Science of the SpiritS


Bulb

Fear Learning: The Cortex Plays an Essential Part in Emotional Learning


INSERM (Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale)
Fri, 09 Dec 2011 05:59 UTC
Image
© Unknown
The study, initiated by the Swiss researchers and published in Nature, constitutes ground-breaking work in exploring emotions in the brain.

Anxiety disorders constitute a complex family of pathologies affecting about 10% of adults. Patients suffering from such disorders fear certain situations or objects to exaggerated extents totally out of proportion to the real danger they present. The amygdala, a deep-brain structure, plays a key part in processing fear and anxiety. Its functioning can be disrupted by anxiety disorders.

Although researchers are well acquainted with the neurons of the amygdala and with the part those neurons play in expressing fear, their knowledge of the involvement of other regions of the brain remains limited. And yet, there can be no fear without sensory stimulation: before we become afraid, we hear, we see, we smell, we taste, or we feel something that triggers the fear. This sensory signal is, in particular, processed in the cortex, the largest region of the brain.

For the first time, these French and Swiss scientists have succeeded in visualising the path of a sensory stimulus in the brain during fear learning, and in identifying the underlying neuronal circuits.

What happens in the brain?

During the experiments conducted by the researchers, mice learnt to associate a sound with an unpleasant stimulus so that the sound itself became unpleasant for the animal.
Read More...
Candle

John Trudell - Poetry, Politics and Perspective


YouTube
Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:25 UTC
John analyzes our current social and spiritual state as a featured speaker at the US Social Forum in Detroit, June 2010.
Read More...
MIB

Is Your Company Being Run By a Psychopath?

Larry Kahaner
The McGowan Blog
Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:28 UTC
psycho 6%
© SOTT.net
In the movie American Psycho actor Christian Bale plays an up-and-coming corporate vice president who barbarically kills people in his off hours. Unbeknownst to his colleagues, this unremorseful psychopath exhibits the oft rewarded business traits of aggressiveness, ruthlessness and aloofness while in the corporate suite. He may be callous but he gets the job done especially when it comes to business card selection.

While the Patrick Bateman character is fiction, it may not be far from the truth, according to recent research into the psychology of CEOs who are responsible for bringing down the world's financial system. One researcher, Clive Boddy, Professor of Marketing at Nottingham Business School in England, has been studying what he and others call Corporate Psychopaths well before the current global meltdown. They have found significant evidence that many of these business leaders may well be psychopaths whose behavior mimics serial killers and other social deviants but without the blood and gore.

He writes in the Journal of Business Ethics
"In watching these events [the global financial meltdown] unfold it often appears that the senior directors involved walk away with a clean conscience and huge amounts of money. Further, they seem to be unaffected by the corporate collapses they have created. They present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings, and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done. They cheerfully lie about their involvement in events are very persuasive in blaming others for what has happened and have no doubts about their own continued worth and value... Many of these people display several of the characteristics of psychopaths and some of them are undoubtedly true psychopaths."
Read More...
Boat

Finding Purpose After Living With Delusion

Benedict Carey
The New York Times
Fri, 25 Nov 2011 22:27 UTC
Meaning in Madness: Milton Greek, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, believes that decoding the messages in delusions can help some people recover.


She was gone for good, and no amount of meditation could resolve the grief, even out here in the deep quiet of the woods.

Milt Greek pushed to his feet. It was Mother's Day 2006, not long after his mother's funeral, and he headed back home knowing that he needed help. A change in the medication for his schizophrenia, for sure. A change in focus, too; time with his family, to forget himself.

And, oh yes, he had to act on an urge expressed in his psychotic delusions: to save the world.

So after cleaning the yard around his house - a big job, a gift to his wife - in the coming days he sat down and wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, supporting a noise-pollution ordinance.
Read More...
People

Are Doing Harm and Allowing Harm Equivalent? Only After Deliberative, Careful, Controlled Thinking

David Orenstein
Brown University
Fri, 02 Dec 2011 11:34 UTC
Image
© Cushman Lab/Brown UniversityLooking at a moral choice Test subjects who feel that doing active harm is morally the same as allowing harm to occur will show more brain activity. The notion that active harm is worse appears to be automatic, a psychological default requiring less thought.
Individuals and courts deal more harshly with people who actively commit harm than with people who willfully allow the same harm to occur. A new study finds that this moral distinction is psychologically automatic. It requires more thought to see each harmful behavior as morally equivalent.

People typically say they are invoking an ethical principle when they judge acts that cause harm more harshly than willful inaction that allows that same harm to occur. That difference is even codified in criminal law. A new study based on brain scans, however, shows that people make that moral distinction automatically. Researchers found that it requires conscious reasoning to decide that active and passive behaviors that are equally harmful are equally wrong.

For example (see below), an overly competitive figure skater in one case loosens the skate blade of a rival, or in another case, notices that the blade is loose and fails to warn anyone. In both cases, the rival skater loses the competition and is seriously injured. Whether it is by acting, or willfully failing to act, the overly competitive skater did the same harm.
Read More...
Attention

Maltreated children show same pattern of brain activity as combat soldiers


University College London
Mon, 05 Dec 2011 10:24 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Children exposed to family violence show the same pattern of activity in their brains as soldiers exposed to combat, new research has shown.

In the first functional MRI brain scan study to investigate the impact of physical abuse and domestic violence on children, scientists at UCL in collaboration with the Anna Freud Centre, found that exposure to family violence was associated with increased brain activity in two specific brain areas (the anterior insula and the amygdala) when children viewed pictures of angry faces.

Previous fMRI studies that scanned the brains of soldiers exposed to violent combat situations have shown the same pattern of heightened activation in these two areas of the brain, which are associated with threat detection. The authors suggest that both maltreated children and soldiers may have adapted to be 'hyper-aware' of danger in their environment.

However, the anterior insula and amygdala are also areas of the brain implicated in anxiety disorders. Neural adaptation in these regions may help explain why children exposed to family violence are at greater risk of developing anxiety problems later in life.
Read More...
Magnify

Tuning Out Daydreaming: How Brains Benefit from Meditation

Bill Hathaway
YaleNews
Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:00 UTC
Experienced meditators seem to be able switch off areas of the brain associated with daydreaming as well as psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia, according to a new brain imaging study by Yale researchers.

Image
© Google Images
Less day dreaming has been associated with increased happiness levels, said Judson A. Brewer, assistant professor of psychiatry and lead author of the study published the week of Nov. 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Understanding how meditation works will aid investigation into a host of diseases, he said.

"Meditation has been shown to help in variety of health problems, such as helping people quit smoking, cope with cancer, and even prevent psoriasis," Brewer said.

The Yale team conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on both experienced and novice meditators as they practiced three different meditation techniques.
Read More...
Stormtrooper

Chaplains Wanted For Atheists In Foxholes


National Public Radio
Sun, 04 Dec 2011 13:21 UTC
Image
© Associated Press/Julie JacobsonSoldiers pray with a chaplain in Afghanistan. Jason Torpy says military chaplains are assigned many secular advising duties that atheist service members need, too.
Jason Torpy says military chaplains are assigned many secular advising duties that atheist service members need, too.

Retired Army captain and Iraqi war veteran Jason Torpy says the chaplains employed by the U.S. military can't relate to people like him. He's an atheist.

He's also the president of a group that's trying to get the armed forces to become more inclusive by hiring atheist chaplains. The Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers wants the military to provide for the estimated 40,000 atheists, agnostics and humanists who serve in U.S. forces.

Military chaplains, most of whom are Protestant Christians, are assigned many secular advising duties, including marriage, family and suicide counseling, Torpy tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Rachel Martin. They touch so many parts of service members' lives, he says, they can help improve what he sees as an environment of exclusion.
Read More...
Info

Life's Extremes: Atheists vs. Believers

Adam Hadhazy
Live Science
Sun, 04 Dec 2011 07:54 UTC
Praying Woman
© Alexey Fursov | ShutterstockHow often do you pray? Or do you think it's a waste of time?

This December is chock full of "holy days," or holidays. On Dec. 25, Christians commemorate Christmas. For Jews, Hanukkah starts this year on Dec. 20 in the Western and international Gregorian calendar. Shia Muslims, meanwhile, celebrate Ashura today (Dec. 4), the 10th day of the Islamic lunar calendar's first month. Yet others in the Northern Hemisphere will party on Dec. 22 for the winter solstice, as druids might have ritualistically done so at Stonehenge in the U.K. 4,000 years ago.

Religion, it goes without further saying, is a very popular phenomenon. In the U.S., as in much of the world, a majority of people claim to practice some form of it. According to recent surveys, around 80 percent of American adults say they belong to an organized religion.

A minority of that population takes its religion very seriously. These individuals' behaviors and attitudes are largely influenced by what is perceived to conform to their faiths' dogmas. On the opposite end, another, smaller percentage of the population thinks that religion is absolute hooey.

Psychologists, sociologists and neurologists continue to study why some gobble up religion as profound truth while others reject it as superstition.

"This whole area [of research] teaches us something about the human mind and brain," said Andrew Newberg, director of research at the Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University and author of How God Changes Your Brain (Ballantine Books, 2009).

"There are a lot of philosophical and theological implications of this work and about how we understand the world," Newberg added.
Read More...
People

Zero Degrees of Empathy

RSA
YouTube
Wed, 06 Jul 2011 18:03 UTC
Professor Simon Baron Cohen presents a new way of understanding what it is that leads individuals down negative paths, and challenges all of us to consider replacing the idea of evil with the idea of empathy-erosion.

Read More...