Science of the Spirit
It's a fine line between sanity and insanity, or so they say. But what about personality? How big is the difference between traits such as psychopathy and more common and socially approved ones?
New research published in the European Journal of Psychological Assessment may hold an answer. A team of psychologists led by Delroy Paulhus of the University of British Columbia conducted a study in which they sought to map the four aspects of what is referred to as the "Dark Tetrad" to the five best-known and most widely researched dimensions of personality — that is, extraversion, openness to experience, emotional stability, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.

As part of the World Brain Death Project, an international group of doctors has written guidelines that help identify whether a person’s brain no longer functions, completely and irreversibly. That information can be used to determine when to take a patient off life support.
Brain death has been a recognized concept in medicine for decades. But there's a lot of variation in how people define it, says Gene Sung, a neurocritical care physician at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "Showing that there is some worldwide consensus, understanding and agreement at this time will hopefully help minimize misunderstanding of what brain death is," Sung says.
As part of the World Brain Death Project, Sung and his colleagues convened doctors from professional societies around the world to forge a consensus on how to identify brain death. This group, including experts in critical care, neurology and neurosurgery, reviewed the existing research on brain death (which was slim) and used their clinical expertise to write the recommendations, published August 3 in JAMA. In addition to the main guidelines, the final product included 17 supplements that address legal and religious aspects, provide checklists and flowcharts, and even trace the history of relevant medical advances. "Basically, we wrote a book," Sung says.
The minimum requirement for determining brain death is "a good, thorough clinical examination," Sung says. Before the exam even occurs, doctors ought to verify that a person has experienced a neurological injury or condition that could cause brain death. Next, clinicians should look for other explanations, conditions that could mimic brain death but are actually reversible. Cooling the body, a procedure for treating heart attacks, can cause brain function to temporarily disappear, the report points out. So can certain drugs, alcohol and other toxins.
"I became interested in the topic during my undergraduate degree. In the social psychology courses I took, it was clear that there were things you were 'allowed' to say and things you were not," said study author Jordan Moss, a medical student at Sydney Medical School.
"For instance, the blank-slate hypothesis was maintained, and any comments appreciating the genetic contribution to individual or group differences were met with incredible resistance. At the time, I became aware of Jordan Peterson in his opposition to Bill C-16, and examples of 'controversial' speakers getting 'cancelled' at university campuses were becoming more frequent."
Comment: See also:
- The woke left v. the alt-right: A new study shows they're more alike than either side realizes
- Narcissists, psychopaths, and manipulators are more likely to engage in 'virtuous victim signaling' - study
- Does Not Complying With Social Distancing Rules Mean You're a Psychopath? The Answer is Obvious
- 7 things covert psychopaths, narcissists and sociopaths do differently
- The Truth Perspective: From Sinners to Saints: Exploring the Psychology of Good and Evil
- Supporters of nasty leaders share negative personality traits
Porges's work on the two branches of the vagus nerve, and the states of consciousness they are involved in, has important implications for physical and mental health. But the connections may go even further than that, into areas considered spiritual or even paranormal. The states facilitated by ventral vagus nerve activation have a lot in common with the conditions most conducive to eliciting psi, both in the lab and in everyday life. And together they may explain certain features of contemplative states and practices.
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In a search of answers, I have been reflecting a lot on a phrase I transcribed into a notebook years ago from Martin Amis's Koba the Dread: " . . . a contagion of selective incuriosity, a mindgame begun in self-hypnosis and maintained by mass hysteria."
While not discounting the impact of short-term welfare payments (buying the people's freedom with their own money) I have gotten to thinking that the answer maybe includes, as a primary factor, something along the lines of mass hypnosis — the viral entrancement of entire populations.
Comment: Waters has exposed the outline of the psychological operation the elite are running on the world's population, fronted by puppets Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci. The isolation, social distance rules and interminable disruption of daily life is taking a severe toll on the world's mental health. This is by design. The population is being worn down so the Gates/Fauci vaccine will be accepted with a minimum of fuss, all in the name of getting back even a little of one's previous life. The more you know . . . .
- How to Create a Fake Pandemic
- Is the Coronavirus Scare a Psychological Operation?
- People are so spooked by the state-sanctioned Project Fear they believe TENS OF MILLIONS have died from Covid-19
- Almost 3 in 10 parents say social distancing is harming child's mental health: poll
- Leading scientist claims lockdown & quarantine is a "human catastrophe"
- Covid-19, The Great Reset and The New Normal
- Coronavirus 'Plandemic' - This IS the global reset
- Dr. Anthony Fauci plotted 'global vaccine action plan' with Bill Gates before pushing COVID panic and doubts about hydroxychloroquine treatments
- Trudeau: No return to 'normality' until coronavirus vaccine is available
- COVID-19: The Spearpoint For Rolling Out a 'New Era' of High-Risk, Genetically Engineered Vaccines
The Truth Perspective: Herd Behavior: What Gustav Le Bon's Classic Book Can Teach Us About 'The Crowd'

Abigail Shrier "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters"
Whether it is a statement or a question, the title of this book conveys the necessary urgency of this desperately sad story. Amid the trans debate, seemingly a battle between grown adults, vulnerable children are prey to a malevolent ideology that survivors call a cult.
In a superb piece of investigative journalism, Abigail Shrier focusses on teenage girls - most with no history of gender dysphoria - who become captivated by the belief that they are transgender. Behind the glittery exterior portrayed in the media, she encounters damaged children - many alienated from their families - in poor mental health and facing the prospect of infertility and medication for life.
Shrier, a writer with the Wall Street Journal, pulls no punches when describing phalloplasty, the construction of an artificial penis. The complications can be horrific. She reports the experience of one nineteen-year-old, "whose phalloplasty resulted in gangrene and loss of the appendage." On the cusp of adulthood, that young person has been left without normal genitalia, for either sex, and tethered to a catheter.
I am a transgender person, but I transitioned as an adult when I could understand the implications on my body and my relationship with society. Besides, by then I'd had my own children. Yet children too young to even give consent for a tattoo are being corralled into making truly life-changing decisions.
Now, David M. Eagleman and Don A. Vaughn have proposed a new theory. Their preprint article, which has not yet been peer reviewed, is called The Defensive Activation theory: Dreaming as a mechanism to prevent takeover of the visual cortex.
To my mind, it's a highly original and creative theory, but I'm not convinced by it.
Here's Eagleman and Vaughn's theory in nutshell: The role of dreams is to ensure that the brain's visual cortex is stimulated during sleep. Otherwise, if the visual system were deprived of input all night long, the visual cortex's function might degrade.
We know that the visual cortex, in the brain's occipital lobe, can start to respond to non-visual signals if it is deprived of visual input. In blind people, for instance, the occipital lobe strongly responds to touch. This rewiring or repurposing of under-utilized brain areas is a form of neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is generally considered a good thing. But Eagleman and Vaughn point out that for the visual system, neuroplasticity could actually pose a threat, because vision — unlike our other senses — isn't active all the time.
If we are in a dark place, or it's night, we get little or no visual input. So — in theory — our visual cortex would be vulnerable to 'takeover' by other senses, every single night. Dreams, on this view, are our brain's way of defending the integrity of our visual system by keeping it active.
But traditional print books may have an edge over e-books when it comes to quality time shared between parents and their children, a new study suggests.
The research, led by University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital and involving 37 parent-toddler pairs, found that parents and children verbalized and interacted less with e-books than with print books. The findings appear in journal Pediatrics, which is published by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
"Shared reading promotes children's language development, literacy and bonding with parents. We wanted to learn how electronics might change this experience," says lead author Tiffany Munzer, M.D., a fellow in developmental behavioral pediatrics at Mott.
"We found that when parents and children read print books, they talked more frequently and the quality of their interactions were better."
In a nutshell, the study concludes that young children living with at least one dog at home display far stronger emotional and social development than kids with no pups at home.
The research, conducted at the University of Western Australia in collaboration with the Telethon Kids Institute, includes 1,646 households (42%, or 686, of which own a dog) with at least one child between the ages of two and five. Each family was given a questionnaire to fill out.
Best friends with benefits
To start, a number of additional factors were considered for each child, including age, gender, sleep routine, parents' education, and usual daily screen time. Using this data, researchers say that kids with a pet dog were 23% less likely to have problems with their emotions or social interactions with others than children with no dog at home.
One day, some psychologists placed Barry in a corridor full of obstacles like boxes and chairs. They took away his walking stick and told him to walk down the corridor. The result of this simple experiment would prove dramatic for our understanding of consciousness. Barry was able to navigate around the obstacles without tripping over a single one.
Barry has blindsight, an extremely rare condition that is as paradoxical as it sounds. People with blindsight consistently deny awareness of items in front of them, but they are capable of amazing feats, which demonstrate that, in some sense, they must be able to see them.
Comment: For more on the study of consciousness, check out SOTT radio's:
- MindMatters: Interview with James Carpenter: First Sight, Psi, and Consciousness
- The Truth Perspective: Unlocking the Secrets of Consciousness, Hyperdimensional Attractors and Frog Brains
- MindMatters: The Nature of Reality: Mindless Matter, or Universal Consciousness?
Comment: See also: