Science of the Spirit

In the brain, timing is everything

Anne Trafton
MIT News Office
Thu, 23 Jan 2014 14:16 UTC

© Takashi Kitamura
This cross-section of the hippocampus shows island cells (green) projecting to the CA1 region of the hippocampus.

Suppose you heard the sound of skidding tires, followed by a car crash. The next time you heard such a skid, you might cringe in fear, expecting a crash to follow - suggesting that somehow, your brain had linked those two memories so that a fairly innocuous sound provokes dread.

MIT neuroscientists have now discovered how two neural circuits in the brain work together to control the formation of such time-linked memories. This is a critical ability that helps the brain to determine when it needs to take action to defend against a potential threat, says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience and senior author of a paper describing the findings in the Jan. 23 issue of Science.

"It's important for us to be able to associate things that happen with some temporal gap," says Tonegawa, who is a member of MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. "For animals it is very useful to know what events they should associate, and what not to associate."

The interaction of these two circuits allows the brain to maintain a balance between becoming too easily paralyzed with fear and being too careless, which could result in being caught off guard by a predator or other threat.

The paper's lead authors are Picower Institute postdocs Takashi Kitamura and Michele Pignatelli.

Corruption of Science: U.S. psychology body declines to rebuke member in Guantánamo torture case

Spencer Ackerman
Guardian
Wed, 22 Jan 2014 19:25 UTC

Complaint dropped against John Leso, involved in brutal interrogation of suspected 9/11 hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani

- APA: 'We cannot proceed with formal charges' - full letter

America's professional association of psychologists has quietly declined to rebuke one of its members, a retired US army reserve officer, for his role in one of the most brutal interrogations known to have to taken place at Guantánamo Bay, the Guardian has learned.

The decision not to pursue any disciplinary measure against John Leso, a former army reserve major, is the latest case in which someone involved in the post-9/11 torture of detainees has faced no legal or even professional consequences.

In a 31 December letter obtained by the Guardian, the American Psychological Association said it had "determined that we cannot proceed with formal charges in this matter. Consequently the complaint against Dr Leso has been closed."

But the APA did not deny Leso took part in the brutal interrogation of the suspected 20th 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed al-Qahtani, whose treatment the Pentagon official overseeing his military commission ultimately called "torture".

13 milliseconds: The incredible speed at which your brain can identify an image

Jeremy Dean
Psyblog
Wed, 22 Jan 2014 12:03 UTC

A new study has brought the estimate of how fast you can process an image down to an incredible 13 milliseconds.

The new study, conducted by MIT researchers and published in the journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, used everyday images such as of picnics and smiling couples (Potter et al., 2013).

Previous research by Professor Mary Potter and colleagues had found it takes one-tenth of a second for images to be processed.

After hitting the retina, the information must be passed to the visual areas of the brain and then around processing loops to identify the image.

In the new study, they began presenting images to their participants faster and faster to see if they could still make accurate judgements about them.

They expected a rapid decline in performance as they approached one-twentieth of a second, but it didn't come.

Instead, although their performance declined, people could still identify novel images when they were shown for just 13 milliseconds.

The researchers were unable to present the images any faster as the monitors they were using couldn't support it.

Psi Co-therapy: Using Psi in the therapeutic process

Adam A. Neal
Paranormalyte
Mon, 10 Jun 2013 08:54 UTC

If the overall goal for any therapist is to aid a client in understanding and managing psychological issues, let’s apply the same framework to the psychic “couch.”

In an exquisitely written memoir, Tales from a Traveling Couch, psychotherapist Dr. Robert U. Akeret begins and ends with a basic thesis: Did my psychotherapy practice truly make a difference in my client's lives?

With an in-depth exploration of five of his most memorable clients, Akeret takes readers through the trials and tribulations of each person, highlighting his approach during their therapy and discussing his choices throughout. By the end, having revisited each person and witnessing them firsthand in their present life circumstances, his conclusion is ambiguous: Probably, yes. There is evidence that therapy helped. But could Akeret "prove" that his therapy worked? Well, of course not. As with any experiential social science, there is no way to prove or disprove the validity of the practice, except to subjectively note "progress."

As any psi practitioner will explain, receiving and sharing psychic information will never be an exact science, at least not with our current view of what "science" means. Information comes through in imagery, often symbolic, as well as in perceived sound, smell, taste, or a specific feeling. Because these senses are intrinsically subjective, a psychic should be thought of as an artist who, much like a painter or sculptor, is responding to a unique, personal experience of inspiration and insight.

Comment: For more information, see 'Spirit release' is a different kind of therapy

"According to some psychiatrists or psychologists, this new therapy works better than what they learned in medical or graduate school. They tell us that too often drug therapy only masks symptoms, and talk therapy reaches only as deep as the patient's conscious mind can go. But "spirit release" usually heals, often permanently.Not only does it heal the client; it heals the attached (or "possessing") spirit."

See also SOTT Talk Radio show #50: Sunday, January 26^th, 2014: Spirit Release & Soul Therapy: Interview with Patrick Rodriguez & Heather Hayes

Why verbal tee-ups like 'to be honest' often signal insincerity

Elizabeth Bernstein
The Wall Street Journal
Mon, 20 Jan 2014 06:27 UTC

James W. Pennebaker, of the University of Texas, Austin, says these phrases are a form of dishonesty

© Adam Doughty
Use of conversational 'tee-ups' can obscure what you are trying to say, but also may signal that you are being insincere

A friend of mine recently started a conversation with these words: "Don't take this the wrong way..."

I wish I could tell you what she said next. But I wasn't listening - my brain had stalled. I was bracing for the sentence that would follow that phrase, which experience has taught me probably wouldn't be good.

Certain phrases just seem to creep into our daily speech. We hear them a few times and suddenly we find ourselves using them. We like the way they sound, and we may find they are useful. They may make it easier to say something difficult or buy us a few extra seconds to collect our next thought.

Yet for the listener, these phrases are confusing. They make it fairly impossible to understand, or even accurately hear, what the speaker is trying to say.

Do schizophrenics live in a parallel universe?

Xavier Ortega
Ghost Theory.com
Tue, 31 Dec 2013 09:39 UTC

The Anomalist posted a link to an article in Psychology Tomorrow titled Do Schizophrenics live in Parallel Universes?.

In Quantum physics, objects can exist in different states at the same time. You know, Schrödinger's cat and all that stuff. Today, psychologists are poking around with an interesting theory about schizophrenics and their mental states and the galactic complexity of Parallel Universe theories.

Do schizophrenics live in multiple Universes?

Dr. Joseph Valks' blog explains it a hell of a lot better:

Usually sufferers only have a single personality, but could they, in fact, be living in parallel universes? As we are not physically aware of other universes their existences is purely theoretical and, therefore, open to conjecture. Quantum objects can exist in different states and it can be argued that each different state belongs to a different world. This would imply a multiverse. This idea has been extended even further to cover actions with more than one possible outcome. If the theory is correct then each possible outcome is in a different but parallel universe. So could schizophrenics actually be spanning more than one reality-state at once?

String theory proposes that our universe is like a bubble existing alongside similar parallel universes and the parallel universes may come into contact with one another. This results in a big bang similar to the one that started our universe.

Two brains running: Thinking fast and slow

Jim Holt
The New York Times
Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:55 UTC

In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in economic science. What made this unusual is that Kahneman is a psychologist. Specifically, he is one-half of a pair of psychologists who, beginning in the early 1970s, set out to dismantle an entity long dear to economic theorists: that arch-rational decision maker known as Homo economicus. The other half of the dismantling duo, Amos Tversky, died in 1996 at the age of 59. Had Tversky lived, he would certainly have shared the Nobel with Kahneman, his longtime collaborator and dear friend.

Human irrationality is Kahneman's great theme. There are essentially three phases to his career. In the first, he and Tversky did a series of ingenious experiments that revealed twenty or so "cognitive biases" - unconscious errors of reasoning that distort our judgment of the world. Typical of these is the "anchoring effect": our tendency to be influenced by irrelevant numbers that we happen to be exposed to. (In one experiment, for instance, experienced German judges were inclined to give a shoplifter a longer sentence if they had just rolled a pair of dice loaded to give a high number.) In the second phase, Kahneman and Tversky showed that people making decisions under uncertain conditions do not behave in the way that economic models have traditionally assumed; they do not "maximize utility." The two then developed an alternative account of decision making, one more faithful to human psychology, which they called "prospect theory." (It was for this achievement that Kahneman was awarded the Nobel.) In the third phase of his career, mainly after the death of Tversky, Kahneman has delved into "hedonic psychology": the science of happiness, its nature and its causes. His findings in this area have proved disquieting - and not just because one of the key experiments involved a deliberately prolonged colonoscopy.

Discovery of quantum vibrations inside brain neurons supports controversial theory of consciousness

Jeremy Dean
Psy Blog
Sun, 19 Jan 2014 12:48 UTC

The recent discovery of quantum vibrations inside neurons in the brain supports a controversial theory of consciousness.

If correct, it might lead to new treatments for many different conditions, it is claimed in a new review of the evidence by Hameroff and Penrose (2013).

The theory - which implies the brain is connected to the universe at a quantum level - was first proposed in the 1990s, but it suffered extensive criticism.

One major point against it was that the brain was thought to be too "warm, wet and noisy" for coherent quantum processes.

Recent evidence, though, from researchers led by Anirban Bandyopadhyay has found the proposed quantum vibrations inside microtubules within brain neurons.

These microtubules are components of cell scaffolding - they help provide our cells with their structure - that are around 25µm in length.

New drug can erase memories

Cheri Cheng
Counsel & Heal
Sun, 19 Jan 2014 02:36 UTC

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental condition often caused by a traumatic experience that involves symptoms such as severe anxiety. One of the most common treatment options for PTSD is psychotherapy, which reenacts the traumatic experience for the patient in a safe and controlled environment. Now, according to a new study, researchers identified a drug that has the potential to improve the treatment of PTSD.

For this study, neuroscientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) examined the effects of a type of drug called an HDAC2 inhibitor. This type of drug can make the brain more malleable. The researchers found that when rats were given the HDAC2 inhibitor, the rats' traumatic memories could be removed. The researchers believe that if this drug were to be given to patients who did not respond well to psychotherapy, the effects of therapy would ideally be improved.

We all have three eyes - one of them is inside the head

Tara MacIsaac
Epoch Times
Fri, 17 Jan 2014 18:19 UTC

© Shutterstock
A woman having a massage, with the masseuse working on a chakra long held by Eastern philosophies to have great spiritual power and also to be related to the pineal body in the brain.

The pineal gland in the human brain has the structure of an eye. It has cells that act as light receptors, as the retina does. It has a structure comparable to the vitreous - a gel-like substance between the retina and lens of the eye. It has a structure similar to a lens.

Scientists are still learning much about the pineal body, known in both Eastern spiritualism and Western philosophy as the seat of human consciousness. A bundle of nerve fibers connects it to the posterior commissure, another part of the brain that is not well-understood.

For many years, scientists have recognized the similarities between the pineal body and the eyes. In 1919, Frederick Tilney and Luther Fiske Warren wrote that the similarities listed above prove the pineal gland was formed to be light-sensitive and possibly to have other visual capabilities.

And there you have it.... Confirmation of a different sort. Demanding a new baptism to a whole different, but much warmer, afterlife and God.

DeliciousTears

Ignominy plain & evident. Typed with one hand & 1 finger thereof. Ignominy plain and simple obvious. I’ve been indignant for a long time...

Buffalo_Ken

Grandad Adam and Grandma Eve's friendly nieghbours.

Awordinyourear

"One might think that Americans...would be better equipped with suspicion." Obviously some are, or they wouldn't be getting fired.

ReRan

It is high time for a large Solar mass ejection or flare that will cripple information systems world wide.

Baybars

Science of the Spirit

In the brain, timing is everything

Corruption of Science: U.S. psychology body declines to rebuke member in Guantánamo torture case

13 milliseconds: The incredible speed at which your brain can identify an image

Psi Co-therapy: Using Psi in the therapeutic process

Why verbal tee-ups like 'to be honest' often signal insincerity

Do schizophrenics live in a parallel universe?

Two brains running: Thinking fast and slow

Discovery of quantum vibrations inside brain neurons supports controversial theory of consciousness

New drug can erase memories

We all have three eyes - one of them is inside the head

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