon destined for the divorce courts.
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Music

Training yourself to boost your alpha brainwaves can increase creativity and musical skills

Helen Thomson
New Scientist
Wed, 07 Mar 2018 20:26 UTC
playing piano
© Daniele Mattioli/Anzenberger / eyevineNurturing your talents can help ease you into that alpha state
If you need to produce your best creative work, try boosting your alpha brainwaves.

Joel Lopata at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and his colleagues have found that people with more synchronised alpha waves are more creative and produce work of higher quality.

The team asked 22 pianists to listen to, play back or improvise jazz melodies. As they did so, the researchers monitored electrical activity in the prefrontal cortex, a brain region that orchestrates our thoughts.

When groups of neurons send signals at the same time, the result is a wave of electrical activity that EEG caps can pick up. Certain brainwave types have been linked with mental states - delta waves are detectable during deep sleep, for instance, whereas beta waves signify that someone is analysing something critically.
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Cloud Grey

Emotions may be fleeting, but sadness lingers longest

Jeremy Dean
PsyBlog
Mon, 30 Apr 2018 00:00 UTC
sadness, sea
Sadness is the longest lasting of the emotions, finds one of the first ever studies to look at why some emotions last much longer than others.

When compared with being irritated, ashamed, surprised and even bored; it's sadness which outlasts the others.

The study, published in the journal Motivation and Emotion, found that sadness tended to be associated with events which had a major long-term impact on people's lives, such as bereavement (Verduyn & Lavrijsen, 2014).

Comment: Is it really bad to be sad?
When you find something this deeply in us biologically, you presume that it was selected because it had some advantage, otherwise we wouldn't have been burdened with it," says Jerome Wakefield, a clinical social worker at New York University and co-author of The Loss of Sadness: How psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder (with Allan Horwitz, Oxford University Press, 2007). "We're fooling around with part of our biological make-up."

[..]

Wakefield believes that in humans sadness has a further function: it helps us learn from our mistakes. "I think that one of the functions of intense negative emotions is to stop our normal functioning, to make us focus on something else for a while," he says. It might act as a psychological deterrent to prevent us from making those mistakes in the first place. The risk of sadness may deter us from being too cavalier in relationships or with other things we value, for example.


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People

People are terrible at judging these desirable traits in themselves


PsyBlog
Fri, 27 Apr 2018 12:38 UTC
girl mirror
People are worst at judging their own levels of intelligence, attractiveness and creativity, research finds.

However, they are good at judging their own levels of anxiety and sadness.

The reason is that people are good at judging internal feelings because they have direct access to them.

However, people are worse at evaluating themselves in comparison to others.

The research underlines that we are not always at our best when judging ourselves.

Dr Simine Vazire, the study's author, said:

Comment: See also: Cognitive bias and the links between intelligence and prejudice

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Rainbow

Looking at this color can make you smarter


PsyBlog
Mon, 23 Apr 2018 12:41 UTC
colours
Seeing red makes people 31% better at detail-oriented tasks like recalling memories or proofreading, research finds.

The colour blue, though, makes people more creative - doubling the number of creative ideas they produce.

Professor Juliet Zhu, study co-author, said:
"Previous research linked blue and red to enhanced cognitive performance, but disagreed on which provides the greatest boost.

It really depends on the nature of the task."
The research involved over 600 people doing six different tasks, some involving detail, others creativity.

Comment: See also:

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Info

How to identify and counteract being mind-killed

immeasurablematt
Medium
Tue, 30 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
mind-killing
Ken McLeod's six methods of mind-killing and their antidotes

The Roots of Mind-Killing

The following is a compilation of material from The Warrior's Solution: Passivity and Freedom retreat taught by Ken McLeod in 2009 and a series of newsletters he wrote and sent out in 2015 (Sources: 1, 2, 3). I was recently reminded of the concept of mind-killing, and how it works and relates to Buddhism during a week-long meditation retreat. I found the concept and antidotes so useful that I reorganized the full text of the newsletters and combined it with material from the audio recordings to present everything in one location.

In a follow up post, I will do an original analysis relating the six methods of mind-killing to Jordan Peterson's concept of 'ideological possession'.

*Ken notes that although the term 'mind-killing' is not used explicitly, Naom Chomsky describes the six methods below in the documentary Manufacturing Consent.

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Brain

Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) may be physically causing PTSD

Scott Pelley
CBS News
Sun, 01 Apr 2018 00:01 UTC
Brian Mancini in 2011
© CBS NewsBrian Mancini in 2011

Scar tissue found in the brains of combat veterans who suffered from PTSD could mean that many cases of the disorder are caused by physical trauma

Editor's Note: Since this story aired, we have received many inquiries about how to contact Dr. Daniel Perl and The Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine. Here is that information: http://www.researchbraininjury.org or 1-855-366-8824.

A new medical discovery has profound implications for wounded warriors. It's a previously unknown type of brain injury uncovered in veterans who are exposed to the invisible wave of energy that erupts from high explosives. The evidence was found in the brains of veterans who died. And tonight, we have a rare opportunity to introduce you to one of the vets who made the discovery possible. Retired Army Sergeant First Class Brian Mancini killed himself in 2017 after descending into psychosis. But we met Mancini years before, in 2011, after he made a nearly miraculous recovery from the impact of a roadside bomb in Iraq. There's no one better to begin this story, than the late Brian Mancini himself.

Comment: The idea that there could be physical trauma that could cause PTSD is quite interesting. While it's obvious that not all those suffering from PTSD are exposed to blasts, perhaps there are subsections of the disorder with a very real and physical cause.

See also:

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Fire

Excuses: Overcome them or become overwhelmed by them

Gary Z McGee
The Mind Unleashed
Thu, 19 Apr 2018 13:50 UTC
brain
© Fer Gregory/Shutterstock.
"You are alive only if you embrace (some) volatility." ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Excuses are like assholes, everybody has one. But there's nothing saying you can't take the necessary steps toward overcoming them.

Excuses are little bastard killjoys that will suck the joy out of your life if you let them. They are psychological hang-ups, tantamount to mental tripwires or psychosomatic speed-bumps. If you allow enough of them to pile up they can turn into a near insurmountable wall that will prevent your comfort zone from stretching into healthier horizons. Such walls are stifling. Deadly even. Deadly to creativity. Deadly to vitality. Deadly to living a life well-lived.

Comment: Countering the excuses that prevent us from making life changes

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Brain

Memories are altered each time they're accessed

Adam Sinicki
Prevent Disease
Tue, 17 Apr 2018 15:41 UTC
memory gears
The fallibility of memory is something that is now well documented and publicized. Like it or not, you can't trust the contents of your brain and this is considered verbatim in a court of law.

There a many reasons for this but one of the most fascinating is that we actually constantly alter our memories every time we access them. We don't do this on purpose but instead it's an involuntary side effect of the process of activating memories.

How Our Memories Work

Memories are essentially stored as connections between neurons in the brain. These connections link together various experiences, stimuli and emotions -- which is why hearing a song or smelling cookies can suddenly bring fragments of memories hurtling back. It's unusual for us to forget memories completely but if they aren't accessed often enough or if they aren't linked to enough cues, there won't be enough strong 'in-roads' for us to find them.

Comment: See also:

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