Science of the SpiritS


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People forage for memories in the same way birds forage for berries

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© Henri Bonnel
Humans move between 'patches' in their memory using the same strategy as bees flitting between flowers for pollen or birds searching among bushes for berries.

Researchers at the University of Warwick and Indiana University have identified parallels between animals looking for food in the wild and humans searching for items within their memory - suggesting that people with the best 'memory foraging' strategies are better at recalling items.

Scientists asked people to name as many animals as they could in three minutes and then compared the results with a classic model of optimal foraging in the real world, the marginal value theorem, which predicts how long animals will stay in one patch before jumping to another.

Dr Thomas Hills, associate professor in the psychology department at the University of Warwick, said: "A bird's food tends to be clumped together in a specific patch - for example on a bush laden with berries.

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TEDxRainier - Dimitri Christakis - Media and Children

Dimitri Christakis is a pediatrician, parent, and researcher whose influential findings are helping identify optimal media exposure for children.


Comment: Other articles mentioning the work of Dimitri Christakis:

Too much TV may affect baby's language learning
'SpongeBob' Cartoon Can Cloud Kids' Concentration


2 + 2 = 4

Human Cognitive Performance Suffers Following Natural Disasters

fractured roadway
© n/a
Not surprisingly, victims of a natural disaster can experience stress and anxiety, but a new study indicates that it might also cause them to make more errors -- some serious- in their daily lives. In their upcoming Human Factors article, "Earthquakes on the Mind: Implications of Disasters for Human Performance," researchers William S. Helton and James Head from the University of Canterbury explore how cognitive performance can decline after earthquakes and other natural disasters.

Past research has indicated that more traffic accidents and accident-related fatalities occur following human-made disasters such as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, due to increased cognitive impairment that can lead to higher stress levels and an increase in intrusive thoughts. However, no research has been conducted on the effects of natural disasters on cognitive performance. The authors were unexpectedly presented with a unique opportunity to investigate the impact of the devastating 2010 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, with participants in a study on human performance they were conducting at the time of the quake.

"We were conducting a [different] study on human performance requiring two sessions," said Helton. "In the midst of the study, between the two sessions, we had a substantial local earthquake, which resulted in the rare opportunity to do a before/after study. We were quick to seize the opportunity."

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Is There a Psychopath in Your Inbox?

The internet has become a hunting ground for psychopaths, explains forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes, who has written a book on how to spot them .

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© UnknownBad date? The internet has become a field of opportunity for psychopaths
I'm all for online dating but what if the person you "met" via the internet turns out to be unpleasantly different in real life? More often than not it will simply be that the chemistry between you is wrong, or that you've stumbled across a perfectly harmless odd ball. But as a consultant forensic psychologist, I'm finding that both criminal and non-criminal psychopaths are increasingly turning to the internet as a means of meeting people, just as you would expect as social networking grows in popularity. This means that there's a small chance that the person sitting across the table could be a psycho - and you will need to take steps to protect yourself. Psychopathy can only be diagnosed using strict and detailed criteria but as a lay person there are certain red flags that can alert you to the possibility that there's a psycho in your life.

Most of us have referred to a "psycho ex" or "psycho boss" at one time or another - probably because the former watched too much Top Gear, or the latter made us work late on a Friday night - but few really understand what the term means. Psychopaths don't walk around with a severed head in one hand and a bloody knife in the other. They are much - much - more subtle than that. Psychopathy is a clinical condition and psychopaths appear in all walks of life and in as many different guises; the only thing they have in common is a cluster of emotional abnormalities and anti-social behaviours that can wreak havoc in families, organisations and even entire communities. Between 1 and 3 per cent of the population exhibit psychopathic tendencies - in other words, potentially one in 100 of your Facebook friends - which puts anyone socialising online at risk of encountering a psycho. Their condition is resistant to treatment and they are devoid of empathy, out to get what they want no matter who gets in their way.

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Breaking the Code: Why Yuor Barin Can Raed Tihs

brain graphic
© Control Mind

You might not realize it, but your brain is a code-cracking machine.

For emaxlpe, it deson't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aepapr, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pobelrm.

S1M1L4RLY, Y0UR M1ND 15 R34D1NG 7H15 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17.

Passages like these have been bouncing around the Internet for years. But how do we read them? And what do our incredibly low standards for what's legible say about the way our brains work?

According to Marta Kutas, a cognitive neuroscientist and the director of the Center for Research in Language at the University of California, San Diego, the short answer is that no one knows why we're so good at reading garbled nonsense. But they've got strong suspicions.

"My guess is that context is very, very, very important," Kutas told Life's Little Mysteries.

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Study: Schizophrenia's Hallucinated Voices Drown Out Real Ones

Neurons
© iDesign, ShutterstockNeurons in the brain communicate via electrical impulses and neurotransmitters.

A new finding in brain science reveals that the voices in a schizophrenia patient's head can drown out voices in the real world - and provides hope that people with the disorder can learn to ignore hallucinatory talk.

The new research pulls together two threads in earlier schizophrenia studies. Many scientists have noticed that when patients hallucinate voices, neurons in brain regions associated with processing sounds spontaneously fire despite there being no sound waves to trigger this activity. That's an indication of brain overload.

But when presented with real-world voices, other studies showed, hallucinating patients' brains often failed to respond at all, in contrast with healthy brains. These studies pointed to a stifling of brain signals.

By analyzing all of these studies together, biological psychologist Kenneth Hugdahl of the University of Bergen in Norway found the simultaneous over-stimulation and dampening of brain signals to be two sides of the same coin. The findings help explain why schizophrenia patients retreat into a hallucinatory world. Now, Hugdahl wants to use this knowledge to help patients reverse that tendency.

"What if one could train the patient to shift attention away from the inside voices to voices coming from outside?" Hugdahl said.

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Silence May Not Cause a Memory to Fade

Memory
© Psych Central

Emerging research questions the belief that if we do not talk about something, then we will forget the episode.

The issue is timely as experts look for new methods to help people recover after a traumatic experience.

"There's this idea, with silence, that if we don't talk about something, it starts fading," says Charles B. Stone, an author of a new paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Although this perspective has been widely accepted, researchers question this view saying that the belief is not supported by empirical psychological research - a lot of it comes from a Freudian belief that everyone has deep-seated issues that are repressed and need to be talked about.

The real relationship between silence and memory is much more complicated, Stone said.

"We are trying to understand how people remember the past in a very basic way," he said. "Silence is everywhere."

Stone and his coauthors divide silence about memories into several categories.

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Unraveling the Mystery of Consciousness

Antonio Damasio, author of Self Comes to Mind, published by Pantheon/Vintage, is a professor of neuroscience and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. He spoke at the TED2011 conference in Long Beach, California. TED is a nonprofit dedicated to "Ideas worth spreading," which it makes available through talks posted on its website.


How do living organisms become conscious of what is happening to them and around them?

How is it that I as well as you, reader of these words, can be conscious of our respective existences and of what is going on in our minds - in my case, ideas about how the brain generates consciousness, about the fact that I was asked to prepare this particular text for a specific deadline, along with the fact that I happen to be in Paris, at the moment, not Los Angeles, and that I am writing this on a cold January day.

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Hearing metaphors activates brain regions involved in sensory experience

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© Unknown
When a friend tells you she had a rough day, do you feel sandpaper under your fingers? The brain may be replaying sensory experiences to help understand common metaphors, new research suggests.

Linguists and psychologists have debated how much the parts of the brain that mediate direct sensory experience are involved in understanding metaphors. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their landmark work 'Metaphors we live by', pointed out that our daily language is full of metaphors, some of which are so familiar (like "rough day") that they may not seem especially novel or striking. They argued that metaphor comprehension is grounded in our sensory and motor experiences.

New brain imaging research reveals that a region of the brain important for sensing texture through touch, the parietal operculum, is also activated when someone listens to a sentence with a textural metaphor. The same region is not activated when a similar sentence expressing the meaning of the metaphor is heard.

The results were published online this week in the journal Brain & Language.

"We see that metaphors are engaging the areas of the cerebral cortex involved in sensory responses even though the metaphors are quite familiar," says senior author Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine and psychology at Emory University. "This result illustrates how we draw upon sensory experiences to achieve understanding of metaphorical language."

Sathian is also medical director of the Center for Systems Imaging at Emory University School of Medicine and director of the Rehabilitation R&D Center of Excellence at the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Seven college students who volunteered for the study were asked to listen to sentences containing textural metaphors as well as sentences that were matched for meaning and structure, and to press a button as soon as they understood each sentence. Blood flow in their brains was monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging. On average, response to a sentence containing a metaphor took slightly longer (0.84 vs 0.63 seconds).

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The Price of Your Soul: How Your Brain Decides Whether to 'Sell Out'

Money vs Religion
© iStockphoto

A neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.

"Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred - whether it's a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics - is a distinct cognitive process," says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.

Berns headed a team that included Emory economist Monica Capra; Michael Prietula, a professor of information systems and operations management at Emory's Goizueta Business School; a psychologist from the New School for Social Research and anthropologists from the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris, France. (Click here to see the full list of names.) The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.