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Science of the SpiritS
When people describe seeing tunnels, white lights and deceased family members after their hearts stop, they're dead - but they can come back, believes Dr. Sam Parnia.
Parnia, a critical care doctor and the director of resuscitation research at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, writes in his new book, Erasing Death: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death, that a person can now be resuscitated long after they previously would have been considered clinically dead.
"The advances in the last 10 years have shown us that it's only after a person dies that they turn into a corpse, that their brain cells start to die,'' Parnia told Savannah Guthrie on TODAY Tuesday. "Although most people think this takes place in only four or five minutes, we now know that actually brain cells are viable for up to eight hours."
He continued, "We now understand that it's only after a person has turned into a corpse that their cells are undergoing death, and if we therefore manipulate those processes, we can restart the heart and bring a person back to life."
New research highlights a memory strategy that may help people who suffer from depression in recalling positive day-to-day experiences. The study is published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Previous research has shown that being able to call up concrete, detailed memories that are positive or self-affirming can help to boost positive mood for people with a history of depression. But it's this kind of vivid memory for everyday events that seems to be dampened for people who suffer from depression.
Researcher Tim Dalgleish of the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and colleagues hypothesized that a well-known method used to enhance memory - known as the "method-of-loci" strategy - might help depressed patients to recall positive memories with greater ease.
The method-of-loci strategy consists of associating vivid memories with physical objects or locations - buildings you see on your commute to work every day, for instance. To recall the memories, all you have to do is imagine going through your commute.
In the study, depressed patients were asked to come up with 15 positive memories. One group was asked to use the method-of-loci strategy to create associations with their memories, while a control group was asked to use a simple "rehearsal" strategy, grouping memories based on their similarities.
Previous research has shown that being able to call up concrete, detailed memories that are positive or self-affirming can help to boost positive mood for people with a history of depression. But it's this kind of vivid memory for everyday events that seems to be dampened for people who suffer from depression.
Researcher Tim Dalgleish of the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and colleagues hypothesized that a well-known method used to enhance memory - known as the "method-of-loci" strategy - might help depressed patients to recall positive memories with greater ease.
The method-of-loci strategy consists of associating vivid memories with physical objects or locations - buildings you see on your commute to work every day, for instance. To recall the memories, all you have to do is imagine going through your commute.
In the study, depressed patients were asked to come up with 15 positive memories. One group was asked to use the method-of-loci strategy to create associations with their memories, while a control group was asked to use a simple "rehearsal" strategy, grouping memories based on their similarities.
© StockxpertIndividuals with mysterious psychological and muscular disorders with no clear physical cause show abnormal brain activity, a new study finds.
Psychogenic diseases - once referred to as "hysterical" illnesses - have severe symptoms that strongly resemble nervous system illnesses caused by nerve or muscle damage or genetics, but show none of these characteristics.
As a result, such diseases are very difficult to diagnose and treat. But sufferers of these diseases show unique patterns of brain activity, researchers report today (Feb. 25) in the journal Brain.
Many of the traditional brain-scanning tests show normal results in psychogenic diseases. "It has been extremely difficult to show these patients are abnormal," study author and neuroscientist James Rowe of the University of Cambridge told LiveScience. Understanding the brain mechanism behind these diseases will enable them to be diagnosed and treated sooner, Rowe said.
Rowe and his colleagues studied people with two different forms of dystonia, a movement disorder that causes muscles to contract painfully and involuntarily. One group had normal dystonia resulting from a gene mutation, whereas the other group had psychogenic dystonia with no obvious cause.
© Photos.com
Performed by doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, this study has linked being talkative with a particular protein found in the brain called FOXP2. Women have been found to have more of this protein in their brains, leading the researchers to believe this is why women are more vocal than men.
The results of this study have been published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
"This study is one of the first to report a sex difference in the expression of a language-associated protein in humans or animals," explained the study's co-author Margaret McCarthy, PhD, in a prepared statement. "The findings raise the possibility that sex differences in brain and behavior are more pervasive and established earlier than previously appreciated."
Science, it seems, has been forever curious about a female's tendency to be more communicative and has been looking for this answer for years. The link between FOXP2 and speech was first discovered at the turn of the century and was found to connect vocalization in a host of different animals, such as bats, mice and rats. This latest study started off by observing this correlation in rats before moving on to young children.
© Unknown
"The sounds uttered by birds offer in several respects the nearest analogy to language," Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man (1871), while contemplating how humans learned to speak. Language, he speculated, might have had its origins in singing, which "might have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions."
Now researchers from MIT, along with a scholar from the University of Tokyo, say that Darwin was on the right path. The balance of evidence, they believe, suggests that human language is a grafting of two communication forms found elsewhere in the animal kingdom: first, the elaborate songs of birds, and second, the more utilitarian, information-bearing types of expression seen in a diversity of other animals.
"It's this adventitious combination that triggered human language," says Shigeru Miyagawa, a professor of linguistics in MIT's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, and co-author of a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
The idea builds upon Miyagawa's conclusion, detailed in his previous work, that there are two "layers" in all human languages: an "expression" layer, which involves the changeable organization of sentences, and a "lexical" layer, which relates to the core content of a sentence. His conclusion is based on earlier work by linguists including Noam Chomsky, Kenneth Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser.
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To demonstrate the future potential of this growing field, guest editors Professor Peter Halligan from the School of Psychology at Cardiff University and David A. Oakley of University College London, brought together leading researchers from cognitive neuroscience and hypnosis to contribute to this month's special issue of the international journal, Cortex.
The issue illustrates how methodological and theoretical advances, using hypnotic suggestion, can return novel and experimentally verifiable insights for the neuroscience of consciousness and motor control. The research also includes novel brain imaging studies, which address sceptics' concerns regarding the subjective reality and comparability of hypnotically suggested phenomena that previously depended on subjects' largely unverifiable report and behaviour.
© News.com.auResearch from the University of Washington says living cells from sons can live in their mother's brains for her entire life.
Women have claimed an intuitive link with their children for centuries. Now science has discovered their living cells in the brains of their mothers.
The bond between a pregnant mother and their unborn child is both physical and psychological. It relies totally on her for nutrition, warmth, comfort and protection.
A new study published in the science journal PLOS ONE suggests elements of this mother-baby connection may linger long after birth.
It found fetal DNA and cells from male children cross the blood-brain barrier and end up living in the mother's brain.
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Research to date on human thinking suggests that our judgment is often biased because we are intellectually lazy, or so-called cognitive misers. We intuitively substitute hard questions for easier ones. What is less clear is whether or not we realize that we are doing this and notice our mistake.
Using an adaptation of the standard 'bat-and-ball' problem, the researchers explored this phenomenon. The typical 'bat-and-ball' problem is as follows: a bat and ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The intuitive answer that immediately springs to mind is 10 cents. However, the correct response is 5 cents.
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Many people tend to forego the larger reward and opt for the $120 now, a phenomenon known as temporal discounting. But research conducted by Priyanka Joshi and Nathanael Fast of the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business suggests that people who feel powerful are more likely to wait for the bigger reward, in part because they feel a stronger connection with their future selves.
In the first of four experiments, the researchers randomly assigned participants to be a team manager (high-power role) or a team worker (low-power role) in a group activity. Afterwards, the participants were asked to make a series of choices between receiving $120 now or increasing amounts of money ($137, $154, $171, $189, $206, $223, and $240) in one year.
© XKCD
When we hear about the psychology of crowds, it's often in an unsavory context. "Group-Think Makes Killers," reads the title of this article by social psychologist Bernd Simon, who cites the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment as an example of how giving up "I" for "We" can have nasty consequences.
Crowd psychology is often singled out as the catalyst that drives the transformation of a civil protest into an unruly riot. "When you are in a crowd, you are more likely to behave as others do, even if it is against your own personal belief system," explains psychologist Stephanie Sarkis in Psychology Today.
"And others' behavior can be contagious - people get "wrapped up" in the behavior. Those with ulterior motives (looting, for example) take an opportunity in the midst of chaos to commit an anonymous act." Still, exceptions, caveats, and counterarguments to nefarious instances of group-think abound.
