Science of the SpiritS


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When Our Neurones Remain Silent So That Our Performances May Improve

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© Unknown
To be able to focus on the world, we need to turn a part of ourselves off for a short while, and this is precisely what our brain does.

They demonstrate more specifically that when we need to concentrate, this network disrupts the activation of other specialized neurones when it is not deactivated enough. The results have just been published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

When we focus on the things around us, certain parts of the brain are activated: this network, well known to neurobiologists, is called the attention network. Other parts of the brain, however, cease their activity at the same time, as if they generally prevented our attention from being focused on the outside world. These parts of the brain form a network that is extensively studied in neurobiology, and commonly known as the "default-mode network", because, for a long time, it was believed that it activated itself when the brain had nothing in particular to do. This interpretation was refined through ten years of neuroimaging research that concluded by associating this mysterious network ("the brain's dark energy" as it was called by one of its discoverers, Marcus Raichle) with a host of intimate and private phenomena of our mental life: self-perception, recollections, imagination, thoughts...

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Natural Born Musical Prodigy? Maybe

Prodigy
© nayukim/Flickr.com

The adage "Practice makes perfect," might inspire people to focus on getting better at a given sport or task, but some research suggests there's more to the equation.

A recent paper, along with other experiments, shows that a person's innate abilities may matter just as much. In other words, some people have qualities that, when combined with practice, make them "naturals."

The paper's authors suggest the idea contrasts with some popular writers' tendencies to de-emphasize individual qualities in determining success.

Also called "working memory capacity," the ability to use knowledge and adapt to new or distracting situations may separate the really good from the best. Another study suggests that people with higher working memory capacity could process information more quickly.

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Flashback Army's New PTSD Treatments: Yoga, Reiki, 'Bioenergy'

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© Associated Press
The military is scrambling for new ways to treat the brain injuries and post-traumatic stress of troops returning home from war. And every kind of therapy - no matter how far outside the accepted medical form - is being considered. The Army just unveiled a $4 million program to investigate everything from "spiritual ministry, transcendental meditation,[and] yoga" to "bioenergies such as Qi gong, Reiki, [and] distant healing" to mend the psyches of wounded troops.

As many as 17 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, one congressional study estimates. Nearly 3,300 troops have suffered traumatic brain injury, or TBI, according to statistics assembled last summer. And the lifetime costs of treating these ailments could pile up to as much as $35 billion, a Columbia University report guesses.

Small wonder, then, that the government is looking for alternate means to treat these injuries. The Defense Department "is dedicated to supporting evidence-based approaches to medical treatment and wants to support the use of alternative therapies if they are proven efficacious," notes a recently-issued request for proposals.

Comment: Read the following articles for more information about alternative therapies that are being used to help treat PTSD symptoms in veterans:


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Thoughts of God Make Us Slackers, Study Suggests

Praying
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No matter if you're a believer, thinking about God and religion may turn you into a slacker, according to a new study.

"More than 90 percent of people in the world agree that God or a similar spiritual power exists or may exist,"study researcher Kristin Laurin of the University of Waterloo in Canada, said in a statement. "This is the first empirical evidence that simple reminders of God can diminish some types of self-regulation, such as pursuing one's goals, yet can improve others, such as resisting temptation."

Even for those without a personal belief in God, U.S. culture is saturated with religious references and imagery that could impact them, Laurin said. The study's results were independent of the participants' religious beliefs. Even without knowing it, these signs and signals can have a psychological effect.

A Gallup poll in May found that more than nine out of 10 Americans believe in God. These numbers drop for groups of younger Americans, liberals, those living in the Eastern United States, those with postgraduate educations and political independents. However, belief in God is nearly universal among Republicans and conservatives and, to a slightly lesser degree, in the South.

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Curiosity Doesn't Kill The Student

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© iStockphoto
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it's good for the student. That's the conclusion of a new study published in Perspectives in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors show that curiosity is a big part of academic performance. In fact, personality traits like curiosity seem to be as important as intelligence in determining how well students do in school.

Intelligence is important to academic performance, but it's not the whole story. Everyone knows a brilliant kid who failed school, or someone with mediocre smarts who made up for it with hard work. So psychological scientists have started looking at factors other than intelligence that make some students do better than others.

One of those is conscientiousness - basically, the inclination to go to class and do your homework. People who score high on this personality trait tend to do well in school. "It's not a huge surprise if you think of it, that hard work would be a predictor of academic performance," says Sophie von Stumm of the University of Edinburgh in the UK. She co-wrote the new paper with Benedikt Hell of the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic of Goldsmiths University of London.

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Brain Scans Offer Peek Into People's Dreams

Dreams
© Goodluz, ShutterstockCould scientists one day be able to reconstruct dreams?
It's not quite Inception, but new research has allowed scientists to "read" some people as they dream.

Using brain imaging, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Germany said they were able to compare the brain activity of "lucid dreamers" as they entertained the same thoughts awake and asleep. The brain activity was similar, if weaker during sleep, the researchers said.

Lucid dreamers are sleepers who are aware that they are dreaming and can deliberately control their dream actions. According to the researchers, lucid dreaming is a learned skill, one very useful to scientists trying to understand the secrets of dreams.

"The main obstacle in studying specific dream content is that spontaneous dream activity cannot be experimentally controlled, as subjects typically cannot perform pre-decided mental actions during sleep," study researcher Michael Czisch said in a statement. "Employing the skill of lucid dreaming can help to overcome these obstacles."

Einstein

The Most Successful Way to Brainstorm

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© beidaenglish.com
There are many situations where we get together in groups to generate ideas. We usually call these events "brainstorming sessions." The term brainstorming actually comes from a technique developed by Alex Osborn in the 1950s following some basic intuitively reasonable rules like listing every idea that comes to mind and withholding criticism of ideas at first.

The problem with group brainstorming sessions is that the technique is often ineffective. That is, groups that get together to generate ideas often generate fewer ideas than the individual group members would generate if they worked alone. A number of scientific studies have backed up this productivity loss from brainstorming.

Because of the observation that brainstorming often backfires, researchers have explored ways to improve brainstorming techniques. For example, research that I did with my colleagues Julie Linsey and Kris Wood explored methods that involve having people generate ideas individually before getting together as a group. That helps to increase the number and quality of ideas people generate.

An interesting study by Jonali Baruah and Paul Paulus published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2011 examined the influence of the aspect of the problem people think about on the performance of the group.

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How Music Changes Our Brains

Science is becoming increasingly interested in the relationship between sound and the brain, an expert explains

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© Distrikt 3 Fotografie/Shutterstock/iStockphoto/pavlen
Music has never been more accessible. Just a decade ago, we were lugging around clunky portable CD players that weighed as much as a hardcover book and would skip whenever we made any sudden movement. Now our entire record collection (and thanks to new companies like Spotify, almost any other song on the planet) can fit into our phones. We can listen to music nonstop - on our commute, at work, at the gym and everywhere else we might want to. But what is this explosion of sound doing to our brains?

In their new book, Healing at the Speed of Sound, Don Campbell, an author who has written extensively about music and health, and Alex Doman, a specialist in technology in brain function, take an extensive survey about what the latest neuroscientific findings tell us about music and the brain. Although excessive noise has be harmful in a number of ways, music has been shown to improve children with learning disabilities, help elders feel more connected to the world, and even get people into better shape. It provides children with a "hook" for the brain's memory centers, allowing them to retain more information, and it can play huge roles in modifying our moods.

Salon spoke to Campbell over the phone about the dangers of excessive noise, the importance of exercise music and why more children should learn how to play instruments.

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How to Spot Psychopaths: Speech Patterns Give Them Away

crime scene tape
© Flynt | Dreamstime.comPsycopaths are estimated to make up 1 percent of the population and up to 25 percent of male offenders in correctional settings.

Psychopaths are known to be wily and manipulative, but even so, they unconsciously betray themselves, according to scientists who have looked for patterns in convicted murderers' speech as they described their crimes.

The researchers interviewed 52 convicted murderers, 14 of them ranked as psychopaths according to the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, a 20-item assessment, and asked them to describe their crimes in detail. Using computer programs to analyze what the men said, the researchers found that those with psychopathic scores showed a lack of emotion, spoke in terms of cause-and-effect when describing their crimes, and focused their attention on basic needs, such as food, drink and money. [10 Contested Death Penalty Cases]

While we all have conscious control over some words we use, particularly nouns and verbs, this is not the case for the majority of the words we use, including little, functional words like "to" and "the" or the tense we use for our verbs, according to Jeffrey Hancock, the lead researcher and an associate professor in communications at Cornell University, who discussed the work on Monday (Oct. 17) in Midtown Manhattan at Cornell's ILR Conference Center.

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Best of the Web: Beware the Sociopaths

Psychopaths Rule our World
© SOTT
For most of my adult life, I have wrestled with ideas and people I felt were insensitive to the basic needs of others.

I have been frustrated with people who seem to believe that human suffering is something to be increased rather than alleviated or eliminated. I have searched in vain for ways to resolve conflicts between people. I have deeply pondered why some people "just don't get it."

It seems that I am the one who "just didn't get it." Many of these people are sociopaths. They can't experience some basic human feelings that I assumed everyone felt.

That discovery came from reading Martha Stout's book, The Sociopath Next Door.

Forget ghosts, goblins, vampires, witches and zombies. They are, as far as I can tell, just imaginary. They are extremely dependent on our gullibility and ability to suspend disbelief in the absurd.

Sociopaths, on the other hand, are very real.