Science of the SpiritS


Horse

Columbia University studies equine therapy to assist with healing PTSD

Leslie Potter
Horse Channel
Wed, 15 Nov 2017 22:54 UTC
The Man O' War Project aims to determine how equine-assisted therapy can be most effectively used to help veterans with PTSD.
horse
Equine-facilitated therapy could be a key treatment option for people diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and new research underway at Columbia University, dubbed the Man O' War Project, could help prove just how effective it is.

PTSD can affect anyone who has been through a traumatic experience, such as victims or witnesses of violence. It's a common affliction of members of the military who have served in combat zones. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, approximately 14 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have some degree of PTSD, along with 10 to 12 percent of Gulf War veterans and a staggering 30 percent of Vietnam vets.

Comment: Mental health professionals use horses for therapy

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Brain

Two interacting brains use different neural and cognitive processes than two individual brains doing the same task

Sarah DeWeerdt
Spectrum
Mon, 13 Nov 2017 19:15 UTC
functional near-infrared spectroscopy
Wired up: A method of measuring blood flow in the brain allows people to sit upright, as they normally would while conversing with others.
A test designed to capture the dynamic back-and-forth of conversation suggests the existence of a new language area in the brain. The brain's subcentral area, previously of unknown function, is activated specifically during interactions between people, the new work suggests. Researchers presented the unpublished results yesterday at the 2017 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Language and communication difficulties are hallmarks of autism. To assess these problems, studies commonly track brain activity while the participant lies in a scanner and either talks or listens to words piped in through a speaker. "Most of what we know about language comes from single subjects," says study leader Joy Hirsch, professor of psychiatry at Yale University. These studies suggest that talking is associated with activity in a brain region called Broca's area, and listening with a nearby spot called Wernicke's area.

However, they don't reveal much about what happens in the brain during real-life, spontaneous communication, Hirsch says. Some scientists are developing ways to record brain activity during real-life social interactions. Hirsch's new work suggests a novel place to look in the brain, and a new method of analysis, to gain insights into language impairments.
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Donut

Eckhart Tolle, like most spiritual gurus, is a con

Andrea Quintero
Huffpost
Sun, 05 Nov 2017 16:51 UTC
breathing meditation depression
© Anton Gepolov / Fotolia
When the human being experiences a moment of pleasure - it begins to desire that experience to endlessly repeat itself in an attempt to create permanence. And the constant attempt to construct permanence gives the so-called "spiritual ideologies", or "new age gurus" the opportunity to provide us with the methods to attain "constant happiness", "bliss" and "higher states of consciousness". The reality is that we are constantly in pursuit of ideas given to us by others. And the pursuit of these goals is what creates the polarization in the human being. Now, let me remind you that a true "guru" seeks no followers.

I recently listened to a podcast where Eckhart Tolle was being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey about "The Conscious New Earth". Not only was I enraged by a lot of what I heard, but I was left wondering how people come to believe this bunch of baloney.

I will point out the fallacies in his words:

Comment: See also:

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Rose

Plants can count and communicate, even without a brain

Red Pill Junkie
Daily Grail
Thu, 02 Nov 2017 00:01 UTC
Neuroscientist Greg Gage
If you have one of those annoying Vegan/Buddhist friends who keep yammering about how they don't eat meat because "animals have a mind of their own", show them this video of Neuroscientist Greg Gage demonstrating many of the 'sentient' properties of plants, just to piss them off:


Comment: Plants are pretty amazing things! See:

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Family

Neuroscientist: The most important choice you can make is the company you keep

Chris Weller
Business Insider
Mon, 06 Nov 2017 19:43 UTC
Friends walking on a beach
© Kelvin Delvecchio/Unsplash
According to Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University who has been studying decision-making for over a decade, the surest way to maximise happiness has nothing to do with experiences, material goods, or personal philosophy.

It's all about who you decide to spend time with. But "it's not just advice to choose your friends carefully," Cerf told Business Insider.

There are two premises that lead Cerf to believe personal company is the most important factor for long-term satisfaction.

The first is that decision-making is tiring. A great deal of research has found that humans have a limited amount of mental energy to devote to making choices. Picking our clothes, where to eat, what to eat when we get there, what music to listen to, whether it should actually be a podcast, and what to do in our free time all demand our brains to exert that energy on a daily basis.
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Brain

New study shows sleep deprivation makes it difficult for neurons to function effectively

Samantha Mathewson
Live Science
Tue, 07 Nov 2017 14:20 UTC
Tired man
© Shutterstock
After a sleepless night, you likely feel sluggish the next morning, and a small new study suggests why: Your brain cells feel sluggish, too. And when those brain cells are tired, you may be more likely to be forgetful and get distracted more easily, the research found.

In the study, the researchers found that sleep deprivation makes it difficult for brain cells to communicate effectively, which, in turn, can lead to temporary mental lapses that affect memory and visual perception.

In other words, the findings offer clues as to why a sleepless night makes it so hard to think and concentrate the next day.

"We discovered that starving the body of sleep also robs neurons of the ability to function properly," senior study author Dr. Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), said in a statement. "This paves the way for cognitive lapses in how we perceive and react to the world around us."

Comment: See also:

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Brain

How challenging situations activate cognitive shifts

Milla Bengtsson
Reliawire
Fri, 10 Nov 2017 00:00 UTC
Cognitive shifts
Challenging situations make it more difficult to understand where you are and what's happening around you, new research demonstrates. The finding suggests that challenging situations cause the brain to abandon nuanced, context-based cognition and shift to reflexive action.

Previous research suggests that long-term memories formed under stress lack the context and peripheral details encoded by the hippocampus, making false alarms and reflexive reactions more likely. These context details are necessary for situating yourself in space and time, so struggling to acquire them has implications for decision-making in the moment as well as in memory formation.

Biased cognition during high arousal states is a relevant to a variety of topics, from the development of post-traumatic stress disorders or stress-triggered addictive behaviors to forensic considerations regarding crimes of passion.

Comment: See also: Waking the Tiger: An interview with Peter Levine

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Gear

Unhealed trauma may cause physical illness

Alex Pietrowski
Waking Times
Tue, 31 Oct 2017 16:21 UTC
crying person
We've known for a long while that unresolved emotional trauma can cause lifelong behavioral problems. Most notably, Dr. Gabor Maté has explained how addictions arise in people who've suffered wounds in the past, mostly during their childhood years, and how those wounds continue to manifest in negative ways throughout their lives.

While this is not something that can easily be pinned down by medical research, it does make sense intuitively, and the improvements people see in their lives once traumatic experiences are reconciled and put to rest offers sufficient testimony to support this idea.

Comment:

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Question

Are you only as happy as your unhappiest child?

Tim Lott
The Guardian
Fri, 03 Nov 2017 09:30 UTC
Unhappy children
© Don McPhee for the Guardian‘Yes, children are trouble – but is life about avoiding trouble at all costs?’
An article published this week in the digital magazine Aeon carries the headline: "Kids? Just say no," which purports to make "the moral case against procreation". The author, a philosopher called David Benatar, claims that "coming into existence is always a serious harm". He describes himself as an "antinatalist". "Even if life isn't pure suffering," he ponders, "coming into existence can still be sufficiently harmful to render procreation wrong. Life is simply much worse than most people think."

This is a point of view I find verging on the pathological, but it is true that the reasons not to have children are sufficiently numerous that it makes you wonder why so many people do it.

Apart from anything else, people who don't have children are, according to numerous surveys, consistently happier. The moment you have children, you are burdened with worries and responsibilities for the rest of your life. You are only ever as happy as your unhappiest child.

So, what is the motivation? The answer to this, as far as I'm concerned, is pretty much: "Well, what else are you going to do?" For me, life isn't the pursuit of happiness. Life is the pursuit of meaning.

Comment: Jordan Peterson: " Transcend your suffering"
This is the most profound speech of the 21st century.

Its balance of emotional wrath and cogent argument makes it undeniably sincere, and yet, entirely reasonable. Peterson rips apart the victim mindset that plagues our culture -- a plague that is quietly nourished by our intelligentsia.

It's not that the victim mindset is wrong -- it's correct. Everyone's a victim! But instead of masturbating over our collective self-pity, we ought to try to lessen the load of our victim-hood. Start with yourself: what are you doing that is making your life more painful? If you ask yourself that question, and you sincerely want to know the answer, it will immediately become clear that you are your own worst enemy. And how can you complain about society when you won't improve your individual inadequacies?

And so Dr Peterson places the blame squarely on the individual. Which is the primary discovery of the West: the necessity of individual responsibility. That's not "Blaming the Victim" -- it's a realistic approach to life. No one is going to shelter and protect you indefinitely, so you'll have to do it yourself. And anyone who suggests otherwise will most likely enslave you.

In short, Dr. Peterson shows how the correct response to the suffering of life is to confront it forthrightly. And with that, he drops the mic on western civilization



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Brain

Burnout: When minds turn to ash

Josh Cohen
1843
Fri, 15 Jul 2016 11:53 UTC
mental burnout
© Izhar Chen
When Steve first came to my consulting room, it was hard to square the shambling figure slumped low in the chair opposite with the young dynamo who, so he told me, had only recently been putting in 90-hour weeks at an investment bank. Clad in baggy sportswear that had not graced the inside of a washing machine for a while, he listlessly tugged his matted hair, while I tried, without much success, to picture him gliding imperiously down the corridors of some glassy corporate palace.

Steve had grown up as an only child in an affluent suburb. He recalls his parents, now divorced, channeling the frustrations of their loveless, quarrelsome marriage into the ferocious cultivation of their son. The straight-A grades, baseball-team captaincy and Ivy League scholarship he eventually won had, he felt, been destined pretty much from the moment he was born. "It wasn't so much like I was doing all this great stuff, more like I was slotting into the role they'd already scripted for me." It seemed as though he'd lived the entirety of his childhood and adolescence on autopilot, so busy living out the life expected of him that he never questioned whether he actually wanted it.

Comment: Finding a healthy balance between our work, social, and personal lives can be very difficult. With the advent of cell phones and social media, for all their usefulness, finding that balance has become even more tricky. After all, we must pay rent on life, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy the process of creating a life for ourselves that we find worth living.

One way to help deal with the stress that comes with paying rent on life and facing reality is Éiriú Eolas. Other ways can be found here:

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