Why is it that otherwise perfectly intelligent, thoughtful and rationally minded people baulk at the suggestion that sociopaths are conspiring to manipulate and deceive them? And why will they defend this ill-founded position with such vehemence?

History catalogues the machinations of liars, thieves, bullies and narcissists and their devastating effects. In modern times too, evidence of corruption and extraordinary deceptions abound.

We know, without question, that politicians lie and hide their connections and that corporations routinely display utter contempt for moral norms - that corruption surrounds us.

We know that revolving doors between the corporate and political spheres, the lobbying system, corrupt regulators, the media and judiciary mean that wrongdoing is practically never brought to any semblance of genuine justice.

We know that the press makes noise about these matters occasionally but never pursues them with true vigour.

Millions of people are administered general anesthesia each year in the United States alone, but it's not always easy to tell whether they are actually unconscious.

A small proportion of those patients regain some awareness during medical procedures, but a new study of the brain activity that represents consciousness could prevent that potential trauma. It may also help both people in comas and scientists struggling to define which parts of the brain can claim to be key to the conscious mind.

"What has been shown for 100 years in an unconscious state like sleep are these slow waves of electrical activity in the brain," says Yuri Saalmann, a University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology and neuroscience professor. "But those may not be the right signals to tap into. Under a number of conditions — with different anesthetic drugs, in people that are suffering from a coma or with brain damage or other clinical situations — there can be high-frequency activity as well."

UW-Madison researchers recorded electrical activity in about 1,000 neurons surrounding each of 100 sites throughout the brains of a pair of monkeys at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center during several states of consciousness: under drug-induced anesthesia, light sleep, resting wakefulness, and roused from anesthesia into a waking state through electrical stimulation of a spot deep in the brain (a procedure the researchers described in 2020).

"With data across multiple brain regions and different states of consciousness, we could put together all these signs traditionally associated with consciousness — including how fast or slow the rhythms of the brain are in different brain areas — with more computational metrics that describe how complex the signals are and how the signals in different areas interact," says Michelle Redinbaugh, a graduate student in Saalman's lab and co-lead author of the study, published today in the journal Cell Systems.

People who frequently try to impress or persuade others with misleading exaggerations and distortions are themselves more likely to be fooled by impressive-sounding misinformation, new research from the University of Waterloo shows.

The researchers found that people who frequently engage in "persuasive bullshitting" were actually quite poor at identifying it. Specifically, they had trouble distinguishing intentionally profound or scientifically accurate fact from impressive but meaningless fiction. Importantly, these frequent BSers are also much more likely to fall for fake news headlines.

Shane Littrell, lead author of the paper and cognitive psychology Ph.D. candidate at Waterloo, stated:

"It probably seems intuitive to believe that you can't bullshit a bullshitter, but our research suggests that this isn't actually the case. In fact, it appears that the biggest purveyors of persuasive bullshit are ironically some of the ones most likely to fall for it."

The researchers define "bullshit" as information designed to impress, persuade, or otherwise mislead people that is often constructed without concern for the truth. They also identify two types of bullshitting — persuasive and evasive. "Persuasive" uses misleading exaggerations and embellishments to impress, persuade, or fit in with others, while 'evasive' involves giving irrelevant, evasive responses in situations where frankness might result in hurt feelings or reputational harm.

As we rapidly approach the one year anniversary of Covid madness I'll freely admit I've been shocked by the millions upon millions of American's who appear so traumatized they are unable to think clearly. They clamor for an unproven, untested, hastily cobbled together DNA altering gene therapy mislabeled as a "vaccine".

They stand in long lines for hours to have this experimental cocktail injected into their bodies with the very real possibility of death as has already happened to hundreds of Covid Vaccine victims. At least 271 deaths, 9,845 adverse events after COVID vaccination so far: CDC data | News | LifeSite (lifesitenews.com) Who in their right mind would agree to risk their life by taking this concoction to hopefully protect themselves from a virus that according to the CDC is survivable by 99.74% of those exposed?

It doesn't make any sense does it?

For decades, a conflict has been simmering in the elementary school classrooms of the English-speaking world. On one side are those who place mathematics understanding above all else and whose teaching methods involve asking students to figure out ways to solve authentic mathematics problems, focusing on the process while de-emphasizing the importance of obtaining correct answers. On the other side, often painted as stuffy traditionalists, are those who assert the importance of explicit teaching, practice, and memorization. Welcome to the math wars.

The origins of the math wars stretch back to the educational progressivists of the 19th century. Drawing on the writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, while reviling the strict discipline and recitation of the school house of the 1800s, they demanded a new, reformed mode of education. Learning should proceed through experience. After all, kids can learn lots of things through pure immersion, from recognizing individual faces, to speaking their mother tongue, navigating their local area or sharing resources with friends. Why should they not learn math the same way? Why can't learning be more natural and joyful? The traditionalists, for their part, insisted that young children need to have math fully explained to them and that attention must be devoted to the task of memorizing "math facts" such as that 7 × 8 = 56.

Joshua Slocum hosts Disaffected - the best new podcast on the market. Our society isn't just getting crazier - it's getting Cluster B crazy: borderline, narcissistic, histrionic, and antisocial personality disorders and their traits are off the charts. In the universities, media, social media, and the Democratic establishment - something is happening, but few can put their finger on it. Josh can and does, and he's not afraid to tell it like it is. He can see it because he has lived through it, and we can all learn from his hard-won experience and painful disillusionment at what his political party has become.

Disaffected liberals, horrified observers of the state of North American social trends and ideology, and those just wondering what is going on should tune in, and check out Josh's podcast and videos. Check him out on Twitter and subscribe to his show. You won't regret it.

Disaffected Podcast:

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Running Time: 01:54:34

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My dear, sweet, son,I've got to break it to you: you're not trans, you're just weird.

This seems like a cruel thing to point out right now. Clearly, you are struggling and feeling pretty awful about things. I can see that you are in a rough patch, and one of the first rules of parenting is to not pile on. The world is pretty heavy on your shoulders. You're fifteen. There's a pandemic going on. But here I come anyway. I'm about to throw more on you.

When you were two ­- a happy, chubby, little tyke in pull-ups, you watched the world with wary eyes behind the thumb in your mouth. You leapt with joy in the rhythm of the toddle music classes. You chattered and shared stories about your stuffed animals. You loved your little sister. Enjoyed cookies and finger painting. That was all pretty normal.

But you also started to count to one thousand on our walks. And you started to call out the store names as we drove around. And you preferred reading books rather than playing with the other two-year-olds at preschool. And you hated sitting in the circle when instructed. And you hated the feel of blue jeans. And you threw big tantrums when you lost any kind of game. In other words, you started to show signs that you were... weird.

Seika, Japan — If modern science conceived of a way to "pluck" unwanted fears, thoughts, and preferences from your mind, is that that something you would be interested in? It sounds impossible, but a new study on non-conscious brain stimulation may just make it a reality. Via a combination of artificial intelligence and brain scanning technology, scientists in Japan say they've discovered avenues to remove specific fears, boost confidence, and even alter individual preferences.

They believe that in the future these techniques may lead to new treatments for patients dealing with issues like PTSD or generalized anxiety disorder.

All of this is incredibly promising, but researchers admit they haven't perfected their approach just yet. While the treatment they developed has proven effective with many, some individuals haven't seen the same benefits.

A new meta-analysis gives the most detailed look yet at the neuroscience of placebo effects.
Much of the benefit that a person gets from taking a real drug or receiving a treatment to alleviate pain is due to an individual's mindset, not to the drug itself, according to previous research. Understanding the neural mechanisms driving this placebo effect has long been a challenge. A meta-analysis published in Nature Communications finds that placebo treatments meant to reduce pain, known as placebo analgesia, reduce pain-related activity in multiple areas of the brain.

Previous research of this kind has relied on small-scale studies, so until now, researchers did not know whether the neural mechanisms underlying placebo effects observed to date would hold up across larger samples. This study represents the first large-scale mega-analysis, which looks at individual participants' whole brain images. It enabled researchers to look at parts of the brain they did not have sufficient resolution to see in the past. The analysis comprised 20 neuroimaging studies with 600 healthy participants. The results provide new insight on the size, localization, significance and heterogeneity of placebo effects on pain-related brain activity.

The research reflects the work of an international collaborative effort by the Placebo Neuroimaging Consortium, led by Tor Wager, the Diana L. Taylor Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience and Ulrike Bingel, a professor at the Center for Translational Neuro- and Behavioral Sciences in the Department of Neurology at University Hospital Essen, for which Matthias Zunhammer and Tamás Spisák at the University Hospital Essen served as co-authors. The meta-analysis is the second with this sample and builds on the team's earlier research using an established pain marker developed earlier by Wager's lab.

Researchers have mapped an underlying "psychological signature" for people who are predisposed to holding extreme social, political or religious attitudes, and support violence in the name of ideology.

A new study suggests that a particular mix of personality traits and unconscious cognition - the ways our brains take in basic information - is a strong predictor for extremist views across a range of beliefs, including nationalism and religious fervour.

These mental characteristics include poorer working memory and slower "perceptual strategies" - the unconscious processing of changing stimuli, such as shape and colour - as well as tendencies towards impulsivity and sensation seeking.

This combination of cognitive and emotional attributes predicts the endorsement of violence in support of a person's ideological "group", according to findings published today in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

The study also maps the psychological signatures that underpin fierce political conservatism, as well as "dogmatism": people who have a fixed worldview and are resistant to evidence.

Psychologists found that conservatism is linked to cognitive "caution": slow-and-accurate unconscious decision-making, compared to the fast-and-imprecise "perceptual strategies" found in more liberal minds.

Brains of more dogmatic people are slower to process perceptual evidence, but they are more impulsive personality-wise. The mental signature for extremism across the board is a blend of conservative and dogmatic psychologies.