Science of the SpiritS


Bulb

To understand others, know thyself


Springer
Thu, 18 May 2017 22:47 UTC
Know thyself
© saramarchessault.com
Through targeted training, people can be guided to develop a better inner awareness about their own mental states, and to have a better understanding of the mental states of others. In fact, the better people understand themselves, the more easily they can put themselves in other people's shoes.

Such training therefore ultimately helps us deal with current global challenges, says Anne Böckler of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science and Julius Maximilians University Würzburg in Germany. She, together with Tania Singer and Lukas Hermann, is an author of a study in Springer's Journal of Cognitive Enhancement which looked at the influence of a three-month contemplative training course in a group of adults.

During the three months, various methods were used to teach two groups of 80 and 81 participants, aged between 20 and 55 years, how to develop their perspective-taking skills . The training was inspired by the Internal Family Systems model which views the self as being composed of different complex inner parts or subpersonalities, each with their own defining set of behaviours, thoughts and emotions. Participants were taught to identify and classify their own inner parts. They explored how being identified with different inner parts such as their caring, managing or pleasure parts affects their everyday experiences.
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Info

40 more 'intelligence' genes found

Laura Sanders
Science News
Mon, 22 May 2017 11:00 UTC
Smart Genes
© abide/iStockphotoSMART GENES A large genetic study turns up more genes that may help build intelligence into the brain.
Smarty-pants have 40 new reasons to thank their parents for their powerful brains. By sifting through the genetics of nearly 80,000 people, researchers have uncovered 40 genes that may make certain people smarter. That brings the total number of suspected "intelligence genes" to 52.

Combined, these genetic attributes explain only a very small amount of overall smarts, or lack thereof, researchers write online May 22 in Nature Genetics. But studying these genes, many of which play roles in brain cell development, may ultimately help scientists understand how intelligence is built into brains.

Historically, intelligence research has been mired in controversy, says neuroscientist Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine. Scientists disagreed on whether intelligence could actually be measured and if so, whether genes had anything at all to do with the trait, as opposed to education and other life experiences. But now "we are so many light-years beyond that, as you can see from studies like this," says Haier. "This is very exciting and very positive news."

The results were possible only because of the gigantic number of people studied, says study coauthor Danielle Posthuma, a geneticist at VU University Amsterdam. She and colleagues combined data from 13 earlier studies on intelligence, some published and some unpublished. Posthuma and her team looked for links between intelligence scores, measured in different ways in the studies, and variations held in the genetic instruction books of 78,308 children and adults. Called a genome-wide association study or GWAS, the method looks for signs that certain quirks in people's genomes are related to a trait.
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Eye 2

When your child is a psychopath

Barbara Bradley
The Atlantic
Sat, 20 May 2017 18:49 UTC
child_psychopath
© Lola Dupre
This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We're sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha's mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. "I wanted the whole world to myself," she says. "So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people."

Starting at age 6, Samantha began drawing pictures of murder weapons: a knife, a bow and arrow, chemicals for poisoning, a plastic bag for suffocating. She tells me that she pretended to kill her stuffed animals.

"You were practicing on your stuffed animals?," I ask her.

She nods.

"How did you feel when you were doing that to your stuffed animals?"

"Happy."

"Why did it make you feel happy?"

"Because I thought that someday I was going to end up doing it on somebody."

"Did you ever try?"

Silence.

"I choked my little brother."
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Bulb

The virtues of boredom

Julie Beck
The Atlantic
Mon, 08 May 2017 16:41 UTC
boredom
© Hulton Deutsch / GettyPrince Charles with his Aunt, Princess Margaret (right), and his Grandmother, Elizabeth the Queen Mother, at the 1953 coronation of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II.
What's going on under the surface when people feel bored?

Boredom is in many ways an emotion of absence. The absence of stimulation, of interest, of excitement. But as Mary Mann reveals in her new book, Yawn: Adventures in Boredom, what's lacking when we feel bored is often something much deeper than entertainment. She writes about her "fear that there was no overarching purpose for my time," how boredom can paper over feelings of powerlessness or meaninglessness. It's easier to label that itchy sensation "boredom" than it is to consider the feeling one gets sometimes that the train of life is stopped on its tracks, that the narrative is going nowhere.

Feeling bored "doing work that didn't mean anything to me in San Diego, a place I'd never meant to live," Mann writes, "felt as if I'd slipped out of the role of protagonist in my own life, just fallen right out of the story altogether."

Comment: 'I'm bored!' - Research on attention sheds light on the unengaged mind

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Candle

Lament singing: An ancient tradition that helps people cope with trauma in the modern world

Tristan Ahtone
YES! Magazine
Tue, 16 May 2017 14:45 UTC
Lament singing
Lament teacher Prikko Fihlman at her home in Helsinki
In Finland, lament singing is experiencing a revival, one sad song at a time.

Riitta Excell wore a pair of homemade wool socks: white with red floral patterns and rounded blue toes. Around her were women sipping tea and enjoying plum pastries and chicken feta pie. They wore homemade wool socks, as well.

It was nearly 3 o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, and Pirkko Fihlman's living room on the outskirts of Helsinki was filled with black-and-white family photos, porcelain figurines of angels and birds, and embroidered rococo chairs. The clink of tea cups fell silent, and then Excell squeezed her eyes closed, clenched her fists, and began to sing a lament in Finnish.

Comment: The magic of music is a balm for the body and soul

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Heart - Black

Meditation and the dark recesses of the mind

Dr. Miguel Farias
Upliftconnect.com
Wed, 17 May 2017 15:05 UTC
mindfullness
© Cameron Gray
Aaron Alexis was in search of something. He started attending a Buddhist temple and learned to meditate; he hoped it would bring him wisdom and peace. "I want to be a Buddhist monk," he once told a friend from the temple. His friend advised him to keep studying. Aaron did. He learned Thai and kept going to the temple, chanting, and meditating. But then other things got in the way.

On 16 September 2013, Aaron drove into Washington's Navy Yard. It was eight o'clock in the morning. He'd been working there not long before, and security let him in. He walked out of the car with a large bag and briefly disappeared into a toilet. Minutes later the security cameras caught him holding a shotgun. Aaron walked briskly and hid behind a wall for a few seconds before advancing through the building. Within 30 minutes twelve people were dead. He killed randomly, first using his shotgun and then, after running out of ammunition, using the handgun belonging to a guard he'd just killed. He died after an exchange of gunfire with the police.

It took only 24 hours for a journalist to notice that Aaron had been a Buddhist, prompting her to write an article that asked, 'Can there be a less positive side to meditation?' Western Buddhists immediately reacted. One wrote, "This man represented the Dharma teachings no more than 9/11 terrorists represented the teachings of Islam."
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Family

Negative thoughts can harm your health at the DNA level

April McCarthy
Prevent Disease
Fri, 19 May 2017 20:45 UTC
DNA strand
Lose your temper on the road? Frustrated with colleagues at work? You may be cutting your life short, warns molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn--who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2009--and health psychologist Elissa Epel, who studies stress and aging.

The authors claim in their new book, The Telomere Effect, that negative thoughts harm your health at the DNA level. Research has shown that a person's "social relationships, environments and lifestyles" affect their genes. "Even though you are born with a particular set of genes, the way you live can influence how they express themselves."

Blackburn and Epel say components of DNA called telomeres determine how fast your cells age. Short telomeres are one of the major reasons human cells grow old, but lab tests have shown that they can also grow longer. In other words, aging "could possibly be accelerated or slowed -and, in some aspects, even reversed."

Comment: See also:

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Magnify

Inversion: A rare and crucial skill that nearly all great thinkers use to their advantage

James Clear
JamesClear.com
Mon, 15 May 2017 00:00 UTC
half empty glass, negative thinking, inversion
The ancient Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus regularly conducted an exercise known as a premeditatio malorum, which translates to a "premeditation of evils."

The goal of this exercise was to envision the negative things that could happen in life. For example, the Stoics would imagine what it would be like to lose their status in society or to be abandoned by their spouse or to have all of their worldly possessions stolen.

The Stoics believed that by imagining the worst case scenario ahead of time, they could overcome their fears of negative experiences and make better plans to prevent them. While most people were focused on how they could achieve success, the Stoics also considered how they would manage failure. What would things look like if everything went wrong tomorrow? And what does this tell us about how we should prepare today?

This way of thinking, in which you consider the opposite of what you want, is known as inversion. When I first learned of it, I didn't realize how powerful it could be. As I have studied it more, I have begun to realize that inversion is a rare and crucial skill that nearly all great thinkers use to their advantage.
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Hearts

A crisis hormone? Oxytocin is not just for love and cuddling

Josh Richardson
Prevent Disease
Thu, 18 May 2017 20:35 UTC
cuddling puppy
Oxytocin plays an important role in bonding. It is often called the "love hormone" or "cuddle chemical", but American and Norwegian researchers have found out that it may as well be called a "crisis hormone."

When we hug someone, oxytocin is released into our bodies by our pituitary gland, lowering both our heart rates and our cortisol levels. Cortisol is the hormone responsible for stress, high blood pressure, and heart disease.

Oxytocin is a neurotransmitter that acts on the limbic system, the brain's emotional centre, promoting feelings of contentment, reducing anxiety and stress, and even making mammals monogamous. It is the hormone responsible for us all being here today.

"When people notice that their partner is showing less interest in their relationship than they are, the level of this relationship-building hormone increases," says Andreas Aarseth Kristoffersen, a research assistant in NTNU's Department of psychology.
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Cell Phone

Instagram and Snapchat rate the worst for youngsters' mental health


RT
Fri, 19 May 2017 19:10 UTC
texting
© Mario Anzuoni / Reuters
Young people experience increased rates of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem and poor sleep because of popular social media platforms, according to a new UK study. Instagram and Snapchat can be particularly damaging, the study says.

Social media are "more addictive than alcohol and cigarettes," according to the report published on Friday by the independent health education charity Royal Society for Public Health and its Young Health Movement.

Ninety-one percent of youngsters use online social networks, and it can negatively affect their lives, according to the group's findings. Almost 1,500 youngsters were surveyed, aged from 14 to 24.

The researchers say those spending more than two hours per day on social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram "are more likely to report poor mental health, including psychological distress."

Those surveyed were asked to rate five popular social platforms - YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram - by 14 points to determine their influence on young people's health and well-being.

Comment: Further reading:

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