According to Buddhist teaching, the self is an illusion. The religion preaches a fundamentally selfless worldview, encouraging followers to renounce individual desires and distance themselves from self-concern. To advance this perspective, millions of people around the world practice yoga and meditation.

But a recently published psychological study directly contradicts that approach, finding that contemporary meditation and yoga practices can actually inflate your ego.

In the paper, published online by University of Southampton and due to be published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers note that Buddhism's teachings that a meditation practice helps overcome the ego conflicts with US psychologist William James's argument that practicing any skill breeds a sense of self-enhancement (the psychological term for inflated self-regard.)

Continuing the discussion in my last post, I'd like to look at one particular serial killer - David Berkowitz, aka the Son of Sam, who terrorized New York City in 1976 and 1977 - and see if the spirit-possession hypothesis fits the facts of the case.

First, here are the relevant parts of Berkowitz's biography, taken from the Wikipedia page on Son of Sam.

Berkowitz, who was adopted as an infant, was said to have a "troubled" childhood.

Although of above-average intelligence, he lost interest in learning at an early age and became infatuated with petty larceny and starting fires. Neighbors and relatives would recall Berkowitz as difficult, spoiled, and a bully. His adoptive parents consulted at least one psychotherapist due to his misconduct, but his misbehavior never resulted in legal intervention or serious mention in his school records.

When Berkowitz was twenty-three, after a stint in the Army and an honorable discharge, the killings began. One theory is that the murders were triggered by Berkowitz's discovery that he'd been born outside of wedlock, and that both his natural father and a prospective stepfather had been unwilling to care for him. Why this should have upset his mental balance and produced an animus against young women with long dark hair is unclear.

Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes-car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle-that it almost seems easier to list the things they don't mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices.

Even so, emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. It involves kids' development, but it's probably not what you think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents.

Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend more time caring for their children than mothers did in the 1960s. But the engagement between parent and child is increasingly low-quality, even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their children's lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned. To be clear, I'm not unsympathetic to parents in this predicament. My own adult children like to joke that they wouldn't have survived infancy if I'd had a smartphone in my clutches 25 years ago.

To argue that parents' use of screens is an underappreciated problem isn't to discount the direct risks screens pose to children: Substantial evidence suggests that many types of screen time (especially those involving fast-paced or violent imagery) are damaging to young brains. Today's preschoolers spend more than four hours a day facing a screen. And, since 1970, the average age of onset of "regular" screen use has gone from 4 years to just four months.

You sit in a chair, facing a computer screen, while a clinician sticks electrodes to your scalp with a viscous goop that takes days to wash out of your hair. Wires from the sensors connect to a computer programmed to respond to your brain's activity.

Try to relax and focus. If your brain behaves as desired, you'll be encouraged with soothing sounds and visual treats, like images of exploding stars or a flowering field. If not, you'll get silence, a darkening screen and wilting flora.

This is neurofeedback, a kind of biofeedback for the brain, which practitioners say can address a host of neurological ills - among them attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, depression and anxiety - by allowing patients to alter their own brain waves through practice and repetition.

Without doubt, we humans took an important step forward when we stopped attributing every unexplained phenomenon, whether in the world around us or in our own psyches, to the action of supernatural forces. But is it possible that we've carried this undeniably successful and productive approach too far? Perhaps in some cases, especially cases of extremely aberrant human behavior, there is a supernatural component, whether we're talking about miracles performed by saints or heinous crimes committed by the type of people we still characterize as "monsters."

In other words, can some varieties of evil be better understood in terms of spirit possession or obsession, rather than as a simple breakdown of neurochemistry in combination with subconscious drives?

I became more interested in this question after reading about the serial killer Charles Cullen, who, in his capacity as a nurse, murdered at least forty patients and probably many more. Throughout his life, Cullen made repeated suicide attempts, starting at the age of nine, when he drank chemicals from a chemistry set. After joining the Navy, he attempted suicide seven times before receiving a medical discharge. His first confirmed murders occurred a decade later, after which he attempted suicide on four occasions - three times in 1993 and again in 2000.

Now, it could be argued that these suicide attempts were not serious, since none of them succeeded. But at least some of them do appear to have been legitimate attempts at ending his own life. It's doubtful that, as a nine-year-old, he would have been sure that the chemicals he ingested would not prove fatal. And his last attempt, in 2000, was thwarted only because neighbors smelled the smoke coming from a charcoal grill he'd lit inside his apartment in the hope of poisoning himself with carbon monoxide.

At the very least, it appears that Charles Cullen was a deeply divided personality. On one hand, he murdered scores of people over a long period, with no apparent hesitation or remorse. On the other hand, he repeatedly tried to take his own life, as if he found his homicidal obsessions intolerable. Is this inner conflict rooted only in psychological or neurological dysfunction, or could it be indicative of an external personality trying to control and distort his behavior, and of his increasingly desperate attempts to escape?

Surreal books and films could make you smarter, research finds.

Stories by Franz Kafka or films by master of the absurd David Lynch could boost learning.

Even an unsettling feeling, like the absurdity of life, can engender the desired state.

The reason is that surreal or nonsensical things put our mind into overdrive looking for meaning.

When people are more motivated to search for meaning, they learn better, the psychologists found.

Dr Travis Proulx, the study's first author, explained:

"The idea is that when you're exposed to a meaning threat -- something that fundamentally does not make sense -- your brain is going to respond by looking for some other kind of structure within your environment.

And, it turns out, that structure can be completely unrelated to the meaning threat."

A regular object of ridicule on the jungle gym, the "helicopter parent" has inspired countless analyses that paint a disturbing picture of over-dependence and stunted emotional maturity in affected children. To confirm what playground gossipers have long muttered under their breath, researchers of a new study literally took candy from a child.

Children of over-controlling mothers experience heightened emotional problems, poor social skills and limited academic success throughout elementary school, says a study published Monday in the journal Developmental Psychology. Starting as young as 2 years old, children of "helicopter moms" developed dependent behaviors that limited their control over their emotions and inhibitions and hindered their achievement as pre-teens.

In a study of over 400 American children and their mothers, more than half white and more than 80 percent married, psychologists measured children's emotional and cognitive development at ages 2, 5 and 10 over the course of eight years. At 2, mothers were asked to play with their child, then work with him or her to clean up toys. Mothers who attempted to structure the activity and issue repeated commands to their toddler were rated as highly controlling. At the same age, children with observed aggression and destructive behaviors were likely to portray poor social skills, less success in school and more emotional problems at 10.

Even if marriage is sometimes more a bed of nails than roses, living into old age with a partner may help ward off heart disease and stroke, researchers said Tuesday.

A sweeping survey of research conducted over the last two decades covering more than two million people aged 42 to 77 found that being hitched significantly reduced the risk of both maladies, they reported in the medical journal Heart.

The study examined ethnically varied populations in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia, adding weight to the results.

Compared to people living in spousal union, the divorced, widowed or never married were 42 percent more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and 16 percent more likely to have coronary heart disease, the study found.

Narcissists' lives are about winning, generally at others' expense. Many narcissists pursue a win-at-all-costs, anything-goes approach. The casualties: Honesty, empathy and reciprocity.

Narcissists distort the truth through disinformation, oversimplifying, ridiculing and sowing doubt. Narcissists can be incredibly skilled at using classic elements of thought-control and brainwashing.

To get free of narcissistic thought control it is essential to spot the distortions narcissists deliberately and instinctively practice. Applying critical thinking skills can inoculate you against their campaigns.

The personality traits that are linked to both good and bad mental health.

People who are extraverted - self-confident and cheerful - are less likely to suffer mental health problems, personality research finds.

However, people who are aggressive and neurotic - a tendency to worry and be emotionally unstable - are at higher risk of mental health problems.

Neurotic people are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety, as well as drink and drug problems.