Science of the SpiritS


Hearts

The warmth and power of human interaction: The story of Norah and Dan

Tara Wood
Little Things
Wed, 02 Nov 2016 09:13 UTC
Girl befriends elderly man
© Tara Wood, writer
The day before my daughter Norah's fourth birthday, she foreshadowed a remarkable event.

I'd just picked her up from preschool when she cautioned me to mind the elderly person walking across the parking lot at a glacier's pace.

She went on to explain that she has a soft spot for mature folks: 'I like old peoples the best 'cos they walk slow like I walk slow and they has soft skin like I has soft skin. They all gonna die soon so I'm gonna love 'em all up before they is died.'

Sure it got kinda weird and dark at the the end there, but I liked where her heart was.

I was struck by her thoughtfulness and empathy and posted that quote as a status update on Facebook when we got home. I had no idea how much she really meant it.

Comment: Related articles:

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Family

Empathy: Rescuing the oxygen of civilization from extinction

Libby Simon, LSW
PsychCentral
Sun, 30 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC
compassion, empathy
'Some people scarcely move when touched. While some are moved with scarce a touch'- Source Unknown
"What, Me Care? Young are Less Empathetic.".1 Empathy, long considered innate, has been unexpectedly challenged by a U.S. study led by Dr. Sara H. Konrath and published online in Personality and Social Psychology Review. In this self-reported study of 14,000 students, the researchers found empathy levels have declined over the past 30 years.

On the other side of the same coin, another self-reported study carried out by psychologists, Jean M. Twenge with W. Keith Campbell, reported narcissism, a psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation and a lack of empathy, has reached new heights. Their book, The Narcissism Epidemic (2009), explores the rise of narcissism in American culture.2 In a TV interview on the Meredith Vieria Show, Twenge describes the U.S. condition as "suffering from an epidemic of narcissism."3

In addition, drawing on a database of more than 75,000 assessments from 2011-2013, a global sample was created by EQ, an organization dedicated to increasing emotional intelligence around the world. The report, "The State of the Heart," also noted emotional intelligence that encompasses empathy and compassion in young people is declining in comparison with people over 40 years of age. 4

What makes these studies particularly relevant in today's world is their association with known character traits expressed, ranging from schoolyard bullying to heinous violence. The problem is widespread among children and youth and, too often, comes with serious consequences.

Comment: Practical ways to boost empathy

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People 2

What makes some people more altruistic than others?

Alexa Erickson
Collective Evolution
Fri, 28 Oct 2016 17:40 UTC
girl helping boy
Abigail Marsh almost lost her life in a car accident. She was avoiding a dog in the middle of the street, and suddenly found her own life in danger. But a complete stranger stopped, got out of his car, helped her to safety, and then drove off, never even telling her his name.

Why did he do it though? That was the biggest question Marsh found herself asking, and it changed the course of her life. She has since made a career out of understanding the human capacity to care for others; where it comes from; how it develops. Marsh wondered why people do selfless things, and resolved to find out. She soon realized very little work had been done on this topic.

Altruism is a voluntary, costly behaviour that benefits only the other. And Marsh wanted to know what made some people more altruistic than others:

Comment: Further reading:

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Info

New study suggests that religious people have less understanding of the world

Ben Kentish
The Independent
Tue, 25 Oct 2016 15:07 UTC
westminster abby
© Getty ImagesThe researchers compared believers in God to people with autism, saying both struggle to distinguish between the physical and the mental.
Religious people are more likely to have a poorer understanding of the world and are more likely to believe objects like rocks and paper have human qualities, scientists say.

Researchers at the University of Helsinki compared believers in God or the paranormal to people with autism after finding they tend to struggle to understand the realities of the world around us.


Comment: Right there they have conflated two distinct things and thus potentially corrupted their results. Religion and paranormal phenomena are not equivalent. An uneducated "believer" doesn't really compare to an unreligious parapsychologist with academic degrees, for example. What was the overlap between these two groups? Where there some who believed in the paranormal but not God? Vice versa? How did their results compare?


Religious beliefs were linked with a weaker ability to understand physical and biological phenomenon such as volcanoes, flowers, rocks and wind without giving them human qualities.

Believers were more likely to think that inanimate objects such as metal, oil, clothes and paper can think and feel, and agree with statements such as "Stones sense the cold".


Comment: Funnily enough, that's probably closer to a philosophically sound way of looking at the universe. Stones may not 'think' as humans do, but it's a valid hypothesis that every 'thing', from subatomic particles to humans, 'senses' in some way. Panpsychism trumps materialism any day of the week.


Comment: Despite the overly materialistic view of the researchers (even quantum physics can seem a little mystical) the brains of religious people have been found to work 'differently'.

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Music

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

Mo Costandi
The Guardian
Mon, 24 Oct 2016 10:26 UTC
Music and brain power
© Sophie Wolfson'Music probably does something unique. It stimulates the brain in a very powerful way, because of our emotional connection with it.’
The multimillion dollar brain training industry is under attack. In October 2014, a group of over 100 eminent neuroscientists and psychologists wrote an open letter warning that "claims promoting brain games are frequently exaggerated and at times misleading".

Earlier this year, industry giant Lumosity was fined $2m, and ordered to refund thousands of customers who were duped by false claims that the company's products improve general mental abilities and slow the progression of age-related decline in mental abilities. And a recent review examining studies purporting to show the benefits of such products found "little evidence ... that training improves everyday cognitive performance".

While brain training games and apps may not live up to their hype, it is well established that certain other activities and lifestyle choices can have neurological benefits that promote overall brain health and may help to keep the mind sharp as we get older. One of these is musical training. Research shows that learning to play a musical instrument is beneficial for children and adults alike, and may even be helpful to patients recovering from brain injuries.

Comment: See also: Musical training accelerates children's cognitive, social and emotional development

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Camera

Viewing selfies linked to lower self-esteem

Florian Rosado
Reliawire
Mon, 24 Oct 2016 10:30 UTC
selfie
© Lindsey De Laet CC BY
Frequent viewing of selfies through social network sites like Facebook is linked to a decrease in self-esteem and life satisfaction, report Penn State researchers.

Ruoxu Wang, graduate student in mass communications, said:
"Most of the research done on social network sites looks at the motivation for posting and liking content, but we're now starting to look at the effect of viewing behavior."
Viewing behavior is also called "lurking". That is when a person does not participate in posting or liking social content, but is just an observer.

This form of participation in social media may sound like it should have little effect on how humans view themselves, but the study revealed the exact opposite.

Comment: Men who take more selfies have higher than average narcissistic, psychopathic traits - study

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Blue Planet

Taking responsibility for LIFE

Julian Rose
Waking Times
Tue, 25 Oct 2016 09:19 UTC
responsibility
How many times have you felt like a hapless onlooker in a world seemingly gone insane?

How many times have you wondered how things ever managed to get into the unprecedented mess they are in today?

How many times have you longed to escape this crazy turmoil?

I'm confident to predict that the answer is 'many'.

But reflect on this: there must be thousands, if not millions and quite possibly billions, who feel exactly the same way. Let us assume the possibility that the majority of those living on this planet have had such thoughts from time to time. What does this tell us?

It tells us that we see our lives and what goes on 'out there', as two separate realities. It suggests that we feel largely removed and alienated from the goings-on of the planet, regardless of the fact that we live off its (unequally) shared resources.

Now the trouble with all this is that, in truth, we are actually a part of the problem we see as separate from ourselves. We are part of the reason there is such a mess 'out there' in the first place.
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Info

Over time lies may desensitise brain to dishonesty

Hannah Devlin
The Guardian
Mon, 24 Oct 2016 17:00 UTC
Liars
© malerapaso/Getty Images The study suggests that telling small, insignificant lies desensitises the brain to dishonesty, meaning that lying gradually feels more comfortable over time.
American fraudster Frank Abagnale, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Catch Me If You Can, started out swindling his father out of small change for date money and ended up impersonating an airline pilot, despite the admission that he "couldn't fly a kite".

Now scientists have uncovered an explanation for why telling a few porkies has the tendency to spiral out of control. The study suggests that telling small, insignificant lies desensitises the brain to dishonesty, meaning that lying gradually feels more comfortable over time.

Tali Sharot, a neuroscientist at University College London and senior author, said: "Whether it's evading tax, infidelity, doping in sports, making up data in science or financial fraud, deceivers often recall how small acts of dishonesty snowballed over time and they suddenly found themselves committing quite large crimes."

Sharot and colleagues suspected that this phenomenon was due to changes in the brain's response to lying, rather than simply being a case of one lie necessitating another to maintain a story.

In the study, published on Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, 80 volunteers played a game in which they estimated the value of pennies in a jar and sent their guess to an unseen partner. Sometimes participants were told they would secretly benefit at their partner's expense if they overestimated the cash in the jar, incentivising them to lie.

Neil Garrett, also of UCL and a co-author, said: "We knew by how many British pounds they lied on each trial. The amount by which participants lied got larger and larger."

At first, volunteers tended to alter the jar's value by around £1, but this typically ramped up to about £8 by the end of the session.

Comment: For more on how being dishonest and lying can affect your brain, here are a few links that adds more to the picture.

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Boat

Dr. Kelly Brogan: Depression is the medicine

Dr. Kelly Brogan
kellybroganmd.com
Wed, 19 Oct 2016 13:30 UTC
depression
"Tears are a river that take you somewhere. Weeping creates a river around the boat that carries your soul-life. Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace new, someplace better." - Clarissa Pinkola Estés
What if depression is an almost essential part of the process of awakening to yourself, to your wildness?

Understand me when I tell you, depression is a gift. Thank yourself and your body for sending you the message rather than complacently agreeing to make room for toxicity.

Comment:

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Gear

Slippery slope: Telling small lies desensitizes your brain to self-serving dishonesty

Dan Modano
Reliawire
Mon, 24 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC
telling lies, lying
Telling small lies desensitises your brain to the associated negative emotions and may encourage you to tell bigger lies in the future, suggests new research at University College London.

The research provides the first empirical evidence that self-serving lies gradually escalate and shows how this happens in our brains.

The team scanned volunteers' brains while they took part in tasks where they could lie for personal gain. They found that the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with emotion, was most active when people first lied for personal gain. The amygdala's response to lying declined with every lie while the magnitude of the lies escalated.

Comment: To read more about how lying can affect the brain.

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