Creativity is often part of a mental illness, with writers particularly susceptible, according to a study of more than a million people.

Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, the Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute found.

They were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves.

The dancers and photographers were also more likely to have bipolar disorder.

As a group, those in the creative professions were no more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders than other people.

But they were more likely to have a close relative with a disorder, including anorexia and, to some extent, autism, the Journal of Psychiatric Research reports.

We all know that regular, moderate exercise is good for us. But imagine what it would be like if all you did was exercise: if you ran, walked, jumped, or lifted 24 hours a day. After only a very short while, exercise actually wouldn't be that good for you because without rest, exercise becomes counterproductive and even risky...and so it is with your mind. We spend all day (and sometimes all night, too!) in a whirlwind of thought. When there isn't something particular to think about (what to eat for breakfast, the tasks of the day, or what you're going to say in an upcoming meeting), we search restlessly for something to fill the gap-worries, hopes, television, and so on. We never allow our minds to rest. And without this precious self-healing time, our minds become exhausted and thoughts less trustworthy. Just as we need to stop moving our bodies every once in a while, we also need to stop moving our minds. But how? The idea can actually seem terrifying, not to mention impossible.

But it is quite possible. The practice of self-healing meditation is just this: resting the mind in silence and space, allowing it time to recover and rejuvenate. Meditation does not mean sitting in a perfect state of peace while having no thoughts. Big misconception! Instead, meditation is about establishing a different relationship with your thoughts, just for a little while. Instead of attention being drawn off by whatever thought happens to present itself, in meditation, you watch your thoughts from a different, more stabilized perspective. You're training yourself to place your attention where and when you want. This is very powerful. It gives you the ability to direct your thoughts (and mood) in more productive and peaceful directions. And, as has been demonstrated in the last few years, this ability has profound self-healing implications for physical and mental health.

There are two schools of thought about race. One school views race as a social construct, and that there is only one true race in humans: the human race. The other school disagrees with that idea, saying that the brain indeed reacts when it sees faces of other races, and holds that as proof that racism is innate.

Those that believe in the social construct idea argue that different ethnic groups were largely separated until the era of nautical travel, and that travel did not open up to the masses until airline travel, so there would be no evolutionary reason for the biological response in humans. And the two groups go back and forth, with neither side changing their mind.

Now, a study published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience seems to suggest that racism is not innate, after all. The study, conducted by Eva H. Telzer at the University of California, Los Angeles and three colleagues, took 32 children of both European American and African American ancestry and conducted functional MRIs on them while showing them European American and African American faces. Previous studies on race that used fMRIs on adults had found that the amygdala, the part of the brain that registers emotion and especially the detection of threats, lit up when seeing faces of other races.

There's plenty of brain activity even when people are thinking nothing at all. But it's the brain's right side - for most people the less-dominant half - that stays busiest while you're at rest, according to surprising new findings.

Researchers found that during periods of wakeful rest, the right hemisphere of the brain chatters more to itself than the left hemisphere does. It also sends more messages to the left hemisphere than vice versa. Surprisingly, this remains true whether the owner of the brain is left- or right-handed. That seems odd, because in right-handed people the left hemisphere is the dominant one, and in left-handed people the right is usually more dominant.

Andrei Medvedev of Georgetown University Medical Center's Center for Functional and Molecular Imaging asked 15 study participants to sit peacefully and let their minds drift while they wore a cap that measured brain activity.

This resting state, previously found to improve memory, "is a special state when the brain tries to deal with information that was acquired during previous active states," Medvedev told LiveScience.

Dr. Eben Alexander has taught at Harvard Medical School and has earned a strong reputation as a neurosurgeon. And while Alexander says he's long called himself a Christian, he never held deeply religious beliefs or a pronounced faith in the afterlife.

But after a week in a coma during the fall of 2008, during which his neocortex ceased to function, Alexander claims he experienced a life-changing visit to the afterlife, specifically heaven.

"According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent," Alexander writes in the cover story of this week's edition of Newsweek.

So what exactly does heaven look like?

Alexander says he first found himself floating above clouds before witnessing, "transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamer like lines behind them."

He claims to have been escorted by an unknown female companion and says he communicated with these beings through a method of correspondence that transcended language. Alexander says the messages he received from those beings loosely translated as:

"You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever."

"You have nothing to fear."

"There is nothing you can do wrong."

From there, Alexander claims to have traveled to "an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting." He believes this void was the home of God.

Brain feedback from facial mimicry used to interpret ambiguous smiles, shape relationships of power and status

Research released today helps reveal how human and primate brains process and interpret facial expressions, and the role of facial mimicry in everything from deciphering an unclear smile to establishing relationships of power and status. The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2012, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.

Facial mimicry - a social behavior in which the observer automatically activates the same facial muscles as the person she is imitating - plays a role in learning, understanding, and rapport. Mimicry can activate muscles that control both smiles and frowns, and evoke their corresponding emotions, positive and negative. The studies reveal new roles of facial mimicry and some of its underlying brain circuitry.

Companionship has the potential to reduce pain linked to nerve damage, according to a new study.

Mice that were paired with a cage-mate showed lower pain responses and fewer signs of inflammation in their nervous system after undergoing surgery that affected their nerves than did isolated mice, suggesting that the social contact had both behavioral and physiological influences.

The social contact lowered the pain response and signs of inflammation even in animals that had experienced stress prior to the nerve injury.

These mice experienced a specific kind of nerve-related pain called allodynia, which is a withdrawal response to a stimulus that normally would not elicit a response - in this case, a light touch to the paw.

"If they were alone and had stress, the animals had increased inflammation and allodynia behavior," said Adam Hinzey, a graduate student in neuroscience at Ohio State University and lead author of the study. "If the mice had a social partner, both allodynia and inflammation were reduced."

More than 20 million Americans experience the nerve pain known as peripheral neuropathy as a consequence of diabetes or other disorders as well as trauma, including spinal cord injury. Few reliable treatments are available for this persistent pain.

"A better understanding of social interaction's beneficial effects could lead to new therapies for this type of pain," Hinzey said.

Hinzey described the research during a press conference Monday (10/15) in New Orleans at Neuroscience 2012, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

In the study, researchers paired one group of mice with a single cage-mate for one week while other mice were kept socially isolated. For three days during this week, some mice from each group were exposed to brief stress while others remain nonstressed.

Sandusky's faith in his own lies is a common and very human trait, revealing the flexibility of memory in the mind.

For sexually abusing 10 boys while working as an assistant football coach at Penn State, Jerry Sandusky received a sentence this week of between 30 and 60 years in prison.

And yet, Sandusky continues to insist that he is innocent.

"They could take away my life, they could make me out as a monster, they could treat me as a monster, but they can't take away my heart," he said in a recorded statement. "In my heart, I know I did not do these alleged disgusting acts. My wife has been my only sexual partner and that was after marriage. Our love continues."

Shoppers, students, workers, and voters are all seen by consumerism and behaviorism the same way: passive, conditionable objects.


The corporatization of society requires a population that accepts control by authorities, and so when psychologists and psychiatrists began providing techniques that could control people, the corporatocracy embraced mental health professionals.

In psychologist B.F. Skinner's best-selling book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), he argued that freedom and dignity are illusions that hinder the science of behavior modification, which he claimed could create a better-organized and happier society.

There are noises that set our teeth on edge, make us recoil, and generally unnerve us. For me, that noise is the sound of someone popping his or her back. Scientists from Newcastle University and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging say heightened activity between the emotional and auditory areas of the brain can explain why the sound of chalk on a blackboard, a knife on a bottle, or a joint popping is so unpleasant.

A new study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, reveals the interaction between the region of the brain that processes sound - the auditory cortex - and the region which processes negative emotions - the amygdala.

The team used brain imaging to show that when we hear an unpleasant noise the amygdala modulates the response of the auditory complex. This heightens activity and provokes our negative reaction.

"It appears there is something very primitive kicking in," says Dr Sukhbinder Kumar, from Newcastle University. "It's a possible distress signal from the amygdala to the auditory cortex."

The team examined the brains of 13 volunteers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see how their brains reacted to unpleasant noises. The test subjects listened to a range of noises while inside the scanners and rated them from most unpleasant - the sound of a knife on a bottle - to most pleasant - bubbling water, giving the research team the ability to study the brain response to each type of sound.