© MPI of Psychiatry Brain regions activated more strongly during lucid dreaming than in a normal dream.

Studies of lucid dreamers visualise which centres of the brain become active when we become aware of ourselves.

Which areas of the brain help us to perceive our world in a self-reflective manner is difficult to measure. During wakefulness, we are always conscious of ourselves. In sleep, however, we are not. But there are people, known as lucid dreamers, who can become aware of dreaming during sleep. Studies employing magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) have now been able to demonstrate that a specific cortical network consisting of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the frontopolar regions and the precuneus is activated when this lucid consciousness is attained. All of these regions are associated with self-reflective functions. This research into lucid dreaming gives the authors of the latest study insight into the neural basis of human consciousness.

The human capacity of self-perception, self-reflection and consciousness development are among the unsolved mysteries of neuroscience. Despite modern imaging techniques, it is still impossible to fully visualise what goes on in the brain when people move to consciousness from an unconscious state. The problem lies in the fact that it is difficult to watch our brain during this transitional change. Although this process is the same, every time a person awakens from sleep, the basic activity of our brain is usually greatly reduced during deep sleep. This makes it impossible to clearly delineate the specific brain activity underlying the regained self-perception and consciousness during the transition to wakefulness from the global changes in brain activity that takes place at the same time.

Could honing your meditation technique cure chronic pain? It's worth contemplating.

Chronic pain is estimated to affect over 76 million people, more than diabetes and heart disease combined, and back pain is our country's leading cause of disability for people under 45. And though the pharmaceutical industry seems very adept at introducing one new painkiller after another, the pills don't always help. A new study in the Journal of Neuroscience, however, suggests something else might: meditation. It seems that improving your meditation technique could very well be more effective than painkillers at cutting down on pain, and that could save you hundreds in prescription drug costs.

THE DETAILS: This was a small study that looked at just 15 adults who sat through four 20-minute training sessions on mindfulness meditation. However, before and after the training, the participants' brains were scanned using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and during each scan, the researchers put a heating device that induced pain for a five-minute period on each of the meditators' right leg at varying intervals. The brain scans revealed that before meditation, the section of the brain that processes pain was very active, while after meditation training, activity levels were virtually undetectable. Furthermore, after the meditation training, the study participants reported an average 40 percent reduction in pain intensity and an average 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness. The study authors noted that morphine and other pain-relieving drugs usually reduce pain perception and unpleasantness by just 25 percent.

Your brain may be more likely to recognize new things as new when the unknown is already on your mind, according to new research.

The findings suggest that memories are not made or recalled in a vacuum, said study researcher Lila Davachi, a psychologist at New York University. Instead, memories are built with the influence of what your brain has just been exposed to, she said.

"Your previous state of mind can influence the way you see the world and what sort of decisions you make," Davachi told LiveScience.

In fact, the research suggests that the hippocampus, the part of the brain that encodes memories, may have two jobs that it can't perform at the same time: building new memories and recognizing old ones. The time it takes to switch between these two tasks may explain why the brain is better at recognizing new things when it's already in "new thing" mode.

We're half way through 2012. Many prophecies have hinted at this time as The Shift of the Ages and The Time of Transition. If you take a look at the shelves of any spiritual/new age bookstore, you'll see dozens of books with 2012 in the title. It certainly has become a good marketing bit. There are many theories of what 2012 is supposedly all about. From the end of the world to global mass enlightenment. If you type "2012″ into Google, 25,270,000,000 results come up.

Much of it is based on the Mayan Calendar which is presumably ending on 12/21 2012. Many people seem to be fixated on this date. I don't want to get into the technicality of the Mayan Calendar. Lies are mixed with truth and there are all kinds of theories from historians, experts, channeled material and authors who make various claims about this date and the Mayan Calendar, many of them contradicting each other. Instead, I'd like to look into some overlooked issues our world is facing, examining the possibility of a cataclysmic "end time" scenario or a "collective awakening" from a different perspective. But let's backtrack first.

© University of Nebraska-LincolnIn a new study that examined our cognitive process in how we perceive men and women, participants saw a fully clothed person from head to knee. After a brief pause, they then saw two new images on their screen: One that was unmodified and contained the original image, the other a slightly modified version of the original image with a sexual body part changed. Participants then quickly indicated which of the two images they had previously seen. They made decisions about entire bodies in some trials and body parts in other trials.

Study finds that both genders process images of men, women differently.

When casting our eyes upon an object, our brains either perceive it in its entirety or as a collection of its parts. Consider, for instance, photo mosaics consisting of hundreds of tiny pictures that when arranged a certain way form a larger overall image: In fact, it takes two separate mental functions to see the mosaic from both perspectives.

A new study suggests that these two distinct cognitive processes also are in play with our basic physical perceptions of men and women -- and, importantly, provides clues as to why women are often the targets of sexual objectification.

The research, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, found in a series of experiments that participants processed images of men and women in very different ways. When presented with images of men, perceivers tended to rely more on "global" cognitive processing, the mental method in which a person is perceived as a whole. Meanwhile, images of women were more often the subject of "local" cognitive processing, or the objectifying perception of something as an assemblage of its various parts.

The study is the first to link such cognitive processes to objectification theory, said Sarah Gervais, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the study's lead author.

"Local processing underlies the way we think about objects: houses, cars and so on. But global processing should prevent us from that when it comes to people," Gervais said. "We don't break people down to their parts - except when it comes to women, which is really striking. Women were perceived in the same ways that objects are viewed."

In the study, participants were randomly presented with dozens of images of fully clothed, average-looking men and women. Each person was shown from head to knee, standing, with eyes focused on the camera.

Many people, whether they know it or not, are philosophical dualists. That is, they believe that the brain and the mind are two separate entities. Despite the fact dualist beliefs are found in virtually all human cultures, surprisingly little is known about the impact of these beliefs on how we think and behave in everyday life.

But a new research article forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that espousing a dualist philosophy can have important real-life consequences.

Across five related studies, researchers Matthias Forstmann, Pascal Burgmer, and Thomas Mussweiler of the University of Cologne, Germany, found that people primed with dualist beliefs had more reckless attitudes toward health and exercise, and also preferred (and ate) a less healthy diet than those who were primed with physicalist beliefs.

Furthermore, they found that the relationship also worked in the other direction. People who were primed with unhealthy behaviors - such as pictures of unhealthy food - reported a stronger dualistic belief than participants who were primed with healthy behaviors.

Narcissists or psychopaths? Paul Babiak and Robert Hare explore why bosses go bad

Two white-collar criminals received justice in June - Allen Stanford of Stanford International Bank and Rajat Gupta of McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. The actions of one are easy to understand, the other's are extremely hard.

Stanford, a Ponzi schemer who stole $2bn of his eager depositors' money, is easy: if he is not a psychopath, he certainly behaved like one for two decades. Gupta, convicted of fraud and conspiracy for leaking price-sensitive titbits about Goldman to Raj Rajaratnam, the criminally corrupt hedge fund manager who was his confidant and friend, is the puzzle.

Was Gupta always bad, or did he turn bad? Either he fooled McKinsey into electing - and twice re-electing - a fraud as its managing partner or he only later turned into a corporate Narcissus who did not regard himself as needing to obey the usual rules as a board member of Goldman and Procter & Gamble. If he had a moral compass, he lost it.

Too often our memory starts acting like a particularly porous sieve: all the important fragments that should be caught and preserved somehow just disappear. So armed with pencils and bolstered by caffeine, legions of adults, especially older adults, tackle crossword puzzles, acrostics, Sudoku and a host of other activities designed to strengthen their flagging memory muscles.

But maybe all they really need to do to cement new learning is to sit and close their eyes for a few minutes. In an article to be published in the journal Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientist Michaela Dewar and her colleagues show that memory can be boosted by taking a brief wakeful rest after learning something verbally new -- so keep the pencil for phone numbers- and that memory lasts not just immediately but over a longer term.

"Our findings support the view that the formation of new memories is not completed within seconds," says Dewar. "Indeed our work demonstrates that activities that we are engaged in for the first few minutes after learning new information really affect how well we remember this information after a week."

Scientists find evidence that real perceptual experience and mental replay share similar brain activation patterns.

Toronto, Canada - directly experiencing the real moment can trigger similar brain activation patterns.

The study, led by Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute (RRI), in collaboration with the University of Texas at Dallas, is one of the most ambitious and complex yet for elucidating the brain's ability to evoke a memory by reactivating the parts of the brain that were engaged during the original perceptual experience. Researchers found that vivid memory and real perceptual experience share "striking" similarities at the neural level, although they are not "pixel-perfect" brain pattern replications.

The study appears online this month in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, ahead of print publication.

"When we mentally replay an episode we've experienced, it can feel like we are transported back in time and re-living that moment again," said Dr. Brad Buchsbaum, lead investigator and scientist with Baycrest's RRI. "Our study has confirmed that complex, multi-featured memory involves a partial reinstatement of the whole pattern of brain activity that is evoked during initial perception of the experience. This helps to explain why vivid memory can feel so real."

But vivid memory rarely fools us into believing we are in the real, external world - and that in itself offers a very powerful clue that the two cognitive operations don't work exactly the same way in the brain, he explained.

Until the 1990s, the orphanages of Romania were notorious for their harsh, overcrowded conditions. Those perceptions have been borne out in new research that finds growing up in such an environment can change the brain for good.

Institutionalization in early childhood can alter a child's brain and behavior in the long run, the research finds. Fortunately, early intervention can stave off the effects.

The study, conducted with children growing up in Romanian orphanages, reveals changes in the brain composition of kids who spent their first years in institutions versus those who were randomly assigned to foster care. The findings point to a "sensitive period" in the brain for social development, said study researcher Nathan Fox, a child development researcher at the University of Maryland.

"Infants and young children expect an environment in which they are going to interact and receive nurturance, not only food, but psychological nurturance, from adult caregivers," Fox told LiveScience.

The finding adds to evidence that early childhood experiences can have lasting impacts on the brain, with one recent study showing that child abuse may shrink regions in the brain's hippocampus.