Science of the SpiritS


Info

Strange new state of consciousness could exist, researcher says

Bahar Gholipour
LiveScience
Thu, 19 Sep 2013 18:01 UTC
Coma
© Shutterstock
With anesthetics properly given, very few patients wake up during surgery. However, new findings point to the possibility of a state of mind in which a patient is neither fully conscious nor unconscious, experts say.

This possible third state of consciousness, may be a state in which patients can respond to a command, but are not disturbed by pain or the surgery, according to Dr. Jaideep Pandit, anesthetist at St John's College in England, who discussed the idea today (Sept. 19) at the at an anesthetists meeting in Dublin.

Pandit dubbed this state dysanaesthesia, and said the evidence that it exists comes partly from a recent study, in which 34 surgical patients were anesthetized, and had their whole body paralyzed except for their forearm, allowing them to move their fingers in response to commands or to signify if they are awake or in pain during surgery.

One-third of patients in the study moved their finger if they were asked to, even though they were under what seemed to be adequate anesthesia, according to the study led by Dr. Ian F. Russell, of Hull Royal Infirmary in England, and published Sept. 12 in the journal Anaesthesia.

"What's more remarkable is that they only move their fingers if they are asked. None of the patients spontaneously responded to the surgery. They are presumably not in pain," said Pandit, who wrote an editorial about the study.
Read More...
Attention

Researcher finds the most depressing discovery about the brain ever

Marty Kaplan
AlterNet
Mon, 16 Sep 2013 21:44 UTC
brain research decisions
Say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, or reason can provide the tools that people need in order to make good decisions.

Yale law school professor Dan Kahan's new research paper is called "Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government," but for me a better title is the headline on science writer Chris Mooney's piece about it in Grist: "Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math."

Kahan conducted some ingenious experiments about the impact of political passion on people's ability to think clearly. His conclusion, in Mooney's words: partisanship "can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills.... [People] who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs."

In other words, say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, media literacy or reason can provide the tools and information that people need in order to make good decisions. It turns out that in the public realm, a lack of information isn't the real problem. The hurdle is how our minds work, no matter how smart we think we are. We want to believe we're rational, but reason turns out to be the ex post facto way we rationalize what our emotions already want to believe.

For years my go-to source for downer studies of how our hard-wiring makes democracy hopeless has been Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth.
Read More...
Info

How and where imagination occurs in human brains


ScienceDaily
Mon, 16 Sep 2013 18:29 UTC
Brain Activity
© Alex SchlegelEleven areas of the brain are showing differential activity levels in a Dartmouth study using functional MRI to measure how humans manipulate mental imagery.
Philosophers and scientists have long puzzled over where human imagination comes from. In other words, what makes humans able to create art, invent tools, think scientifically and perform other incredibly diverse behaviors?

The answer, Dartmouth researchers conclude in a new study, lies in a widespread neural network -- the brain's "mental workspace" -- that consciously manipulates images, symbols, ideas and theories and gives humans the laser-like mental focus needed to solve complex problems and come up with new ideas.

Their findings, titled "Network structure and dynamics of the mental workspace," appear the week of Sept. 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read More...
Info

From the deepest coma, new brain activity found

Bahar Gholipour
LiveScience
Wed, 18 Sep 2013 16:00 UTC
Brain Waves
© Shutterstock
When a patient's brain falls completely silent, and electrical recordings devices show a flat line, reflecting a lack of brain activity, doctors consider the patient to have reached the deepest stage of a coma. However, new findings suggest there can be a coma stage even deeper than this flat line - and that brain activity can ramp up again from this state.

In the case of one patient in a drug-induced coma, and in subsequent experiments on cats, the researchers found that after deepening the coma by administering a higher dose of drugs, the silent brain started showing minimum but widespread neural activity across the brain, according to the study published today (Sept. 18) in the journal PLOS ONE.

The findings were based on measures of the brain's electrical activity, detected by electroencephalography (EEG), which shows various waveforms. In comatose patients, depending on the stage of their coma, the waveforms are altered. As the coma deepens, the EEG device will eventually show a flat line instead of a wave - this stage is considered to be the turning point between a living brain and a deceased brain.

"Flat line was the deepest known form of coma," said study researcher Florin Amzica, neurophysiologist at Université de Montréal.
Read More...
Info

Baby elephant in China can't stop crying after being stomped by mom

Deborah Hastings
New York Daily News
Wed, 18 Sep 2013 13:54 UTC
Newborn elephant cried for five hours after mom tried to kill him. Chinese zookeepers forced to keep him away from momma.

Image
Despondent baby elephant weeps for hours after mom gives birth, then attacks him at game preserve in China.
Poor baby.

Little Zhuangzhuang, a newborn elephant at a wildlife refuge in China, was inconsolable after his mother rejected him and then tried to stomp him to death.

Tears streamed down his gray trunk for five hours as zookeepers struggled to comfort the baby elephant.

They initially thought it was an accident when the mom stepped on him after giving birth, according to the Central European News agency.

Read More...
Chalkboard

Science confirms: Politics wrecks your ability to do math

Chris Mooney
grist
Sun, 08 Sep 2013 02:32 UTC
Image
Everybody knows that our political views can sometimes get in the way of thinking clearly. But perhaps we don't realize how bad the problem actually is. According to a new psychology paper, our political passions can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills. More specifically, the study finds that people who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.

The study, by Yale law professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues, has an ingenious design. At the outset, 1,111 study participants were asked about their political views and also asked a series of questions designed to gauge their "numeracy," that is, their mathematical reasoning ability. Participants were then asked to solve a fairly difficult problem that involved interpreting the results of a (fake) scientific study. But here was the trick: While the fake study data that they were supposed to assess remained the same, sometimes the study was described as measuring the effectiveness of a "new cream for treating skin rashes." But in other cases, the study was described as involving the effectiveness of "a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public."

The result? Survey respondents performed wildly differently on what was in essence the same basic problem, simply depending upon whether they had been told that it involved guns or whether they had been told that it involved a new skin cream. What's more, it turns out that highly numerate liberals and conservatives were even more - not less - susceptible to letting politics skew their reasoning than were those with less mathematical ability.
Read More...
Info

Some brains may be hard-wired for chronic pain

Bahar Gholipour,
Livescience
Tue, 17 Sep 2013 15:50 UTC
Chronic Pain
© Dreamstime
Structural differences in the brain may be one reason why one person recovers from pain while another develops chronic agony, a new study suggests.

The researchers scanned the brains of 46 people who had lower back pain for about three months, and then evaluated their pain four times over the following year. About half of the patients recovered during the year; the other half continued to have persistent pain throughout the study.

Looking back at the brain scans, the researchers found structural differences in the brains of people who recovered compared with people who developed chronic pain. The differences were found in the brain's white matter, which mostly consists of long connections between neurons and brain regions.

Specifically, the differences lay in the connections between brain regions thought to be involved in pain perception, the researchers said.

"We may have found an anatomical marker for chronic pain in the brain," study researcher Vania Apkarian, professor of physiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, said in a statement.
Read More...
Clipboard

The more a society coerces its people, the greater the chance of mental illness

Bruce E. Levine
Alternet
Mon, 26 Aug 2013 18:30 UTC
Image
Miserable marriages, unhappy families and severe emotional and behavioral problems all have a root cause.

Throughout history, societies have existed with far less coercion than ours. While these societies have had far fewer consumer goods and less of what modernity calls "efficiency," they also have had far less mental illness. This reality has been buried, not surprisingly, by uncritical champions of modernity and mainstream psychiatry. Coercion - the use of physical, legal, chemical, psychological, financial, and other forces to gain compliance - is intrinsic to our society's employment, schooling and parenting. However, coercion results in fear and resentment, which fuel miserable marriages, unhappy families, and what we call mental illness.

Societies with Little Coercion and Little Mental Illness

Shortly after returning from the horrors of World War I and before they wrote Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall were given a commission by Harper'smagazine to write nonfiction travel articles about life in the South Pacific. Their reports about the islands of Paumoto, Society and the Hervey group were first serialized in Harper's and then published in the book Faery Lands of the South Seas (1921). Nordhoff and Hall were struck by how little coercion occurred in these island cultures compared to their own society, and they were enchanted by the children such noncoercive parenting produced:
"There is a fascination in watching these youngsters, brought up without clothes and without restraint. . . . Once they are weaned from their mothers' breasts - which often does not occur until they have reached an age of two and a half or three - the children of the islands are left practically to shift for themselves; there is food in the house, a place to sleep, and a scrap of clothing if the weather be cool - that is the extent of parental responsibility. The child eats when it pleases, sleeps when and where it will, amuses itself with no other resources than its own. As it grows older certain light duties are expected of it - gathering fruit, lending a hand in fishing, cleaning the ground about the house - but the command to work is casually given and casually obeyed. Punishment is scarcely known. . . . [Yet] the brown youngster flourishes with astonishingly little friction - sweet tempered, cheerful, never bored, and seldom quarrelsome."
Read More...
People

Diminishing fear vicariously by watching others

Anna Mikulak
Association for Psychological Science
Mon, 16 Sep 2013 15:10 UTC
Phobias - whether it's fear of spiders, clowns, or small spaces - are common and can be difficult to treat. New research suggests that watching someone else safely interact with the supposedly harmful object can help to extinguish these conditioned fear responses, and prevent them from resurfacing later on.

The research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, indicates that this type of vicarious social learning may be more effective than direct personal experience in extinguishing fear responses.

"Information about what is dangerous and safe in our environment is often transferred from other individuals through social forms of learning," says lead author Armita Golka of Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. "Our findings suggest that these social means of learning promote superior down-regulation of learned fear, as compared to the sole experiences of personal safety."

Considerable research has shown that social forms of learning can contribute to the acquisition of fears, which led Golkar and colleagues to wonder whether it could also help to extinguish learned fears.
Read More...
Sun

Our genes respond positively to the right kind of happiness

Jeremy Dean
Psy Blog
Sat, 14 Sep 2013 17:55 UTC
Image
© Dennis Holzberg
The right kind of happiness doesn't just feel great, it also benefits the body, right down to its instructional code.

New research suggests the right kind of happiness can change the code that defines our very being: our genes.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the pattern of gene expression within the cells responsible for fighting off infectious diseases and defending the body against foreign materials (Fredrickson et al., 2013).

The 80 participants in the study also reported their levels of two different types of happiness:
  1. Feeling good or hedonic happiness: the kind you get from straightforward self-gratification, like having a good meal, or buying yourself a new car.
  2. Doing good or eudemonic happiness: the kind you get from working towards a noble goal and searching for meaning in life.
Read More...