Science of the SpiritS


Shoe

Magic shoes: How to hear yourself instantly happy

Corrinne Burns
New Scientist
Thu, 20 Nov 2014 20:00 UTC
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© Andrew LyonsPerception-skewing shoes can make you feel slimmer, happier and full of energy by retuning your body's soundtrack
As a rule, I don't remove my shoes in public. But today I'm making an exception. Surrounded by engineers and psychologists, I pull off my Converse and step into a pair of rather ordinary-looking brown leather sandals.

I begin to walk slowly around the room, and that's when I experience the most peculiar sensations. The sound of my footsteps changes, and suddenly my lower legs feel lighter and longer. My knees feel looser, and I begin to raise them higher and higher as I walk. My walking speed increases until it's all I can do not to break into a trot. I feel slimmer, stronger, and full of energy. These are unlike any shoes I have ever worn.

Such footwear sounds fantastical, but these shoes are just one of a number of new experiments revealing how the noises we make have an immediate and profound effect on the way we experience our bodies, on our emotions and our behavior. The trick here is not in the shoes themselves, but in the way they change the sound of my footsteps.
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Bulb

Meditation sparks 'positive changes' in the brain

Christina Sarich
Natural Society
Sat, 22 Nov 2014 22:54 UTC
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I recently reported how 8 weeks of meditation can promote brain growth by fueling grey-matter in the hippocampus - boosting memory, sense of self, empathy, and reducing stress. But did you know that this practice can also positively affect 'white matter' in the brain? Research has now shown that meditators have better communication in their 'white matter' than those who do not meditate at all.

You've likely heard of 'grey matter' in the brain, but what about 'white matter'? This is an important component of the central nervous system, brain, and spinal nerves that encompass numerous glial cells that help to transmit electrical signals from one part of the cerebrum to another as well as through other brain centers. You might say the 'white matter' is the brain's super highway.

Comment: Meditation is good for the mind, body and spirit in every possible regard: Interested in learning more about the numerous benefits of breathing exercises and meditation? Try the easy to use Éiriú Eolas Stress Control, Healing and Rejuvenation Program here.

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Hearts

Kindness holds the power to heal

Project Compassion Stanford
Huffington Post
Sun, 16 Nov 2014 00:33 UTC
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© ouryearinspain.com
We've all heard the old adage that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but what about a smile?

An extensive scientific literature review sponsored by Dignity Health and conducted by the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University reveals a growing body of scientific evidence that indicates kindness holds the power to heal. We now know that this often overlooked, virtually cost-free remedy has a statistically significant impact on our physical health. For example, the positive effect of kindness is even greater than that of taking aspirin to reduce the risk of a heart attack or the influence of smoking on male mortality. And it doesn't even require a trip to the pharmacy.

Comment: Also read about the importance of kindness when dealing with addiction issues: Killing addiction with kindness

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People

Trouble with your boss? Own it


ScienceDaily
Fri, 21 Nov 2014 00:00 UTC
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© G.L. KohuthBrent Scott, associate professor of management in Michigan State University's Broad College of Business.
Don't get along with your boss? Your job performance may actually improve if the two of you can come to grips with the poor relationship.

A new study led by Michigan State University business scholars finds that workers are more motivated if they and their supervisors see eye-to-eye about a bad relationship than if they have different views about their relationship. The findings are published in the Academy of Management Journal.

"Seeing eye-to-eye about the employee-supervisor relationship is equally, if not more important than the actual quality of the relationship," said Fadel Matta, lead investigator on the study and a management researcher in MSU's Broad College of Business.

Past research suggests workers and their bosses often have differing views about the quality of their relationship. Matta and his fellow researchers set out to examine whether that affects actual work engagement, or motivation.
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Bulb

Is it possible to rewire your brain to change bad habits, thoughts & feelings?

Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic, & Laurel Hulley
Alternet
Tue, 11 Nov 2014 22:17 UTC
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© sgipt.orgtree of psychotherapay
Advances in psychology offer hope.

Nearly 90 years since F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his classic The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrman's film version gave renewed currency to the novel's famous final line:
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
What's afforded this passage such staying power is not only its haunting poetry, but the worldview it expresses - however hard we may try to reinvent ourselves, we're doomed to remain captives of our pasts. Another celebrated author, William Faulkner, put it this way:
"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
Eugene O'Neill penned these words:
"There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now."
Throughout its history, many in the field of psychotherapy have been similarly pessimistic about people's ability to liberate themselves from the past. It can even be argued that most modern cognitive-behavioral approaches are based on the assumption that, at best, therapists can only incrementally create new emotional and behavioral habits that work around - but don't actually transform - the deep-seated emotional programming that causes clients' most visceral distress. This way of thinking, however, doesn't reflect our current understanding of how memory functions, nor do the therapeutic approaches that aim simply to manage or circumvent entrenched emotions, beliefs, and behaviors rooted in painful past experiences.
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Info

Study shows mental and physical pain actually use distinct neural circuits

Rick Nauert PhD
PsychCentral
Wed, 19 Nov 2014 00:00 UTC
brain images pain pathways
New research may rewrite how we believe pain is processed by the brain.

For the last decade, neuroscientists have believed that the brain processes physical and social pain in a similar manner.

Now, a new study from the University of Colorado shows that the two kinds of pain actually use distinct neural circuits.

Investigators are enthusiastic about the new finding as the discovery may lead to specific treatment protocols for each pathway. Researchers may also gain a better understanding of how the two kinds of pain interact.
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2 + 2 = 4

The science of suffering

Judith Shulevitz
Newrepublic.com
Sun, 16 Nov 2014 12:25 UTC
Kids are inheriting their parents' trauma. Can science stop it?

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Lowell, Massachusetts, a former mill town of the red-brick-and-waterfall variety 25 miles north of Boston, has proportionally more Cambodians and Cambodian-Americans than nearly any other city in the country: as many as 30,000, out of a population of slightly more than 100,000. These are largely refugees and the families of refugees from the Khmer Rouge, the Maoist extremists who, from 1975 to 1979, destroyed Cambodia's economy; shot, tortured, or starved to death nearly two million of its people; and forced millions more into a slave network of unimaginably harsh labor camps. Lowell's Cambodian neighborhood is lined with dilapidated rowhouses and stores that sell liquor behind bullet-proof glass, although the town's leaders are trying to rebrand it as a tourist destination: "Little Cambodia."

Comment: For more information on how trauma effects the body, see these links:
When the Body Says No: How Emotions Can Cause or Prevent Deadly Disease
Dr. Gabor Maté: "When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection"

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Arrow Down

By design: Children found to be more vulnerable to advertising when watching programs with action or violence

Jim Dayton
Activist Post
Wed, 19 Nov 2014 00:00 UTC
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A study by a University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism researcher has found that children who watch television shows with action or violence are more susceptible to messages in the advertisements shown during the programs.

Eunji Cho, a graduate student in UW-Madison's School of Journalism and Mass Communication, says the excitement of a violent show causes children to be focused and attentive, an effect that carries over to commercial breaks.

To perform this study, Cho returned to her native South Korea and observed four different kindergarten classes. Each class was randomly assigned to watch either "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" or "A Dog of Flanders," a calm Japanese program. The kids were then shown an ad for chocolate at commercial breaks.

Afterward, the children were asked to choose which candy bar they wanted - the one advertised in the commercials or a generic brand. Cho found that students who watched the violent show overwhelmingly favored the advertised product, while those who watched the calm show were indifferent about which candy bar they chose.

Comment: Now we understand the reasons violent programs have not been scaled back for children, even though studies have shown that such programs and video games increase aggressiveness and hinder the development of empathy in children. The simple reason is that such programming is profitable, and sociopaths running corporations have no concern with the developmental consequences on young minds.

ISU psychologists publish three new studies on violent video game effects on youths

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Bulb

Training can lead to synesthetic experiences: Does learning the 'color of' specific letters boost IQ?


ScienceDaily
Tue, 18 Nov 2014 18:39 UTC
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© brunobarillariA new study has shown for the first time that people can be trained to "see" letters of the alphabet as colours in a way that simulates how those with synaesthesia experience their world.
A new study has shown for the first time that people can be trained to "see" letters of the alphabet as colors in a way that simulates how those with synesthesia experience their world.

The University of Sussex research, published today (18 November 2014) in Scientific Reports, also found that the training might potentially boost IQ.

Synesthesia is a fascinating though little-understood neurological condition in which some people (estimated at around 1 in 23) experience an overlap in their senses. They "see" letters as specific colors, or can "taste" words, or associate sounds with different colors.

A critical debate concerns whether the condition is embedded in our genes, or whether it emerges because of particular environmental influences, such as colored-letter toys in infancy.

While the two possibilities are not mutually exclusive, psychologists at the University's Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science devised a nine-week training program to see if adults without synesthesia can develop the key hallmarks of the condition.
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Magnify

Finding 'lost' languages in the brain: Far-reaching implications for unconscious role of infant experiences


ScienceDaily
Mon, 17 Nov 2014 15:00 UTC
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© McGill UniversityFinding lost languages in the brain.
An infant's mother tongue creates neural patterns that the unconscious brain retains years later even if the child totally stops using the language, as can happen in cases of international adoption, according to a new joint study. The study offers the first neural evidence that traces of the "lost" language remain in the brain.

"The infant brain forms representations of language sounds, but we wanted to see whether the brain maintains these representations later in life even if the person is no longer exposed to the language," says Lara Pierce, a doctoral candidate at McGill University and first author on the paper. Her work is jointly supervised by Dr. Denise Klein at The Neuro and Dr. Fred Genesee in the Department of Psychology. The article, "Mapping the unconscious maintenance of a lost first language," is in the November 17 edition of scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The Neuro conducted and analyzed functional MRI scans of 48 girls between nine and 17 years old who were recruited from the Montreal area through the Department of Psychology. One group was born and raised unilingual in a French-speaking family. The second group had Chinese-speaking children adopted as infants who later became unilingual French speaking with no conscious recollection of Chinese. The third group were fluently bilingual in Chinese and French.
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