"Scientists studying brain process involved in sight have found the visual cortex also uses information gleaned from the ears as well as the eyes when viewing the world.

They suggest this auditory input enables the visual system to predict incoming information and could confer a survival advantage.

Professor Lars Muckli, of the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow, who led the research, said: "Sounds create visual imagery, mental images, and automatic projections.

So, for example, if you are in a street and you hear the sound of an approaching motorbike, you expect to see a motorbike coming around the corner. If it turned out to be a horse, you'd be very surprised."

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, involved conducting five different experiments using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to examine the activity in the early visual cortex in 10 volunteer subjects.

In one experiment they asked the blindfolded volunteers to listen to three different natural sounds -- birdsong, traffic noise and a talking crowd.

Using a special algorithm that can identify unique patterns in brain activity, the researchers were able to discriminate between the different sounds being processed in early visual cortex activity.

Bessel van der Kolk sat cross-legged on an oversize pillow in the center of a smallish room overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Big Sur. He wore khaki pants, a blue fleece zip-up and square wire-rimmed glasses. His feet were bare. It was the third day of his workshop, "Trauma Memory and Recovery of the Self," and 30 or so workshop participants - all of them trauma victims or trauma therapists - lined the room's perimeter. They, too, sat barefoot on cushy pillows, eyeing van der Kolk, notebooks in hand. For two days, they had listened to his lectures on the social history, neurobiology and clinical realities of post-traumatic stress disorder and its lesser-known sibling, complex trauma. Now, finally, he was about to demonstrate an actual therapeutic technique, and his gaze was fixed on the subject of his experiment: a 36-year-old Iraq war veteran named Eugene, who sat directly across from van der Kolk, looking mournful and expectant.

Van der Kolk began as he often does, with a personal anecdote. "My mother was very unnurturing and unloving," he said. "But I have a full memory and a complete sense of what it is like to be loved and nurtured by her." That's because, he explained, he had done the very exercise that we were about to try on Eugene. Here's how it would work: Eugene would recreate the trauma that haunted him most by calling on people in the room to play certain roles. He would confront those people - with his anger, sorrow, remorse and confusion - and they would respond in character, apologizing, forgiving or validating his feelings as needed. By projecting his "inner world" into three-dimensional space, Eugene would be able to rewrite his troubled history more thoroughly than other forms of role-play therapy might allow. If the experiment succeeded, the bad memories would be supplemented with an alternative narrative - one that provided feelings of acceptance or forgiveness or love.

The exercise, which van der Kolk calls a "structure" but which is also known as psychomotor therapy, was developed by Albert Pesso, a dancer who studied with Martha Graham. He taught it to van der Kolk about two decades ago. Though it has never been tested in a controlled study, van der Kolk says he has had some success with it in workshops like this one. He likes to try it whenever he has a small group and a willing volunteer.

For the first decade that I suffered from severe and almost daily migraines, I didn't consider them a gift. Yet, in a way - a very painful one - they are.

My headaches began setting me apart from the rest of society at the age of 15. Back in 1996, my brother got a Nintendo 64. Eager to try it out, I begged him to give me a turn. But it was unmistakable - watching the screen gave me headaches.

Everyone who gets migraines has a different "trigger" - a food, a smell, lack of sleep. My triggers are all visual and luminescent: looking at fluorescent lights, TV, and movies. That keeps me out of gyms, some stores and restaurants, and even some jobs.

In 2006, after trying 20 medications with limited success, my doctor gave me the prescription I'd needed all along. "Unless you exercise outdoors for 30 minutes a day, there is no pill I can give you that will help."

Introduction

In recent years, there has been an effort, particularly by American folkloric scholars (e.g., Hufford 1982; Rojcewicz 1986), to bring some conceptual order to a disparate array of paranormal and transcendental experiences whose academic study has heretofore tended to be associated with distinct and somewhat insular disciplines.

Included in this set of non-ordinary occurrences are such phenomena as out-of-body experiences (traditionally the province of parapsychology), near-death experiences (near-death studies, medicine), shamanic experiences (anthropology), psychedelic experiences(transpersonal psychology), night terrors (folklore), and UFO encounters (ufology). That there are significant similarities among subsets of these experiences, both in terms of phenomenology and aftereffects, has long been recognized, but so far there has been no sustained scholarly effort to build conceptual bridges between these experiential domains or to foster their comparative study, despite some expressions of interest in such undertakings (e.g., Ring and Agar 1986). In the spirit of this kind of endeavor, the need for which has been persuasively set forth by Rojcewicz (1986), I would like to present here a framework for a partial conceptual integration of two non-ordinary experiences previously held to be quite separate and unrelated. I am referring to near-death experiences (NDEs) and alleged UFO encounters (UFOEs),[1] between which I believe there are some hitherto unsuspected links.

This paper has second purpose as well. After delineating certain commonalities between these types of experiences, I intend to explore their possible joint significance for the evolution of human consciousness. This will involve an attempt to embed these and other types of non-ordinary experiences in a second kind of conceptual matrix that will provide a still more encompassing perspective in terms of which to view the implicit connections among the variety of experiences we will be concerned with.

Thought death was clear but? A new book, Opening Heaven's Door, will challenge your views. In the second part of our serialisation, bereaved people recall visits by dead loved ones

A humid night in summer. Ellie Black wakes at around 3am and her eyes focus on a figure at the end of her bed. It's her father, from whom she's long been estranged. Now fully alert, she watches him as he tips his hat and bows with a flourish. Then he's gone.

The following morning she relates the experience to her daughter at the breakfast table. Later that day the phone rings - with news that her father died in the early hours. A tall story? Not at all.

The brain circuits that respond to faces and sex appear to activate abnormally in pedophiles when they look at children's faces, scientists say.

These new findings could lead to novel ways to diagnose pedophiles, and could shed light on the evolutionary roots of sex, the researchers added.

In the animal kingdom, there may be a number of mechanisms preventing adults from attempting sex with children. For example, "pheromones emitted by child mice inhibit sexual behavior of adult male mice," said lead study author Jorge Ponseti, a sex researcher at Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel in Germany. "If scientists inhibited these pheromones in the child mice, adult male mice started to mate with these babies."

The universe is full of mysteries that challenge our current knowledge. In "Beyond Science" Epoch Times collects stories about these strange phenomena to stimulate the imagination and open up previously undreamed of possibilities. Are they true? You decide.

A 3-year-old boy in the Golan Heights region near the border of Syria and Israel said he was murdered with an axe in his previous life. He showed village elders where the murderer buried his body, and sure enough they found a man's skeleton there. He also showed the elders where the murder weapon was found, and upon digging, they did indeed found an axe there.

In his book, "Children Who Have Lived Before: Reincarnation Today," German therapist Trutz Hardo tells this boy's story, along with other stories of children who seem to remember their past lives with verified accuracy. The boy's story was witnessed by Dr. Eli Lasch, who is best known for developing the medical system in Gaza as part of an Israeli government operation in the 1960s. Dr. Lasch, who died in 2009, had recounted these astounding events to Hardo.

Are you irate, irritable and irrational when presented with evidence that goes against your preconceived notions of how the world operates? Looking for a solution to your stress? Join us this week on The Eyeopener as we examine the theory of cognitive dissonance and how it stops people from confronting the uncomfortable truths about the way the world really works.

Much like key players in social networks, University of Kansas scientists have found evidence that there are keywords in word networks that hold together groups of words in our memory.

In a study published in the Journal of Memory and Language, Michael Vitevitch, KU professor of psychology, showed that research participants recognized these keywords more quickly and accurately than other words that were like the keywords in many respects except for their position in a network of 20,000 similar-sounding English words that he and colleagues created in 2008.

"If words are indeed stored like a network in memory, said Vitevitch, "we should be able to see how characteristics of the network affect language-related processes. Our findings clearly show that there are words that hold key positions on the word network and that we process them more quickly and accurately than similar words that they hold together in our memory."

Have you wondered how caught up we get in our daily lives that we hardly make the time to bond with nature. In our spare time, we either watch TV, play games, sit on the computer or meet friends. That has a negative impact on our health.

There is a term called 'Ecopsychology' which shows the connection between ecology and human psychology. Well, hope this doesn't sound too boring, but its a simple theory which we just forget.

Distancing yourself from nature and finding comfort in this concrete jungle has negative effect on humans, mentally and physically, and even nature.

We develop less empathy towards nature, so end up destroying what we never created, but the fact remains that humans have an emotional bond with Mother Nature, which we remain oblivious to.