Science of the SpiritS


Bulb

Neuroscience Of 20-Somethings: 'Emerging Adults' Show Brain Differences

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© Facebook Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls.
In the opening scene of Lena Dunham's HBO series Girls, the Horvaths tell their 24-year-old daughter Hannah that they will no longer support her - or, as her mother puts it: "No. More. Money." A recent college graduate, Hannah has been living in Brooklyn, completing an unpaid internship and working on a series of personal essays. The Horvaths intend to give Hannah "one final push" toward, presumably, a lifestyle that more closely resembles adulthood. Hannah protests. Her voice quavers. She tells her parents that she does not want to see them the following day, even though they are leaving town soon: "I have work and then I have a dinner thing and then I am busy - trying to become who I am."

Across the United States - and in developed nations around the world - twenty-somethings like Hannah are taking longer to finish school, leave home, begin a career, get married and reach other milestones of adulthood. These trends are not just anecdotal; sociologists and psychologists have gathered supporting data. Robin Marantz Henig summarizes the patterns in her 2010 New York Times Magazine feature:
"One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation."
These demographic shifts have transformed the late teens through mid twenties into a distinct stage of life according to Jeffrey Arnett of Clark University, who calls the new phase "emerging adulthood." Arnett acknowledges that emerging adulthood is relevant only to about 18 percent of the global population, to certain groups of twenty-somethings in developed nations such as the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Japan and Australia. To make some broad generalizations, people living in the rest of world - particularly in developing countries - are much more likely to finish formal education in their teens and marry by their early twenties.

Bacon

SOTT Focus: Presentation: The Living System, Evolution, the Purpose of Life and the Sixth Extinction

In this first part of her fascinating presentation at the World Trade Center, Barcelona on October 15th 2011, Laura Knight-Jadczyk gives an overview of the Cassiopaean experiment and introduces the science behind the origins of life on planet earth and the theory of "rational design".

Watch parts 2 and 3 at the links below.


Part 2

Part 3

Magic Wand

People Merge Supernatural and Scientific Beliefs When Reasoning With the Unknown, Study Shows

Reliance on supernatural explanations for major life events, such as death and illness, often increases rather than declines with age, according to a new psychology study from The University of Texas at Austin.

The study, published in the June issue of Child Development, offers new insight into developmental learning.

"As children assimilate cultural concepts into their intuitive belief systems - from God to atoms to evolution - they engage in coexistence thinking," said Cristine Legare, assistant professor of psychology and lead author of the study. "When they merge supernatural and scientific explanations, they integrate them in a variety of predictable and universal ways."

Legare and her colleagues reviewed more than 30 studies on how people (ages 5-75) from various countries reason with three major existential questions: the origin of life, illness and death. They also conducted a study with 366 respondents in South Africa, where biomedical and traditional healing practices are both widely available.

Eye 2

Conservative estimate: 'One In 100 Children Is A Psychopath'

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Around one in 100 children in the UK could be a psychopath, research suggests.

Displaying similar characteristics to the protagonist in the novel We Need To Talk About Kevin, they are liable to lie, cheat, manipulate and commit acts of remorseless cruelty.

Appealing to their sense of fair play and conscience is a waste of time because they lack empathy.

So too are standard punishments such as "time out" which involves brief periods of isolation such as sitting in a corner or on a "naughty chair".

Psychologists are only now starting to recognise that psychopathic children, described as callous-unemotional (CU), form a distinct sub-group.

Magic Wand

Scientists Proclaim Animal and Human Consciousness the Same

A remarkable thing happened at The First Annual Francis Crick Memorial Conference held at the University of Cambridge, July 7 in U.K. A group of prominent neuroscientists signed a proclamation declaring human and animal consciousness alike. Called The Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness, it states:

We declare the following: The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.

To many pet parents and animal lovers, the conference only confirms what they already believed through their own observations and interactions with animals - albeit, not with the credibility of scientific research.

Stephen Hawking - considered the greatest mind in physics since Albert Einstein - was the guest of honor at the signing ceremony. The declaration was authored by Philip Low and edited by Jaak Panksepp, Diana Reiss, David Edelman, Bruno Van Swinderen, Philip Low and Christof Koch, all well-respected neuroscientists. The signing was memorialized by 60 Minutes.

Magic Wand

Consciousness as the key to our mental traits

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© Unknown
In The Ravenous Brain Daniel Bor explores consciousness and suggests that its level of activity is linked to several psychiatric conditions.

It is a long-standing philosophical conundrum: is consciousness somehow separate from the physical world or merely an illusion conjured up by our complex brains? It took his father's stroke to convince Daniel Bor which side he was on.

Bor, who had previously been considering a PhD in the philosophy of mind, opted instead for one in the neuroscience of consciousness. To see his father "robbed of his identity because a small clot on his brain had potently wounded his consciousness" hammered home all too well that the mind really is the output of nothing more than a small sac of jelly.

But what an amazing sac of jelly it is. In The Ravenous Brain, Bor takes us on a tour of the fascinating world of consciousness research. He engages in "technological telepathy", taking part in a conversation where he communicates his thoughts using only an MRI brain scanner.

He also introduces us to conjoined twins with linked brains, an autistic synaesthete who can memorise the digits of pi up to 22,514 decimal places and chimpanzees that practise sophisticated mind games.

As well as providing a primer in the most popular current theories of consciousness, Bor introduces one of his own. This is that consciousness evolved to facilitate information processing, and thus learning and innovation.

Newspaper

Psychopaths not mentally ill and should be held entirely responsible: Canadian study

Canadian criminal psychopaths
© QMI Agency/HandoutComposite photo of Canadian criminal psychopaths (L to R): Michelle Erstikaitis; Paul Bernardo; Col. Russ Williams.
A new Canadian study suggests that psychopaths are not mentally ill and should be held entirely responsible for their violent and manipulative actions.

Researchers from universities in Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan studied 289 murderers, rapists and other violent offenders, and concluded "psychopaths are executing a well-functioning, if unscrupulous strategy."

Psychopaths, with their trademark ruthless, risk-taking and often violent behaviour, "may have evolved to exploit others."

The theory rests in part on the victims of psychopaths.

Mental disorders "disrupt" the mechanism that stops people from hurting their families. But the violent offenders researchers spoke to, who were diagnosed as psychopaths, tended not to hurt family members.

"On average, psychopathy is associated with less harm to genetic relatives - that's exactly what you'd expect of healthy people," lead author Daniel Krupp, of Queen's University, told QMI Agency.

They are preserving their genetic material, he said.

Stop

It's called TV programming for a reason: Children exposed to sex on screen go on to be promiscuous

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© AlamyThe study showed that young people who are exposed to sex on screen tend to lose their virginity at an earlier age and be more promiscuous
Children who watch films with a high sexual content tend to lose their virginity earlier and have more partners, a study has found.

Not only are they more promiscuous, they are also more likely to engage in risky sex by not using condoms.

The six-year study of more than 1,200 teens refers to sexual content in films but campaigners against online porn say it could equally apply to videos on the internet.

They point out that children can now see a lot more sexual imagery online than they ever did at the cinema - meaning that the effect will be magnified. Pornographic images and videos are freely available on the net, many on sites with no age verification procedures at all, putting children at risk.

The NSPCC warns that young male teens are now pressurising their girlfriends to copy what they see on porn films downloaded from the internet.

Other reviews have found that exposure to porn makes boys more likely to view girls as sex objects.

The Daily Mail is campaigning for an automatic block on online porn. Over-18s would be able to see adult material only if they specifically opted in.

Wolf

White Collar Psychopaths: Stealing and Backstabbing is 'busines as usual'

The notion of a colleague betraying you is at least as old as the tale of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, who famously uttered the phrase et tu as Brutus plunged a knife into his back.

And if you've ever encountered a co-worker who will do anything to get ahead - even if that means ruining your good name in the process - you know how calculating and callous such people can be.

But did you realize that such a person could also have psychopathic tendencies?

We often think of a psychopath as being a serial killer. Yet according to former criminal profiler Gregg McCrary, psychopathy runs on a continuum - with white collar criminals falling in the middle.

As a former agent for the FBI for 25 years, 10 of that in the behavioral science unit, McCrary knows the pattern of psychopaths well. While they vary in degree, he says psychopaths share common traits. "They have no guilt, remorse or shame. They're deceitful and egotistical. It's all about them."

Using standards developed by Dr. Robert Hare, a leader in the study of psychopathy, researchers estimated that 3 million Americans - or one percent of the general population in the U.S. - were psychopaths compared to about 20 percent of the prison population.

Family

How fathers who had stressful lives as youths are more likely to have anxious daughters

A woman's risk of anxiety may depend on how stressed out her father's life was when he was young, new research has found.

A new study suggests the stress a man experiences when he is young can contribute to genetic changes in his sperm that can result in psychiatric disorders in female offspring.

And it's not only the first generation of daughters that can be affected, with the research showing the effects can last down to yet another generation.
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© AlamyBlame it on dad... or grandad: A study suggests the stress fathers experience as youths can be passed down to daughters in the form of psychiatric disorders
Researchers from the Tufts University School of Medicine subjected young male mice to a range of stresses by constantly changing the composition of their cages.

They found that the stresses led the mice, particularly females, to become rather more anxious and socially disfunctional than their peers who had not been subjected to stressful treatment.

The researchers then studied the offspring of these previously-stressed mice and observed that female, but not male, offspring exhibited elevated anxiety and poor social interactions.