At first glance, Quiet Time - a stress reduction strategy used in several San Francisco middle and high schools, as well as in scattered schools around the Bay Area - looks like something out of the om-chanting 1960s. Twice daily, a gong sounds in the classroom and rowdy adolescents, who normally can't sit still for 10 seconds, shut their eyes and try to clear their minds. I've spent lots of time in urban schools and have never seen anything like it.

This practice - meditation rebranded - deserves serious attention from parents and policymakers. An impressive array of studies shows that integrating meditation into a school's daily routine can markedly improve the lives of students. If San Francisco schools Superintendent Richard Carranza has his way, Quiet Time could well spread citywide.

What's happening at Visitacion Valley Middle School, which in 2007 became the first public school nationwide to adopt the program, shows why the superintendent is so enthusiastic. In this neighborhood, gunfire is as common as birdsong - nine shootings have been recorded in the past month - and most students know someone who's been shot or did the shooting. Murders are so frequent that the school employs a full-time grief counselor.

Research has found a link between reading disabilities and less gray matter in the brain for people with dyslexia. However, new evidence from Georgetown University Medical Center's Center for the Study of Learning suggests that this is a consequence of poorer reading experiences and not the root cause of the disorder.

Prior to this research, scientists assumed that the difference in the amount of gray matter might, in part, explain why dyslexic children have difficulties correctly and fluently mapping the sounds in words to their written counterparts during reading. The new findings, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, have turned this assumption of causality on its head.

The researchers compared two control groups with a group of dyslexic children. One of the control groups was an age-matched group included in most previous studies, while the other was a group of younger children who were matched at the same reading level as the children with dyslexia.

"This kind of approach allows us to control for both age as well as reading experience," explains neuroscientist Guinevere Eden, DPhil, a professor of pediatrics at GUMC. "If the differences in brain anatomy in dyslexia were seen in comparison with both control groups, it would have suggested that reduced gray matter reflects an underlying cause of the reading deficit. But that's not what we observed."

In December 2013, we spoke with Dr. Anna Salter on SOTT Talk Radio. Dr. Salter is a licensed clinical psychologist who received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and Public Practice from Harvard University. She is the author of the best-selling book, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders, Who They Are, How They Operate, and How We Can Protect Ourselves and Our Children, provides expert testimony in high-profile criminal trials in the US, and has given talks internationally.

Dr. Salter's invaluable contribution towards exposing and understanding the predators in our midst comes from her tremendous courage in both treating the victims of violent sex crimes, and also from studying the offenders, interviewing them and compiling the videotaped interviews along with her commentary and analysis.

What motivates sexual abusers? Why are so few caught? Lifting the lid on an unspoken, unacknowledged reality that sees countless thousands of sex crimes take place in towns and cities everywhere, Dr. Salter shows that sexual predators use sophisticated deception techniques and rely on misconceptions surrounding them to evade discovery.

Arguing that even the most knowledgeable among us can be fooled, listen as Dr. Salter dispels the myths about sexual predators and gives us the tools to protect our families and ourselves. As Dr. Salter put it: "Knowing how they think and act and operate is the only protection we have."

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In October 2013, we spoke with licensed clinical psychologist Dr. Aleta Edwards on SOTT Talk Radio. Dr. Edwards graduated with honors form the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and is the author of the best-selling e-book Fear of the Abyss: Healing the Wounds of Shame and Perfectionism.

Through her many years of practice, Dr. Edwards has treated people with painful issues of perfectionism, shame, indecisiveness, control issues, and a fear of needing others. This constellation of issues kept appearing in a majority of her clients, regardless of gender, age, or cultural-ethic group.

Rather than solely focusing on coping with symptoms of these anxieties, she has helped people go inward, facing the specific fears that caused these symptoms. She has found that these painful symptoms - defensive in nature - would lessen considerably or simply vanish when the core issue was addressed.

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With evidence growing that training the mind or inducing certain modes of consciousness can have positive health effects, researchers have sought to understand how these practices physically affect the body. A new study by researchers in Wisconsin, Spain, and France reports the first evidence of specific molecular changes in the body following a period of intensive mindfulness practice.

The study investigated the effects of a day of intensive mindfulness practice in a group of experienced meditators, compared to a group of untrained control subjects who engaged in quiet non-meditative activities. After eight hours of mindfulness practice, the meditators showed a range of genetic and molecular differences, including altered levels of gene-regulating machinery and reduced levels of pro-inflammatory genes, which in turn correlated with faster physical recovery from a stressful situation.

"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that shows rapid alterations in gene expression within subjects associated with mindfulness meditation practice," says study author Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A book titled Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the Nature of the Universe has stirred up the Internet, because it contained a notion that life does not end when the body dies, and it can last forever. The author of this publication, scientist Dr. Robert Lanza who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times, has no doubts that this is possible.

Beyond time and space

Lanza is an expert in regenerative medicine and scientific director of Advanced Cell Technology Company. Before he has been known for his extensive research which dealt with stem cells, he was also famous for several successful experiments on cloning endangered animal species.

But not so long ago, the scientist became involved with physics, quantum mechanics and astrophysics. This explosive mixture has given birth to the new theory of biocentrism, which the professor has been preaching ever since. Biocentrism teaches that life and consciousness are fundamental to the universe. It is consciousness that creates the material universe, not the other way around.

Lanza points to the structure of the universe itself, and that the laws, forces, and constants of the universe appear to be fine-tuned for life, implying intelligence existed prior to matter. He also claims that space and time are not objects or things, but rather tools of our animal understanding. Lanza says that we carry space and time around with us "like turtles with shells." meaning that when the shell comes off (space and time), we still exist.

The theory implies that death of consciousness simply does not exist. It only exists as a thought because people identify themselves with their body. They believe that the body is going to perish, sooner or later, thinking their consciousness will disappear too. If the body generates consciousness, then consciousness dies when the body dies. But if the body receives consciousness in the same way that a cable box receives satellite signals, then of course consciousness does not end at the death of the physical vehicle. In fact, consciousness exists outside of constraints of time and space. It is able to be anywhere: in the human body and outside of it. In other words, it is non-local in the same sense that quantum objects are non-local.

Lanza also believes that multiple universes can exist simultaneously. In one universe, the body can be dead. And in another it continues to exist, absorbing consciousness which migrated into this universe. This means that a dead person while traveling through the same tunnel ends up not in hell or in heaven, but in a similar world he or she once inhabited, but this time alive. And so on, infinitely. It's almost like a cosmic Russian doll afterlife effect.

One epilepsy patient reported a flushing in his chest and described a feeling of determinedness, like getting ready to drive through a storm. A second reported similar feelings, a response scientists involved in the study called "the will to persevere." Both patients were reacting to an electric current delivered through an electrode implanted in the brain - put there to try to find the source of their seizures - which happened to stimulate one of the key nodes of a brain circuit known as the "salience network."

In a rare study involving direct brain stimulation, Michael Greicius,a neurologist at Stanford University, and collaborators say they have uncovered direct evidence that a brain region known as the anterior midcingulate cortex and its surrounding network play a central role in motivation and a readiness to act. The theory had been based on indirect data - until now. "It was a fortuitous opportunity, providing a rare piece of data that we can't get from any other setting," Greicius said. "It's nice to have a human lend this first-person insight into what it feels like to have your salience network stimulated."

When choosing baby names, parents often want something that is pleasing to the ear. Some even turn to alliteration when naming multiple children. But according to a new psychology study from The University of Texas at Austin, parents set themselves up for speech errors when they give their children similar-sounding names.

The findings, published online in December in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PLOS One, show that what many people consider to be "Freudian slips," may be a quirk in the brain's information-retrieval process. The study was authored by Zenzi Griffin, professor of psychology at UT Austin, and Thomas Wangerman, formerly of Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta.

"Because name substitutions are increased by factors like name similarity and physical similarity, they should not be seen as purely Freudian or reflecting preferences for one child over another," Griffin says. "In other words, people shouldn't read too much into the errors."

Teenagers often do things if the payoff is great, and the reason may come down to how their brains respond to rewards, a new study suggests.

When teens receive money, or anticipate receiving it, their brains' pleasure center lights up more than it does in adults. The reason is not that teenagers value money more than adults, but more likely because teenage brains haven't finished maturing, researchers say.

"The current study replicates our previous research that the adolescent brain is more responsive and excitable to rewards compared to adults and to younger children," said

Galván, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, leader of the study detailed online today (Jan. 13) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A significant amount of brain development happens during the teenage years. Studies have shown that when teenagers receive or expect to receive money, it produces strong activity in a brain region called the ventral striatum, the brain's reward center. One explanation is that teenage brains are less mature than adult brains. But another possibility is that teenagers value money more than adults because the teens typically have less of it.

A new breed of therapist is healing the mentally ill not with talk and drug therapy but by releasing troublesome or malevolent spirits who have attached themselves to their victims. I am not talking about religious healers like Francis McNutt, but secular healers, some of them licensed psychiatrists or psychologists, who have discovered, often by accident, that this new therapy works better than what they learned in medical or graduate school. They tell us that too often drug therapy only masks symptoms, and talk therapy reaches only as deep as the patient's conscious mind can go. But "spirit release" usually heals, often permanently.Not only does it heal the client; it heals the attached (or "possessing") spirit.

William Baldwin's Spirit Releasement Therapy: A Technique Manual, published in 1995, was a watershed event for this movement. Dr. Baldwin left a dentistry practice to pursue his passion. His ensuing doctoral dissertation in psychology was the first ever to take seriously spirit release as a legitimate therapy.

The disciples of Dr. Baldwin, who died in 2004, deal with spirits, or "entities," as they are often called, in a manner very different from most church-based exorcists and deliverance ministers. Missing is the adversarial command to "come out in the name of Jesus!" These alternative therapists treat the spiritswith respect and compassion. To threaten anyone, living or dead, they say, only provokes an angry reaction, but a gentler, more rational approach is usually enough to coax the spirit out of its host and into the light of the afterworld, where it should have been all along.