Science of the SpiritS


Hearts

The Neurobiology of Grace Under Pressure: 7 habits that stimulate your vagus nerve and keep you calm, cool, and collected

vagus nerve drawing
Early anatomical drawing of the vagus nerve.
When was the last time that you had to perform gracefully in a high-pressure situation? How did you handle it? Did you choke or did you have grace under pressure? Researchers continue to confirm that daily habits of mindset and behavior can create a positive snowball effect through a feedback loop linked to stimulating your vagus nerve. In this entry I will show you 7 habits that will stimulate healthy 'vagal tone' and allow you to harness the power of your vagus nerve to help you stay calm, cool, and collected in any storm.

Healthy vagal tone is indicated by a slight increase of heart rate when you inhale, and a decrease of heart rate when you exhale. Deep diaphragmatic breathing - with a long, slow exhale - is key to stimulating the vagus nerve and slowing heart rate and blood pressure, especially in times of performance anxiety. A higher vagal tone index is linked to physical and psychological well-being. A low vagal tone index is linked to inflammation, negative moods, loneliness, and heart attacks.

Comment: The breathing and meditation techniques of the Éiriú Eolas program are geared towards stimulating the vagus nerve so that you, the practitioner, can enjoy the healing and life affirming results of the Vagusstuff.


People

Working alone won't get you good grades

Students who work together and interact online are more likely to be successful in their college classes, according to a study published Jan. 30 in the journal Nature Scientific Reports and co-authored by Manuel Cebrian, a computer scientist at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego.

Image
© UCSD JacobsA graph showing interactions between 82 students during the last week of a course. High performing students are in dark blue and form a core where the highest density of persistent interactions can be observed. Mid-performing students are in red and low-performing student sin green. Persistent interactions are shown in thick blue edges, while dotted thin grey edges indicate transient interactions.
Cebrian and colleagues analyzed 80,000 interactions between 290 students in a collaborative learning environment for college courses. The major finding was that a higher number of online interactions was usually an indicator of a higher score in the class. High achievers also were more likely to form strong connections with other students and to exchange information in more complex ways. High achievers tended to form cliques, shutting out low-performing students from their interactions. Students who found themselves shut out were not only more likely to have lower grades; they were also more likely to drop out of the class entirely.

"Elite groups of highly connected individuals formed in the first days of the course," said Cebrian, who also is a Senior Researcher at National ICT Australia Ltd, Australia's Information and Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence. "For the first time, we showed that there is a very strong correspondence between social interaction and exchange of information - a 72 percent correlation," he said "but almost equally interesting is the fact that these high-performing students form 'rich-clubs', which shield themselves from low-performing students, despite the significant efforts by these lower-ranking students to join them. The weaker students try hard to engage with the elite group intensively, but can't. This ends up having a marked correlation with their dropout rates."

Snakes in Suits

What Is a Psychopath? Definition and basic criteria

Image
First a bit of terminological history, to clear up any confusion about the meanings of "sociopath," "psychopath," and related terms. In the early 1800s, doctors who worked with mental patients began to notice that some of their patients who appeared outwardly normal had what they termed a "moral depravity" or "moral insanity," in that they seemed to possess no sense of ethics or of the rights of other people. The term "psychopath" was first applied to these people around 1900. The term was changed to "sociopath" in the 1930s to emphasize the damage they do to society. Currently researchers have returned to using the term "psychopath." Some of them use that term to refer to a more serious disorder, linked to genetic traits, producing more dangerous individuals, while continuing to use "sociopath" to refer to less dangerous people who are seen more as products of their environment, including their upbringing. Other researchers make a distinction between "primary psychopaths," who are thought to be genetically caused, and "secondary psychopaths," seen as more a product of their environments.

The current approach to defining sociopathy and the related concepts is to use a list of criteria. The first such list was developed by Hervey Cleckley (1941), who is known as the first person to describe the condition in detail. Anyone fitting enough of these criteria counts as a psychopath or sociopath. There are several such lists in use. The most commonly used is called the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R), developed by Robert Hare and his colleagues. An alternative version was developed in 1996 by Lilienfeld and Andrews, called the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI). The book that psychologists and psychiatrists use to categorize and diagnose mental illness, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, (DSM IV) contains a category for something called "antisocial personality disorder" (APD), while the World Health Organization delineates a similar category it calls "dissocial personality disorder." These are much broader categories than that of psychopathy. The category of psychopath is seen as included within this category but considerably smaller so that only roughly 1 in 5 people with APD is a psychopath (Kiehl and Buckholtz, 2010).

Comment: A 'psychopathic trait' not belonging to a psychopath can't really be considered a 'psychopathic trait'. This is not to say that ordinary people do not behave in pathological ways that are, in that moment, outwardly indistinguishable from a psychopath's behaviour. But it's important for people to realise that the inner landscape of a psychopath is so totally different from theirs that it marks them apart as a different species from humans.

So 'ruthlessness', 'cunning', 'charisma', etc. are all traits that in certain situations are extremely beneficial for ordinary people to have. Sometimes it is essential to our survival that we be selfish in looking after our interests, or that we become violent to protect ourselves and our loved ones, or that we project overconfidence as part of playing a role.

While these are not 'psychopathic traits' per se, they may, when taken together with much other data, suggest that someone is in fact a psychopath.

The study of psychopathy is still a new science and much remains to be explored. SOTT Talk Radio will be discussing this issue on Sunday 3rd of February 2013.


Info

The (really scary) invisible gorilla

The Invisible Gorilla
© Psychological Science Org
The Invisible Gorilla is part of the popular culture nowadays, thanks largely to a widely-read 2010 book of that title. In that book, cognitive psychologists Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris popularized a phenomenon of human perception -- known in the jargon as "inattentional blindness" -- which they had demonstrated in a study some years before. In the best known version of the experiment, volunteers were told to keep track of how many times some basketball players tossed a basketball. While they did this, someone in a gorilla suit walked across the basketball court, in plain view, yet many of the volunteers failed even to notice the beast.

What the invisible gorilla study shows is that, if we are paying very close attention to one thing, we often fail to notice other things in our field of vision -- even very obvious things. We all love these quirks of human perception. It's entertaining to know that our senses can play tricks on us. And that's no doubt the extent of most people's familiarity with this psychological phenomenon. But what if this perceptual quirk has serious implications -- even life-threatening implications?

A new study raises that disturbing possibility. Three psychological scientists at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston --Trafton Drew, Melissa Vo and Jeremy Wolfe -- wondered if expert observers are also subject to this perceptual blindness. The subjects in the classic study were "naïve" -- untrained in any particular domain of expertise and performing a task nobody does in real life. But what about highly trained professionals who make their living doing specialized kinds of observations? The scientists set out to explore this, and in an area of great importance to many people -- cancer diagnosis.

People

Empathy and age: Middle-aged most likely to feel your pain

Image
© Unknown
According to a new study of more than 75,000 adults, women in that age group are more empathic than men of the same age and than younger or older people.

"Overall, late middle-aged adults were higher in both of the aspects of empathy that we measured," says Sara Konrath, co-author of an article on age and empathy forthcoming in the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological and Social Sciences.

"They reported that they were more likely to react emotionally to the experiences of others, and they were also more likely to try to understand how things looked from the perspective of others."

For the study, researchers Ed O'Brien, Konrath and Linda Hagen at the University of Michigan and Daniel Grühn at North Carolina State University analyzed data on empathy from three separate large samples of American adults, two of which were taken from the nationally representative General Social Survey.

They found consistent evidence of an inverted U-shaped pattern of empathy across the adult life span, with younger and older adults reporting less empathy and middle-aged adults reporting more.

According to O'Brien, this pattern may result because increasing levels of cognitive abilities and experience improve emotional functioning during the first part of the adult life span, while cognitive declines diminish emotional functioning in the second half.

Black Magic

Faux psychology damage control: Is suicide contagious?

Image
© Corbis Rows of military graves at the National Cemetery. Rates of suicide have gone up in the military.
Suicide is not a contagion, but it can sometimes spread like one, particularly with the help of the media, relationships and genes.

On Jan. 14, Department of Defense officials acknowledged that during 2012, service members committed suicide at a record pace as more than 349 people took their own lives across all of the military's four branches.

News of suicides, like these reports of suicides in the armed forces, can actually prompt people who are already emotionally vulnerable and mentally ill, to consider suicide themselves, say psychologists.

"It tends to facilitate feelings of helplessness and hopelessness," said David Rudd, Dean and professor of psychology at the University of Utah's College of Social and Behavioral Science. "It also facilitates the false idea that suicide is a solution to life's problems."

Media coverage of prominent suicides, in particular, can spark additional suicides because of all the praise that generally is heaped on the deceased, along with highlights of all their life achievements.

That, said Rudd, suggests to vulnerable people that if such an admirable person saw suicide as a good choice, perhaps it really is a good idea and could even enhance a person's significance. It becomes a distorted kind of celebrity endorsement, if you will.

Comment: The author appears to be attempting to divert our attention from the real cause of the increasing military suicides, sexual assaults, alcohol abuse and domestic violence. These are actually a result of repeated tours of duty in the wars of terror. What the PTB does not want is for people to question the obvious effects of a decade of war on the psychological health of soldiers and their families.

Military suicides in 2012 hit yet another record high
More U.S. Soldiers Take Their Own Lives than are Killed in Action


Info

The brain retroactively edits conscious experience

Woamn in Mirror
© stock.xchng
The brain apparently edits a person's conscious experience retroactively.

Up to a half-second after an object disappears from view, the brain can "edit" the experience to retain that object, a new study from France shows. The finding may partly explain the weird feeling of being able to recall something you heard even when you don't consciously remember hearing it.

The finding also contradicts the notion that the brain sequentially takes in sensory information, processes it and then consciously experiences it, said Tufts University cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, whose books include Consciousness Explained.

"You have to get away from the idea that consciousness is like a movie that's playing in your head and that once the processing is done happening then you've got this finished movie that you see." Dennett told LiveScience. "The editing can go on and on."

The results were published online Dec. 13 in the journal Current Biology.

Magnify

Scientists zoom in on the exact spots in brain that drive addiction

Image
A smoker's craving to light up can be tamed by carefully targeted magnetic fields applied to the brain, a senior researcher from a Japanese-Canadian team said Wednesday.

Scientists managed to zoom in on the exact spots that drive the need for nicotine, noting that a mental connection made when a smoker is able to have a cigarette markedly increases the desire to spark up.

They found that by interrupting this connection, the addict was better able to control his or her cravings.

"Cabin attendants who smoke say they feel stronger cravings for cigarettes as they approach landing times, no matter whether their flights are long-distance or not," Takuya Hayashi told AFP from Kobe in western Japan.

Info

Babies start 'mind reading' earlier than thought

Mind Reading
© H. Clark BarrettIn a modified version of the false-beliefs test, even toddlers seem to understand what other people know.
Even babies as young as a year-and-a-half can guess what other people are thinking, new research suggests.

The results, published today (Jan. 29) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society: B, come from a study of children spanning the globe, from rural China to the more remote islands of Fiji. Previously, scientists thought this ability to understand other people's perspectives emerged much later in children.

The findings may shed light on the social abilities that differentiate us from our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, said study author H. Clark Barrett, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. The study used a form of the false-belief test, one of the few cognitive tasks that young children, but not primates, can do.

Humans are "very good at inferring other people's mental states: their emotions, their desires and, in this case, their knowledge," Barrett said. "So it could play an important role in cultural transmission and social learning."

Bomb

Scots doctors to help stroke patients 'rewire' their brains by stimulating the vagus nerve

Image
Scots doctors are to embark on a pioneering trial of technology similar to that used to manage depression and epilepsy in an attempt to 'rewire' the brains of stroke victims.

Clinical researchers at Glasgow University are aiming to help patients overcome some of the physical disabilities caused by a stroke.

The team from the university's Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Sciences will undertake the world's first in-human trial of vagus nerve stimulation in stroke patients.

Strokes, which affect 280 per 100,000 people in Scotland annually, can result in the loss of brain tissue and negatively affect various bodily functions from speech to movement, depending on the location of the stroke.

The study, which will be carried out at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow, will recruit 20 patients who suffered a stroke around six months ago and who have been left with poor arm function despite receiving the best available treatment.

Each participant will receive three one-hour sessions of intensive physiotherapy each week for six weeks to help improve their arm function.

Half of the group will also receive an implanted Vivistim device, a vagus nerve stimulator, which connects to the vagus nerve in the neck. When they are receiving physiotherapy to help improve their arm, the device will stimulate the nerve.

Comment: Practitioners of the Éiriú Eolas program have been stimulating the vagus nerve in a natural way and reporting its benefits for years. You can also benefit from it at eebreathe.com