Science of the SpiritS


Black Magic

Back from the dead: Reversing walking corpse syndrome

Helen Thomson
New Scientist
Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:01 UTC
open grave
© Scott MacBride/GettyDead? Not just yet
One moment you are alive. The next you are dead. A few hours later and you are alive again. Pharmacologists have discovered a mechanism that triggers Cotard's syndrome - the mysterious condition that leaves people feeling like they, or parts of their body, no longer exist. With the ability to switch the so-called walking corpse syndrome on and off comes the prospect of new insights into how conscious experiences are constructed.

Acyclovir - also known by the brand name Zovirax - is a common drug used to treat cold sores and other herpes infections. It usually has no harmful side effects. However, about 1 per cent of people who take the drug orally or intravenously experience some psychiatric side effects, including Cotard's. These occur mainly in people who have renal failure.
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Lying: False denials are harder to remember than false descriptions

Jeremy Dean
PsyBlog
Tue, 29 Oct 2013 19:07 UTC
Image
© Flickr/Dyanna Hyde
"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." ―Mark Twain
Lying is easy, anyone can do it - it's remembering which lies you've told and to whom, that's the tricky part.

And what a person remembers later depends on exactly how they lie, according to a new study published in the Journal of Applied Research and Memory Cognition.

In their research, Vieira and Lane (2013) compared two types of lies, (1) a brief denial and (2) a false description.

Twenty-four participants were asked to remember a series of simple objects. Then, the items were listed again, with some that weren't seen before, and they were told to either lie or tell the truth about whether they'd seen it before.

Either way - truth or lie - they had to describe the object, so that sometimes this description was made up.
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People

Crying wolf: Who benefits and when?

Tracy James
Indiana University
Mon, 28 Oct 2013 14:18 UTC
A crisis at work can bring out the best in colleagues, often inspiring more cooperation and self-sacrifice. A new study from Indiana University and the University of Guelph has found that the benefits are not shared equally, with higher-ranking group members having the most to gain by perceived threats to the group.

"Sociologists have known for a long time that groups tend to come together when they face adversity," said social psychologist Stephen Benard, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at IU Bloomington. "What our research highlights is that there is a downside to our tendency to stick together when things are tough -- powerful group members can exploit that tendency to distract us from competing with them."

The study, "Who cries wolf, and when? Manipulation of perceived threats to preserve rank in cooperative groups," was published in the online journal Proceedings of the Library of Science One in September. Pat Barclay, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at University of Guelph in Canada is the co-author.
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Info

'Minicomputers' live inside the human brain

Charles Q. Choi
LiveScience
Tue, 29 Oct 2013 11:32 UTC
Human Brain
© UCLHere computer-simulated images of pyramidal neurons in the cerebral cortex, revealing branching dendrites now shown to carry out sophisticated computations rather than just acting as passive wiring.
The brain may be an even more powerful computer than before thought - microscopic branches of brain cells that were once thought to basically serve as mere wiring may actually behave as minicomputers, researchers say.

The most powerful computer known is the brain. The human brain possesses about 100 billion neurons with roughly 1 quadrillion - 1 million billion - connections known as synapses wiring these cells together.

Neurons each act like a relay station for electrical signals. The heart of each neuron is called the soma - a single thin cablelike fiber known as the axon that sticks out of the soma carries nerve signals away from the neuron, while many shorter branches called dendrites that project from the other end of the soma carry nerve signals to the neuron.

Now scientists find dendrites may be more than passive wiring; in fact, they may actively process information.

"Suddenly, it's as if the processing power of the brain is much greater than we had originally thought," study lead author Spencer Smith, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,said in a statement.
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Family

Sense of belonging increases meaningfulness of life

Jeremy Dean
Psyblog
Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:00 UTC
Image
Research finds that a sense of belonging increases meaningfulness of life.
A new study finds that when social relationships provide an all important sense of belonging, people feel life has more meaning (Lambert et al., 2013).

The effect was revealed in one experiment in which participants were asked to close their eyes and think of two people or groups to which they really belonged. Then they were asked about how much meaning they felt life had.

This group was compared with two others where participants (1) thought about the value of other people and (2) the help that others had provided them.

Compared with these two conditions, participants who had been thinking about the groups they belonged to felt the highest levels of meaning in life.

So, belonging to a group provided meaning over and above the value of others or the help they could provide.

It's more than just bonding, therefore, but really feeling like you are fitting in with others which is associated with higher levels of meaningfulness.

Just the reverse effect has been shown in previous studies. People who feel excluded from social groups tend to feel that life has less meaning.
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Info

Light activates brain even in blind people

Robert Weller
Digital Journal
Mon, 28 Oct 2013 14:45 UTC
Sleeping Man
© Flickr user David GoehringA man sleeping in his bed, with a blindfold.

Montreal - Pay attention when your spouse tells you to turn off the bedside lamp. He or she may not be able to sleep because the light is keeping the brain awake.

A study reported in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience Science says brain imaging shows light activates brain cells even in the blind.

"We were stunned to discover that the brain still respond significantly to light in these rare three completely blind patients despite having absolutely no conscious vision at all," said senior co-author of the study, Steven Lockley.

It is an interesting question with daylight savings approaching this weekend, and some scientists believe it can adversely affect sleeping patterns, even causing accidents at work.

This study examined three blind patients. An earlier one returned similar results but only tested one patient.

One simple test was to put them in a room and turn the light off and on. The subjects could tell when the light was turned on.
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Info

The key to consciousness: Efficient information flow?

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Thu, 24 Oct 2013 08:07 UTC
Consciousness
© Ase | ShutterstockSome philosophers say the mind cannot understand itself, but neuroscientists believe otherwise.
The moment a person slips from conscious thought into unconsciousness has long been a mystery.

Now researchers have pinpointed exactly what goes on in the brain as people become unconscious after taking anesthesia. It turns out that there probably aren't individual neurons, or brain cells, responsible for consciousness.

"This data shows that consciousness might not be the result of a special group of neurons, but rather might be the result of how neurons communicate with one another," study co-author Martin Monti, a psychology professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, wrote in an email.

When people are conscious, information zips from one place to another along a direct route, much like an express bus, whereas the way information travels in the unconscious brain is more like taking several buses and stopping in North Dakota and Tennessee to get from New York to Los Angeles, Monti said.
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People

UCSB anthropologist studies the evolutionary benefit of human personality traits

Andrea Estrada
University of California - Santa Barbara
Mon, 21 Oct 2013 15:40 UTC
Image
© Rod RolleThis is Michael Gurven.
Bold and outgoing or shy and retiring - - while many people can shift from one to the other as circumstances warrant, in general they lean toward one disposition or the other. And that inclination changes little over the course of their lives.

Why this is the case and why it matters in a more traditional context are questions being addressed by anthropologists at UC Santa Barbara. Using fertility and child survivorship as their main measures of reproductive fitness, the researchers studied over 600 adult members of the Tsimane, an isolated indigenous population in central Bolivia, and discovered that more open, outgoing - - and less anxious - - personalities were associated with having more children - - but only among men.

Their findings appear online in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

"The idea that we're funneled into a relatively fixed way of interacting with the world is something we take for granted," said Michael Gurven, UCSB professor of anthropology and the paper's lead author. Gurven is also co-director of the University of New Mexico-based Tsimane Health and Life History Project. "Some people are outgoing and open, others are more quiet and introverted. But from an evolutionary standpoint, it doesn't really make sense that our dispositions differ so much, and are not more flexible.
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Bulb

Growing up poor and stressed impacts brain function as an adult

Sherri McGinnis González
University of Illinois
Mon, 21 Oct 2013 14:53 UTC
Image
© University of IllinoisChildhood poverty impacted how much the two regions of the prefrontal cortex (as shown in orange circles) were engaged during emotion regulation.
Childhood poverty and chronic stress may lead to problems regulating emotions as an adult, according to research published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Our findings suggest that the stress-burden of growing up poor may be an underlying mechanism that accounts for the relationship between poverty as a child and how well your brain works as an adult," said Dr. K. Luan Phan, professor of psychiatry at University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine and senior author of the study.

The study was conducted by researchers at UIC, Cornell University, University of Michigan and University of Denver.

The researchers found that test subjects who had lower family incomes at age 9 exhibited, as adults, greater activity in the amygdala, an area in the brain known for its role in fear and other negative emotions. These individuals showed less activity in areas of the prefrontal cortex, an area in the brain thought to regulate negative emotion.
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Bulb

Learning new skills keeps an aging mind sharp

Anna Mikulak
Association for Psychological Science
Mon, 21 Oct 2013 12:41 UTC
Older adults are often encouraged to stay active and engaged to keep their minds sharp, that they have to "use it or lose it." But new research indicates that only certain activities - learning a mentally demanding skill like photography, for instance - are likely to improve cognitive functioning.

These findings, forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that less demanding activities, such as listening to classical music or completing word puzzles, probably won't bring noticeable benefits to an aging mind.

"It seems it is not enough just to get out and do something - it is important to get out and do something that is unfamiliar and mentally challenging, and that provides broad stimulation mentally and socially," says psychological scientist and lead researcher Denise Park of the University of Texas at Dallas. "When you are inside your comfort zone you may be outside of the enhancement zone."

The new findings provide much-needed insight into the components of everyday activities that contribute to cognitive vitality as we age.

"We need, as a society, to learn how to maintain a healthy mind, just like we know how to maintain vascular health with diet and exercise," says Park. "We know so little right now."

For their study, Park and colleagues randomly assigned 221 adults, ages 60 to 90, to engage in a particular type of activity for 15 hours a week over the course of three months.

Some participants were assigned to learn a new skill - digital photography, quilting, or both - which required active engagement and tapped working memory, long-term memory and other high-level cognitive processes.
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