New research suggests muscles respond to simple thoughts of exercise; simply imagining exercise can trick the muscles into delaying atrophy and even getting stronger. It's further proof that brain and body, which evolved together, are more intwined than separate.

To demonstrate the power of the brain, researchers at Ohio University wrapped a single wrist of two sets of study participants in a cast - immobilizing their muscles for four weeks. One set was instructed to sit still and intensely imagine exercising for 11 minutes, five days a week. More than just casually daydream about going to the gym, participants were instructed to devote all of their mental energy towards imagining flexing their arm muscles.

The other set of study participants weren't given any specific instructions. At the end of the four weeks, the mental-exercisers were two times stronger than the others.

Researchers also used magnetic imaging to isolate the area of the brain responsible for the specific arm muscles. Participants that imagine exercise not only had stronger arms but also a stronger brain; their mental exercises created stronger neuromuscular pathways

If obeying orders of the Christian God is the only criteria for determining right and wrong, it's hard to argue otherwise.

Last year, Dimitris Xygalatas, the head of the experimental anthropology lab at the University of Connecticut, decided to conduct a curious experiment in Mauritius, during the annual Thaipusam festival, a celebration of the Hindu god Murugan. For the ten days prior to the festival, devotees abstain from meat and sex. As the festival begins, they can choose to show their devotion in the form of several communal rituals. One is fairly mild. It involves communal prayer and singing beside the temple devoted to Murugan, on the top of a mountain. The other, however - the Kavadi - is one of the more painful modern religious rituals still in practice. Participants must pierce multiple parts of their bodies with needles and skewers and attach hooks to their backs, with which they then drag a cart for more than four hours. After that, they climb the mountain where Murugan's temple is located.

Immediately after each ritual was complete, the worshippers were asked if they would be willing to spend a few minutes answering some questions in a room near the temple. Xygalatas had them rate their experience, their attitude toward others, and their religiosity. Then he asked them a simple question: They would be paid two hundred rupees for their participation (about two days' wages for an unskilled worker); did they want to anonymously donate any of those earnings to the temple? His goal was to figure out if the pain of the Kavadi led to increased affinity for the temple.

For centuries, societies have used pain as a way of creating deep bonds. There are religious rites, such as self-flagellation, solitary pilgrimages, and physical mutilation. There are the rites of passage into adulthood, like the Melanesian rite where boys "may be extensively burned, permanently scarred and mutilated, dehydrated, beaten, and have objects inserted in sensitive areas such as the nasal septum, the base of the spine, the tongue, and the penis." There are also the less intense initiation rituals of fraternity houses and military branches, of summer camps and medical residencies. Painful rites seem to be a way of engineering the kind of affinity that arises naturally among people who have suffered similar traumatic experiences.

Service dogs can significantly reduce symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression in veterans, according to the preliminary findings of a Kaiser Permanente study.

The dogs were also found to improve veterans' relationships and lower their substance abuse.

Researcher Carla Green led the year-long "Pairing Assistance-Dogs with Soldiers" (PAWS) study and recently shared her findings with legislators at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

"The study is significant because no research has been conducted on how service dogs affect the mental health of veterans," Green said. Although benefits for veterans cover service dogs for physical disabilities, they are not available for help with mental health problems.

The video of a monkey in India patiently and persistently working to revive a fellow monkey has gone viral. Check out this and other animal rescue stories.


Last week Pope Francis proclaimed that animals have souls and can go to heaven. Now, one monkey in Kanpur, India, has displayed the kind of compassion and heroics many humans might admire.


This monkey - probably a Rhesus macaque, the most common urban dweller in India - worked frantically to revive another monkey that had passed out on the train tracks after getting a severe shock while cavorting on an electric wire above the station.

Dozens of humans watched, took videos and snapped photos on Dec. 21, but none made a move to help as the doggedly determined little monkey shook, bit, slapped, and splashed water on the unconscious primate.

When his companion was finally revived, the two huddled together in a safe space between the tracks.

We're enjoying the one time of year when protests of "I can't sing!" are laid aside and we sing carols with others. For some this is a once-a-year special event; the rest of the year is left to the professionals to handle the singing (except, perhaps, some alone time in the shower or car).

Music - and singing in particular, as the oldest and only ubiquitous form of music creation - plays a central role in our lives and shared community experiences, and this has been true for every culture for as far back as we can trace our human ancestors.

So does singing in a group provide specific and tangible benefits, or is it merely a curious ability that provides entertainment through creative expression?

Researchers have found new evidence that explains how some aspects of our personality may affect our health and wellbeing, supporting long-observed associations between aspects of human character, physical health and longevity.

A team of health psychologists at The University of Nottingham and the University of California in Los Angeles carried out a study to examine the relationship between certain personality traits and the expression of genes that can affect our health by controlling the activity of our immune systems.

The study did not find any results to support a common theory that tendencies toward negative emotions such as depression or anxiety can lead to poor health (disease-prone personality). What was related to differences in immune cell gene expression were a person's degree of extraversion and conscientiousness.

A clinical psychologist at Yale is attempting to improve the cognitive functioning of psychopaths using computer games, Vox reports.

Arielle Baskin-Sommers claims that psychopaths are not, as is commonly believed, incapable of feeling emotion - and therefore unable to empathize with their victims. They suffer, she believes, from a cognitive deficit that prevents them from focusing on more than one subject at time, such that they pay attention to a goal (stealing money) without thinking about the consequences of attaining it (hurting their victim or being incarcerated).

Baskin-Sommers tells Vox that "[t]here's an attention bottleneck that essentially has the psychopath narrow the focus of their attention on something that's their goal."

Because her computer games enhance a psychopath's ability to attend to more than one matter at a time, Baskin-Sommers believes that they will be less likely to return to jail upon their release.

Being hugged reduces the deleterious effects of stress on the body, according to new research which intentionally exposed people to a cold virus.

Hugging acts as a form of social support and protects people from getting sick and even reduces their illness symptoms if they do get sick.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, asked 404 healthy adults how much social support they perceived they had from other people (Cohen et al., 2014).

They were also asked about how often they were hugged and how often they came into conflict with others.

Participants were then exposed to a cold virus in the lab (they were well paid for this: $1,000 each).

Their condition was monitored in quarantine to see if they developed a cold and how severe their symptoms were.

The precise part of the human brain that controls people's sense of direction has been identified by leading scientists in a groundbreaking piece of research.

Those who have more robust nerve signals in what the scientists describe as the brain's "internal compass" are generally more accomplished navigators, the study suggests.

The report, published in prestigious science journal Current Biology, indicates people tend to get lost when their internal navigational compass cannot maintain pace with these nerve signals.

While scientists have long held the view that such nerve signals exist in the human brain, the theory was based on mere speculation until now.

University College London (UCL) researchers who conducted the study hope the discovery will help shed light on the relationship between Alzheimer's and a deteriorating sense of direction.

Scientists requested 16 volunteers take the time to mentally log a straightforward virtual courtyard. They were then asked to navigate around the space, relying on memory alone, while their brain patterns were scanned using a high-tech MRI machine.

The scans identified the relevant part of the brain responsible for such navigation, showing nerve cell activity in the region each time the participants attempted to virtually make their way around the digital courtyard.

The researchers concluded that the stronger the signal in that part of the brain - known as the entorhinal region - the better the volunteers were at navigating around the courtyard by memory.