Science of the SpiritS


Einstein

The Most Successful Way to Brainstorm

Art Markman
The Huffington Post
Sat, 22 Oct 2011 10:31 UTC
Image
© 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.
Read More...
Magnify

How Music Changes Our Brains

Thomas Rogers
Salon
Sun, 23 Oct 2011 15:00 UTC
Science is becoming increasingly interested in the relationship between sound and the brain, an expert explains

Image
© 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.
Read More...
MIB

How to Spot Psychopaths: Speech Patterns Give Them Away

Wynne Parry
LiveScience
Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:54 UTC
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.
Read More...
Eye 1

Best of the Web: Beware the Sociopaths

Lawrence Diggs, Roslyn
Aberdeen News
Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:00 UTC
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.
Read More...
Heart

Couple married 72 years dies holding hands


TheOmahaChannel.com
Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:12 UTC
'Neither one of them would've wanted to be without each other'

Des Moines, Iowa - An Iowa couple who was married for 72 years died one hour apart last week in the hospital as they held hands.
Image
© Yeager FamilyGordon and Norma Yeager

Family said the story of is a real-life love story.

On the day she graduated from high school, Norma Stock said yes to Gordon Yeager's marriage proposal. The couple got married on May 26, 1939 in State Center.

"They're very old-fashioned. They believed in marriage til death do you part," said son Dennis Yeager.

Dennis Yeager was the youngest of four children born to the couple. His sister Donna was first born.

"Staying together for 72 years is good, I'd say that's exceptional," said Donna Sheets.

The way the kids tell it, dad was the life of the party while mom kept everything together.

"Anybody come over - she was the hostess with the mostess. She just seriously - the more she did - the more she smiled," said Dennis Yeager. "Dad would be the center of attention, like, 'Weee look at me,' and mom was like 'get him away from me!' You know we even got a picture like that."

Norma didn't really want the distance, and family said she hardly left Gordon's side for 72 years.
Read More...
Bulb

Forgetting Is Part Of Remembering


Association for Psychological Science
Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:07 UTC
Image
© Unknown
It's time for forgetting to get some respect, says Ben Storm, author of a new article on memory in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "We need to rethink how we're talking about forgetting and realize that under some conditions it actually does play an important role in the function of memory," says Storm, who is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"Memory is difficult. Thinking is difficult," Storm says. Memories and associations accumulate rapidly. "These things could completely overrun our life and make it impossible to learn and retrieve new things if they were left alone, and could just overpower the rest of memory," he says.

But, fortunately, that isn't what happens. "We're able to get around these strong competing inappropriate memories to remember the ones we want to recall." Storm and other psychological scientists are trying to understand how our minds select the right things to recall - if someone's talking about beaches near Omaha, Nebraska, for example, you will naturally suppress any knowledge you've collected about Omaha Beach in Normandy.
Read More...
Pyramid

Flashback SOTT Focus: The Cult of the Plausible Lie

Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Signs Of The Times
Fri, 09 Jun 2006 12:00 UTC
Image
"Never ascribe to malice those things which may be explained by stupidity." That is an important phrase, and a necessary one; it keeps people from being paranoid. However, it has a corollary most people don't know: "One MAY ascribe to malice those things which stupidity cannot explain." Robert Canup
As the mail continues to come in on the COINTELPRO issue, a number of questions have been raised - mainly about how to tell the difference between Truth and Lies - and I thought I would take some time this morning to try to cover a few aspects of this issue.

I've covered many aspects of this issue here and there on our websites, but since google manages to ensure that we are suppressed on search results, many people have not yet discovered these collections of observation, evidence, and supporting material. (Regarding google, we have been collecting data and making experiments for over a year now and will soon publish some of the results, but don't expect to them to be trumpeted by google!)
Read More...
Heart - Black

From Childhood Trauma, Adult Tumors

Francie Latour
Bu.edu
Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:18 UTC
Groundbreaking MED study links child abuse and fibroid tumors

Image
© Unknown
Among children who have known the trauma of child abuse, the list of potential side effects is long: bad dreams and bed-wetting. Stuttering and substance abuse. Anxiety, aggression, withdrawal, and chronic difficulties in school.

But a new study by the Boston University School of Medicine suggests that child physical and sexual abuse can also have implications for the health and biological function of abuse victims far into adulthood. The groundbreaking study, which followed more than 60,000 women over 16 years, found that those who were abused as girls were more likely to develop uterine fibroids decades later as adults.
Read More...
Roses

What happened to downtime? The extinction of deep thinking and sacred space

Scott Belsky
99%
Sun, 16 Oct 2011 23:58 UTC
meditation sacred space
© Unknown
Interruption-free space is sacred. Yet, in the digital era we live in, we are losing hold of the few sacred spaces that remain untouched by email, the internet, people, and other forms of distraction. Our cars now have mobile phone integration and a thousand satellite radio stations. When walking from one place to another, we have our devices streaming data from dozens of sources. Even at our bedside, we now have our iPads with heaps of digital apps and the world's information at our fingertips.

There has been much discussion about the value of the "creative pause" - a state described as "the shift from being fully engaged in a creative activity to being passively engaged, or the shift to being disengaged altogether." This phenomenon is the seed of the break-through "a-ha!" moments that people so frequently report having in the shower. In these moments, you are completely isolated, and your mind is able to wander and churn big questions without interruption.



However, despite the incredible power and potential of sacred spaces, they are quickly becoming extinct. We are depriving ourselves of every opportunity for disconnection. And our imaginations suffer the consequences.


Read More...
Bad Guys

Psychopathic killers: Computerized text analysis uncovers the word patterns of a predator


Cornell University
Fri, 14 Oct 2011 08:35 UTC
Image
© Unknown
As words can be the soul's window, scientists are learning to peer through it: Computerized text analysis shows that psychopathic killers make identifiable word choices - beyond conscious control - when talking about their crimes.

This research could lead to new tools for diagnosis and treatment, and have implications law enforcement and social media.

The words of psychopathic murderers match their personalities, which reflect selfishness, detachment from their crimes and emotional flatness, says Jeff Hancock, Cornell professor of computing and information science, and colleagues at the University of British Columbia in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology.

Hancock and his colleagues analyzed stories told by 14 psychopathic male murderers held in Canadian prisons and compared them with 38 convicted murderers who were not diagnosed as psychopathic. Each subject was asked to describe his crime in detail. Their stories were taped, transcribed and subjected to computer analysis.
Read More...