The brain may be most active when doing nothing at all.

Imagine a human brain sitting in a chair, laughing at our clumsy attempts to figure out how it works. It's an image that comes to neuroscientist Dr. Georg Northoff, as he writes books and plays about the brain, when he's not busy investigating its neural mysteries.

"I always imagine when I do these plays, there sits a brain beside us, and I'm sure the brain would smile and say 'they're so stupid,' " he said.

It's a pretty cheeky attitude for a mass of neural tissue Northoff describes as 'pulp.'

"You'll see in my play, I describe it as 'gruesome grey pulp.' If you consider the brain from the outside, if you just take it out of the skull, it's just grey, jelly matter," he said. "Inside the brain, it's a collection of neurons, a collection of molecules...I would argue it is some spatial, structural, temporal template which is continuously changing, like a grid. I hope that in 10 years, I can tell you more."

Northoff holds the Canada Research Chair in Neuropsychiatry at the University of Ottawa and he's also part of the Mind, Brain Imaging and Neuroethics Research Unit at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre. As he studies the biochemical basis of mental illness, Northoff believes he's also on the trail of the elusive seat of consciousness, the part of the brain that creates our unique sense of self.

Study of farmer-foragers raises doubt about application of popular personality model.

Five personality traits widely thought to be universal across cultures might not be, according to a study of an isolated Bolivian society.

Researchers who spent two years looking at 1,062 members of the Tsimane culture found that they didn't necessarily exhibit the five broad dimensions of personality - openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism - also known as the "Big Five." The American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published the study online Dec. 17.

While previous research has found strong support for the Big Five traits in more developed countries and across some cultures, these researchers discovered more evidence of a Tsimane "Big Two:" socially beneficial behavior, also known as prosociality, and industriousness. These Big Two combine elements of the traditional Big Five, and may represent unique aspects of highly social, subsistence societies.

"Similar to the conscientiousness portion of the Big Five, several traits that bundle together among the Tsimane included efficiency, perseverance and thoroughness. These traits reflect the industriousness of a society of subsistence farmers," said the study's lead author, Michael Gurven, PhD, of the University of California, Santa Barbara. "However, other industrious traits included being energetic, relaxed and helpful. In small-scale societies, individuals have fewer choices for social or sexual partners and limited domains of opportunities for cultural success and proficiency. This may require abilities that link aspects of different traits, resulting in a trait structure other than the Big Five."

Illinois Senator Mark Kirk has wrestled with lots of devilish political issues during his 28-year political career, but after suffering a stroke one year ago, he claims he had a very different experience: an encounter with angels.

The Republican senator was recovering from a massive stroke in the right side of his brain at Northwestern Memorial Hospital's Intensive Care Unit in Chicago when Kirk said three angels visited him, the Chicago area's Daily Herald reported.

Standing at the foot of his hospital bed, the angels, Kirk said, asked him, "You want to come with us?"

"No," Kirk said he told them matter-of-factly. "I'll hold off."

Kirk, 53, has spent the past year undergoing intensive therapy to help him regain his ability to walk and perform other basic functions. Kirk's mind, according to his surgeon Dr. Richard Fessler, is still very active. "His thought process is normal, and his mental state remains sharp," Fessler told the Daily Herald.

Kirk now joins an estimated 8 million Americans who claim to have received celestial visitors or had some other type of near-death experience (NDE): The congressman sensed he was close to death in the days following his stroke. "A thing goes off in your head that this is the end," Kirk told the Daily Herald.

Are you going to love Taylor Swift just as much in 10 years as you do now? Sure, you might think, I'll be basically the same person then, with roughly the same preferences, values, and personality traits. But you're probably wrong, according to a new study, whose authors claim that many people underestimate how much they'll change in the future.

From picking a job to selecting a spouse, we face many decisions that will affect our lives far into the future. Those choices rest on some assumptions, notes Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard University. "Any kind of lifetime commitment is based on your belief that you know the person you're going to be in 10 years."

To investigate people's predictions about their future selves, Gilbert teamed up with Harvard postdoctoral fellow Jordi Quoidbach and Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The trio devised a series of online experiments in which a total of more than 19,000 people participated. In one, adults between ages 18 and 68 filled out a questionnaire, scoring themselves on basic personality traits such as extraversion, emotional stability, and openness to new experiences.

Then the researchers asked them to do it all again, this time answering either as they would have 10 years ago, or as they thought they would 10 years in the future. The surveys from participants of all ages indicated that on average people felt they had changed more in the past decade than they would in the next, the researchers report online today in Science.

A mother at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Conn. is claiming that her son's psychic powers saved him because he had panic attacks that took him out of school before the Dec. 14 shooting occurred.

According to reporter Sandra Clark, "Karen Dryer's worst nightmare started to unravel when her young son Logan Dryer, 5, became so anxiety ridden when he went to kindergarten at Sandy Hook Elementary School that she decided to pull him out of school just two weeks before the deadly massacre.

"Logan started kindergarten in September 2012. He was perfectly fine in September and October, and then in November he started acting strange. I got an email from his teacher saying he was a little weepy and then I started getting phone calls that Logan was crying and wanted to go home. Eventually it got so bad that I took him to the doctor who ran tests, saying that Logan was perfectly healthy."

Logan's doctor suggested that he be home-schooled for several weeks, though he and his mother visited the school once a week so he could socialize with friends. During those visits, his mother said, the boy would become visibly upset as if he knew something bad would happen. Karen Dryer came to believe that her son's concerns and fears revealed his gift of prophecy: "My mother, Milly, who passed away a couple of months ago was very psychic, and I know now without a doubt that my son has the same gift."

Researchers at the University of North Carolina school of Medicine have found that certain brain patterns in adults with Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia and autism can also be seen in the brain scans of infants.

"These results suggest that prenatal brain development may be a very important influence on psychiatric risk later in life," said lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychiatry at UNC, Rebecca C. Knickmeyer. In addition to early detection, the study may also lead to early intervention breakthroughs in the degenerative brain disorder.

According to the report on UNC's website:

The study included 272 infants who received MRI scans at UNC Hospitals shortly after birth. The DNA of each was tested for 10 common variations in 7 genes that have been linked to brain structure in adults. These genes have also been implicated in conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, Alzheimer's disease, anxiety disorders and depression.

For some polymorphisms - such as a variation in the APOE gene which is associated with Alzheimer's disease - the brain changes in infants looked very similar to brain changes found in adults with the same variants, Knickmeyer said. "This could stimulate an exciting new line of research focused on preventing onset of illness through very early intervention in at-risk individuals."

Just hours after they're born, babies seem to be able to tell the difference between sounds in their native tongue and a foreign one, according to a new study that suggests language learning begins in utero.

"The mother has first dibs on influencing the child's brain," researcher Patricia Kuhl, of the University of Washington, said in the statement. "The vowel sounds in her speech are the loudest units and the fetus locks onto them."

Researchers examined 40 babies (an even mix of girls and boys) in Tacoma, Wash., and Stockholm, Sweden. At about 30 hours old, the infants in the study listened to vowel sounds in their native language and in foreign languages. The babies' interest in the sounds was measured by how long they sucked on a pacifier wired to a computer.

The study found that, in both countries, the infants listening to unfamiliar sounds sucked on the pacifier for longer than they did when exposed to their native tongue, suggesting they could differentiate between the two. Lead author of the study, Christine Moon, a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, said the results show that fetuses can learn prenatally about the particular speech sounds of a mother's language.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

- Martin Luther King Jr.

If it is awakening or spiritual elevation we wish to attain, we must stop living only for ourselves and start living for others, work not only for our own pleasure, comfort, security, and self-image, but work for the liberation of all people from slavery and oppression.

There is no other work to be done, and all "spiritual work" done without this intention is inherently selfish and ultimately self-defeating.

Part of AIGA Talk in London, November 22, 2001

1. 
You can only work for people that you like.

This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didn't particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realised that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle.

A bird listening to birdsong may experience some of the same emotions as a human listening to music, suggests a new study on white-throated sparrows, published in Frontiers of Evolutionary Neuroscience.

"We found that the same neural reward system is activated in female birds in the breeding state that are listening to male birdsong, and in people listening to music that they like," says Sarah Earp, who led the research as an undergraduate at Emory University.

For male birds listening to another male's song, it was a different story: They had an amygdala response that looks similar to that of people when they hear discordant, unpleasant music.

The study, co-authored by Emory neuroscientist Donna Maney, is the first to compare neural responses of listeners in the long-standing debate over whether birdsong is music.

"Scientists since the time of Darwin have wondered whether birdsong and music may serve similar purposes, or have the same evolutionary precursors," Earp notes. "But most attempts to compare the two have focused on the qualities of the sound themselves, such as melody and rhythm."

Earp's curiosity was sparked while an honors student at Emory, majoring in both neuroscience and music. She took "The Musical Brain" course developed by Paul Lennard, director of Emory's Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology program, which brought in guest lecturers from the fields of neuroscience and music.

"During one class, the guest speaker was a composer and he said that he thought that birdsong is like music, but Dr. Lennard thought it was not," Earp recalls. "It turned into this huge debate, and each of them seemed to define music differently. I thought it was interesting that you could take one question and have two conflicting answers that are both right, in a way, depending on your perspective and how you approach the question."