Science of the SpiritS


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Yoga Decreases Stress in Childhood Cancer Patients and Parents


myhealthnewsdaily.com
Mon, 11 Oct 2010 22:47 UTC
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© unknown
Yoga may help childhood cancer patients and their parents cope with the stress of a cancer diagnosis and treatment, according to a new study.

Yoga was beneficial for older children, ages 13 to 18, but not younger ones, ages 7 to 12.

Adolescents and their parents experienced a decrease in anxiety and increase in sense of well-being following the yoga sessions, the researchers say.

"Yoga is emerging as an effective complementary therapy in adult oncology," the researchers wrote in the September/October issue of the Journal of Pediatric Oncology Nursing, "promising benefits for decreasing symptom distress including fatigue, insomnia, mood, and stress resulting in improved quality of life."
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Alarm Clock

SOTT Focus: Subtle Propaganda And The War For Your Mind

Joe Quinn
Sott.net
Fri, 05 Nov 2010 01:22 UTC
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Despite all the talk over the past 15 years or so about the US and coalition forces being engaged in various 'wars', there haven't actually been any. To have a war you need two sizable armies representing two opposing nation states both with the capability to wage war on each other. I'd be impressed if anyone can point to the US or any Western nation being involved in such a conflict over the past 15 years, anywhere in the world.

During those last 15 years however, a very different type of war has been waged. It has been a much more subtle, stealthy and insidious war, and the mind of every Western citizen with two active neurons to rub together has been the target.

Do you know who Dr. Aafia Siddiqui is? She's a American-educated Pakistani cognitive neuroscientist and mother of three children, but she hasn't seen her children for 7 years. Aafia and her children were abducted in Pakistan in 2003 by US and Pakistani intelligence agents and incarcerated on trumped up 'terrorism' charges.

During her long 'rendition' she was held in various locations, including the infamous US Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan, where she was regularly tortured, raped and ultimately shot and wounded.
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Family

Best of the Web: The Normalization of Pathology in America

Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds.com
Sat, 16 Oct 2010 09:16 UTC
Narcissism
© Unknown
The moral rot at the center of American life results from a normalization of pathologies--sociopathic and psychopathic states and behaviors are now "normal" or incentivized. Moral behavior is institutionally punished.

My entry on the moral rot which has taken hold in all socio-economic levels of America drew a number of insightful responses: Runaway Feedback Loops, Wealth Concentration and Gaming-The-System (October 13, 2010).

While the American/Western worldview holds that we are autonomous individuals exercising free will at every moment, in reality we are all heavily programmed by our socio-economic class conditions. What is so striking about present-day America is the way in which the narcissistic, no-moral-compass social pathologies of entitlement, denial and fabrication of "truth"/reality has been "normalized" (accepted as normal behavior and thinking) in all social classes.
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Phoenix

Neurogenesis: How to Change Your Brain

David Perlmutter, M.D.
The Huffington Post
Wed, 03 Nov 2010 04:16 UTC
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"In adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated."
-- Santiago Ramon Y Cajal, Degeneration and Regeneration in the Nervous System, 1928

This long-held tenet, first proposed by Professor Cajal, held that brain neurons were unique because they lacked the ability to regenerate.

In 1998, the journal Nature Medicine published a report indicating that neurogenesis, the growth of new brain cells, does indeed occur in humans. As Sharon Begley remarked in her book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, "The discovery overturned generations of conventional wisdom in neuroscience. The human brain is not limited to the neurons it is born with, or even the neurons that fill in after the explosion of brain development in early childhood."
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Shoe

Exercise During Leisure Time Can Keep Depression at Bay


Daily Mail
Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:00 UTC
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Exercising during your leisure time can keep the blues away.
Physical activity can almost halve your risk of depression - but only if you build up a sweat in your leisure time, according to a study.

Researchers from King's College London found people who take regular exercise are far less likely to be depressed.

But the benefit was not felt by people who exerted themselves at work, for instance by digging up roads or performing heavy lifting.

The team of scientists studied just over forty thousand Norwegian residents. They asked them how often they engaged in both light and intense physical activity during their leisure time.
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Magnify

New Findings on PTSD and Brain Activity

Rick Nauert PhD
psychcentral.com
Mon, 01 Nov 2010 23:43 UTC
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© psychcentral.com
Researchers have discovered a correlation between increased activity among brain circuits and flashbacks among individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

University of Minnesota investigators learned that an increased circuit activity in the right side of the brain is associated with the debilitating, involuntary flashbacks that often characterized PTSD.

The ability to objectively diagnose PTSD through concrete evidence of neural activity, its impact and its manifestation is the first step toward effectively helping those afflicted with this severe anxiety disorder.
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Black Cat

Halloween Special: Why We Love to Scare Ourselves; The Anatomy of Fright

Astara March
PhysOrg
Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:00 UTC
fear
© Guillaume DuchenneMental control may separate the horror of a scary movie from the terror of a truly dangerous situation.
Dracula, Frankenstein, witches, ghosts and goblins are all around us at this time of year -- and Hollywood keeps them at our beck and call for the rest of the year as well. Scary movies allow us to experience the tonic of a good fright whenever we want one, but why do people seek out that experience?

What in your brain separates the pleasurable adrenaline high of a horror film from the traumatizing experience of someone breaking into your house?

The obvious answer is that you know that what's happening on the screen isn't real. According to Andreas Keil, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, that knowledge starts in the visual cortex, an area at the back of the brain that processes what we see and helps link those images to personal and cultural events that put them in a context.

Like the other cortical areas of the brain (the auditory cortex, the sensory cortex, the motor cortex, and the cerebral cortex), it thinks. You see a dark spot on the floor, notice that the dark spot has projections, realize that these projections are legs, and your brain says "Spider!"
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Health

Hippies Weren't the Only Ones Tripping in the Sixties

Ron Hoggan
Celiac.com
Wed, 06 Oct 2010 03:30 UTC
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© UnknownNew insights into celiac disease and schizophrenia.
This article originally appeared in the Winter 2010 edition of Journal of Gluten Sensitivity.

Celiac.com 10/06/2010 - Do you know where LSD comes from? It is made from gluten grains. In 1938 Albert Hofmann, a Swiss chemist, discovered LSD, having refined it from a mold that grows on grains. However, it was not until 1943 that he discovered its psycho-active properties. In his own words Hofmann states: "I synthesized the diethylamide of Iysergic acid with the intention of obtaining an analeptic." The expectation of such a drug was based on its source - ergot - which grows on gluten grains and causes ergotism, also known as ergotoxicosis, ergot poisoning, holy fire, and Saint Anthony's Fire.

This poisonous mold has long been known to infect gluten grains. It was to prevent the development of these molds that the Romans invented central heating systems. They stored their grains on the lowest floor of residences and other buildings that were centrally heated and well ventilated. Their fears of ergot were based on the powerful and bizarre symptoms that developed in people who ate grains that had become moldy with ergot. Some afflicted individuals began to hallucinate, often becoming so mentally disturbed that they injured or killed themselves. Others experienced loss of blood circulation to their extremities which became gangrenous. Their digits and limbs sometimes fell off before these people died. Some experienced a combination of these two sets of symptoms. Animals sometimes display similar symptoms after consuming moldy grains.
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Bulb

Best of the Web: The Empathic Civilisation


RSA Animate
Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:00 UTC
Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society.

Normal human beings are naturally empathic. Human society however has been plagued throughout its history by the influence of psychopaths who, having attained to positions of power, exerted a nefarious and pathological influence on human thought, 'morality' and beliefs.

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Magnify

Emotion Processing in Brain is Influenced by Color of Ambient Light, Study Suggests


ScienceDaily
Mon, 25 Oct 2010 04:49 UTC
We are all aware that a bright day may lift our mood. However the brain mechanisms involved in such effects of light are largely unknown.

Researchers at the Cyclotron Research Centre (University of Liege), Geneva Center for Neuroscience and Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (University of Geneva), and Surrey Sleep Research Centre (University of Surrey) investigated the immediate effect of light, and of its color composition, on emotion brain processing using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The results of their study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the colour of light influences the way the brain processes emotional stimuli.

Brain activity of healthy volunteers was recorded while they listened to "angry voices" and "neutral voices" and were exposed to blue or green light. Blue light not only increased responses to emotional stimuli in the "voice area" of the brain and in the hippocampus, which is important for memory processes, but also led to a tighter interaction between the voice area, the amygdala, which is a key area in emotion regulation, and the hypothalamus, which is essential for biological rhythms regulation by light. This demonstrates that the functional organization of the brain was affected by blue light.
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