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.

Most adults struggle to recall events from their first few years of life and now scientists have identified exactly when these childhood memories fade and are lost forever.

A new study into childhood amnesia - the phenomenon where early memories are forgotten - has found that it tends to take effect around the age of seven.

The researchers found that while most three year olds can recall a lot of what happened to them over a year earlier, these memories can persist while they are five and six, but by the time they are over seven these memories decline rapidly.

Most children by the age of eight or nine can only recall 35% of their experiences from under the age of three, according to the new findings.

The psychologists behind the research say this is because at around this age the way we form memories begins to change.

They say that before the age of seven children tend to have an immature form of recall where they do not have a sense of time or place in their memories.

In older children, however, the early events they can recall tend to be more adult like in their content and the way they are formed.

Children also have a far faster rate of forgetting than adults and so the turnover of memories tends to be higher, meaning early memories are less likely to survive.

The findings also help to explain why children can often have vivid memories of events but then have forgotten them just a couple of years later.

Defense Against the Psychopath is a documentary excerpted from chapter one of my book; The Art of Urban Survival. Teaches people how to recognize and defend against our society's most dangerous predators, psychopaths.


Check out the my website here.

Free download of the PDF booklet, Defense Against the Psychopath here.

Is your apartment complex in the process of clearing a green space to make an additional parking lot? Here's one reason you must protest: Research has revealed that green spaces make for significantly improved mental health.

A new study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology has revealed that parks and green spaces in cities make for significant and sustained improvement in mental health.

Analysing data after following people over a five-year period, the research found that moving to a greener area not only improves people's mental health, but that the effect continues long after they have moved.

The findings add to evidence that suggests increasing green spaces in cities - such as parks and gardens - could deliver substantial benefits to public health, reports Science Daily.

The research is one of the first studies to consider the effects of green space over time, and has used data from the British Household Panel Survey, a repository of information gathered from questionnaires filled in by households across Great Britain.

Using data from over 1,000 participants, the research team at the University of Exeter Medical School focused on two groups of people: those who moved to greener urban areas, and those who relocated to less green urban areas.

They found that, on average, movers to greener areas experienced an immediate improvement in mental health that was sustained for at least three years after they moved.

Biophysicists theorize that plants tap into the eerie world of quantum entanglement during photosynthesis. But the evidence to date has been purely circumstantial. Now, scientists have discovered a feature of plants that cannot be explained by classical physics alone - but which quantum mechanics answers quite nicely.

The fact that biological systems can exploit quantum effects is quite astounding. In a way, they're like mini-quantum computers capable of scanning all possible options in order to choose the most efficient paths or solutions. For plants, this means the ability to make the most of the energy they receive and then deliver that energy from leaves with near perfect efficiency.

Watching too much television can change the structure of a child's brain in a damaging way, according to a new study.

Researchers found that the more time a child spent viewing TV, the more profound the brain alterations appeared to be.

The Japanese study looked at 276 children aged between five and 18, who watched between zero and four hours TV per day, with the average being about two hours.

MRI brain scans showed children who spent the most hours in front of the box had greater amounts of grey matter in regions around the frontopolar cortex - the area at the front of the frontal lobe.

But this increased volume was a negative thing as it was linked with lower verbal intelligence, said the authors, from Tohoku University in the city of Sendai.

They suggested grey matter could be compared to body weight and said these brain areas need to be pruned during childhood in order to operate efficiently.

'These areas show developmental cortical thinning during development, and children with superior IQs show the most vigorous cortical thinning in this area,' the team wrote.

In 1973, a book claiming that plants were sentient beings that feel emotions, prefer classical music to rock and roll, and can respond to the unspoken thoughts of humans hundreds of miles away landed on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. The Secret Life of Plants, by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, presented a beguiling mashup of legitimate plant science, quack experiments, and mystical nature worship that captured the public imagination at a time when New Age thinking was seeping into the mainstream. The most memorable passages described the experiments of a former C.I.A. polygraph expert named Cleve Backster, who, in 1966, on a whim, hooked up a galvanometer to the leaf of a dracaena, a houseplant that he kept in his office. To his astonishment, Backster found that simply by imagining the dracaena being set on fire he could make it rouse the needle of the polygraph machine, registering a surge of electrical activity suggesting that the plant felt stress. "Could the plant have been reading his mind?" the authors ask. "Backster felt like running into the street and shouting to the world, 'Plants can think!' "

It's been an awe-inspiring few years for neuroscience.

By peering inside the living brain, neuroscientists have made all kinds of incredible discoveries.

Here are ten of my favourite - click the title to get the full story.

1. Connectivity: The Difference Between Men's and Women's Brains

A new study on the brains of 949 young people found striking gender differences in the brain's connectivity between males and females. These may help explain some of the classic psychological differences between men and women.

2. Hidden Caves in the Brain Open Up During Sleep to Wash Away Toxins

A new study published in the prestigious journal, Science, found that the brain may wash away toxins built up over the day during sleep.

The research discovered "hidden caves" inside the brain, which open up during sleep, allowing cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to flush out potential neurotoxins, like β-amyloid, which has been associated with Alzheimer's disease.

Babies as young as 9 months old know that friends usually have similar interests, new research suggests.

The new study, published online January in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, shows that babies who are too young to talk still have a set of abstract expectations about the social world.

"Nine-month-old infants are paying attention to other people's relationships," said study co-author Amanda Woodward, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago. "Infants are able to watch two strangers interact in the movie and then make inferences about whether those two people are likely to be friends," said Woodward, referring to a movie showed to the babies during the experiment.

Baby brainiacs

Behind their wide-eyed, innocent facades, babies possess a surprising grasp of how the world works. Infants are born wired with a primitive number sense, have an innate grasp of physics and even know that living organisms should have guts.

They also have expectations about people's interactions. From a young age, babies know that might-makes-right, and want justice meted out to wrongdoers. By a year-and-a-half, many little ones can guess what people are thinking.

But researchers didn't know what babies knew or thought about friendship. Drawing from an assumption many adults hold - that friends have similar interests - Woodward and her colleagues wanted to see whether babies also had a buddies-think-alike intuition.