Science of the SpiritS


Eye 1

Best of the Web: Defense Against the Psychopath

Stefan Verstappen
YouTube
Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:56 UTC
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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.

Comment: Check out our SOTT Talk Radio show discussion with Stefan Verstappen, Canadian author, adventurer, and martial artist:

Surviving the Psy-pocalypse: Interview with Stefan Verstappen

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Family

Living near greenery calms you down


health.india.com
Wed, 08 Jan 2014 03:48 UTC
green space
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.
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Apple Green

New evidence that plants get their energy using quantum entanglement

George Dvorsky
IO9
Sat, 11 Jan 2014 04:00 UTC
plants
© Krivosheev Vitaly/Shutterstock.
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.
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TV

Kids & TV: linked with lower verbal intelligence, brain damage

Robin Yapp
Mail Online
Fri, 10 Jan 2014 07:35 UTC
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Too much TV can change the structure of a child's brain in a way which can lead to lower verbal intelligence
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.
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Rose

The Intelligent Plant: Scientists debate a new way of understanding flora

Michael Pollan
The New Yorker
Mon, 23 Dec 2013 11:38 UTC
plants life
Plants have electrical and chemical signalling systems, may possess memory, and exhibit brainy behavior in the absence of brains. Construction by Stephen Doyle.
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!' "
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Books

10 most awe-inspiring neuroscience studies

Jeremy Dean
PsyBlog
Fri, 10 Jan 2014 10:14 UTC
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© Saad FaruqueNew studies demonstrate the deep power of human empathy, debunk right-brain and left-brain personalities, explore neural structures during sleep and way more…
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.
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Info

Babies know what makes a friend

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Thu, 09 Jan 2014 17:53 UTC
Babies
© DreamstimeBabies know something about friendship from a young age
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.
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People

The strange science of how names shape careers: If your name is Dennis, you're more likely to become a dentist

Alice Robb
New Republic
Thu, 09 Jan 2014 08:27 UTC
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© Unknown
Can we blame Ron Paul's political ambitions on his last name? Research suggests that people choose - or are unconsciously drawn to - careers that resemble their own names. The effect is stronger for women's first names and men's last names; psychologists hypothesize that women are less attached to their last names because they anticipate taking their husbands'.

In a 2002 paper in the journal Attitudes and Social Cognition, psychologists from the State University of New York at Buffalo, led by Brett Pelham, found that people's first and last names may have an impact on the jobs they end up in, thanks to a phenomenon called "implicit egotism." "The essential idea behind implicit egotism," they write, "Is that people should prefer people, places, and things that they associate (unconsciously) with the self...people's positive automatic associations about themselves may influence their feelings about almost anything that people associate with the self."
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Chalkboard

Gifted children get ignored in school despite huge future contribution to society

Jeremy Dean
PsyBlog
Thu, 09 Jan 2014 12:27 UTC
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© Thomas HawkAre exceptionally gifted children being failed by the education system?
The authors of the largest ever study of the profoundly gifted question whether the education system is providing enough support for highly talented young people.

The US study, published in the journal Psychological Science, identified gifted children by their SAT scores, which placed them in the top 0.01% of the population, either in maths or verbal scores (Hill et al., 2013).

The 320 children were tracked from the age of 13, until they were 38, to see how they did in their chosen professions.

Notable careers

As you might expect, the exceptionally gifted children were more likely to gain Master's degrees and PhDs, compared with less gifted children.

Many also went on to have notable careers: they wrote books, composed music, started companies, conducted scientific research, became senior business leaders, and excelled in other worthy occupations.

Even at age 13 it was possible to see in which direction exceptionally children might head:
"...mathematically more able individuals tended to focus on achievement in inorganic fields [e.g. computer science, engineering], whereas verbally more able individuals tended to invest their talent in organic fields [e.g. the arts, social sciences, education]; incorporating motivational dimensions, such as interests in people versus things..." (Hill et al., 2013)
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Eye 1

Behind the epidemic of military suicides: New documentary exposes Psychiatry as "The Hidden Enemy" in military mental health

Kelly Patricia O'Meara
CCHR
Wed, 08 Jan 2014 12:08 UTC
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“We have never drugged our troops to this extent and the current increase in suicides is not a coincidence.” — Lieutenant Colonel Bart Billings
In order to gain acceptance as a medically relevant entity, psychiatry deliberately infiltrated this nation's defense forces and others around the world, practicing pseudo-science on unsuspecting service men and women under the guise of mental health "treatment."

The Hidden Enemy, a comprehensive, years-in-the-making, documentary has been released by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR). It is the first documentary to fully expose psychiatry's use of military personnel worldwide as guinea pigs, subjecting soldiers to devastating psychiatric experiments. In so doing, it provides important insight into the question of why more soldiers are dying from psychiatric treatment than on the battlefield. As Lieutenant Colonel Bart Billings stated, "We have never drugged our troops to this extent and the current increase in suicides is not a coincidence."

The groundbreaking documentary reveals the chilling psychiatric strategy to use the captive population of military communities as guinea pigs for future psychiatric treatments. It was laid out by psychiatrist and Brigadier General J.R. Rees in 1945: "The army and the other fighting services form rather unique experimental groups since they are complete communities and it is possible to arrange experiments in a way that would be very difficult in civilian life."
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