Science of the SpiritS


Snakes in Suits

Smooth-talking charmers: Why psychopaths can be so attractive to the unsuspecting

Tom Hale
In Science
Thu, 31 Oct 2019 16:19 UTC
psychopaths dating
© JSTOCK/ShutterstockYoung men with stronger psychopathic traits tend to have higher social intelligence and more relaxed attitudes towards casual sex.
The old cliché of psychopaths being smooth-talking charmers might not be far wrong, at least according to a new study.

The study carried out by psychologists from Brock University and Carleton University in Canada claims that young women are more attracted to men with stronger psychopathic personality traits, despite these prospective partners having little interest in a committed relationship.

Reporting in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science, the researchers wanted to follow up on "reports" that psychopathic traits were attractive in potential romantic partners, despite the known pitfalls of entering interpersonal relationships with psychopaths.

For the first part of their study, the researchers recruited 46 men, aged 17 to 25, and gauged psychopathy and social intelligence using a filmed fake date scenario with a female research assistant for about 2 minutes. According to the study, the majority of the male participants (89 percent) self-reported as heterosexual.

Comment: Psychopaths are masters at wearing a mask to disarm their prey - it behooves everyone to learn how to spot these 'intraspecies predators':

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Music

Brain takes just less than 300 milliseconds to recognize familiar music


University of Central London
Wed, 30 Oct 2019 12:00 UTC
vinyl record lp
The human brain can recognise a familiar song within 100 to 300 milliseconds, highlighting the deep hold favourite tunes have on our memory, a UCL study finds.
Anecdotally the ability to recall popular songs is exemplified in game shows such as 'Name That Tune', where contestants can often identify a piece of music in just a few seconds.

For this study, published in Scientific Reports, researchers at the UCL Ear Institute wanted to find out exactly how fast the brain responded to familiar music, as well as the temporal profile of processes in the brain which allow for this.

The main participant group consisted of five men and five women who had each provided five songs, which were very familiar to them. For each participant researchers then chose one of the familiar songs and matched this to a tune, which was similar (in tempo, melody, harmony, vocals and instrumentation) but which was known to be unfamiliar to the participant.

Comment: See also:

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Info

The brain has distinct areas for all manner of ideas, research suggests

Paul Biegler
Cosmos Magazine
Tue, 29 Oct 2019 17:59 UTC
MRI Brain Scans
© WLADIMIR BULGAR/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, VIA GETTY IMAGESBrain scans can tell more than we thought about our thoughts and feelings, research suggests.
Researchers have deciphered the abstract concepts people are thinking about - for example justice, truth and forgiveness - merely by analysing their brain scans.

Until now, this type of "thought decoding" has been largely confined to concrete concepts such as apple and hammer. The new findings, however, suggest slippery ideas that are not of the physical world also inhabit distinct parts of the brain.

The study is the work of psychologist Marcel Just and graduate student Robert Vargas from Carnegie Mellon University in the US.

It makes intuitive sense, they say, that physical or "concrete" objects, such as hammers and apples, will be represented in the brain similarly between people. Trade tools and fruit are, by nature, unambiguous.

It's a contention born out in the science of neural decoding, where patterns of activity on brain scans are used to work out what someone is thinking.

Just, for example, has used brain scans to predict when a person is reading sentences that refer to concrete things, such as "the flood damaged the hospital".

But given the fuzziness of abstract ideas like justice and ethics, intuitions cut the other way - could we really share common brain space for them too?

To find out, Vargas and Just put nine people in an MRI scanner and flashed an array of 28 abstract concepts at them, shown as words.
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Brain

Thinking about death: High neural activity is linked to shorter lifespans

Matt Davis
Big Think
Fri, 25 Oct 2019 00:01 UTC
the thinker
© Flickr/Todd Martin
If there's one thing that humans can't stop thinking about, it's death. But new research published in the journal Nature suggests that all that thinking might be the very thing that brings death on.

More precisely, researchers discovered that higher neural activity has a negative effect on longevity. Neural activity refers to the constant flow of electricity and signals throughout the brain, and excessive activity could be expressed in many ways; a sudden change in mood, a facial twitch, and so on.

"An exciting future area of research will be to determine how these findings relate to such higher-order human brain functions," said professor of genetics and study co-author Bruce Yankner. While it's probably not the case that thinking a thought reduces your lifespan in the same way smoking a cigarette does, the study didn't determine whether actual thinking had an impact on lifespan — just neural activity in general.
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Life Preserver

Discovering Wholeness and Healing after Trauma

Joseph Mercola
Mercola.com
Sun, 27 Oct 2019 00:00 UTC
Healing Trauma
Dr. James Gordon is a Harvard-educated psychiatrist who uses self-care strategies and group support to help patients heal from psychological trauma. In this interview, he shares some of those strategies, which are also detailed in his book "The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma."

Gordon is also the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM) in Washington, D.C., and is a clinical professor at Georgetown Medical School. During his presidency, President Bill Clinton appointed Gordon chairman of the National Advisory Council to the National Institutes of Health Office of Alternative Medicine.
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Butterfly

Ian Stevenson's case for reincarnation: Are we skeptics really just cynics?

Jesse Bering
Scientific American
Tue, 26 Nov 2013 21:01 UTC
Dr. Ian Steveson
© University of Virginia School of MedicineDr. Ian Stevenson
If you're anything like me, with eyes that roll over to the back of your head whenever you hear words like "reincarnation" or "parapsychology," if you suffer great paroxysms of despair for human intelligence whenever you catch a glimpse of that dandelion-colored cover of Heaven Is For Real or other such books, and become angry when hearing about an overly Botoxed charlatan telling a poor grieving mother how her daughter's spirit is standing behind her, then keep reading, because you're precisely the type of person who should be aware of the late Professor Ian Stevenson's research on children's memories of previous lives.

Stevenson, who died in 2007, was a psychiatrist by training — and a prominent one at that. In 1957, at the still academically tender age of 38, he'd been named Chair of psychiatry at the University of Virginia. After arriving in Charlottesville, however, his hobbyhorse in the paranormal began turning into a full-grown steed. As you can imagine, investigating apparitions and reincarnation is not something the college administrators were expecting of the head of their mental health program. But in 1968, Chester Carlson, the wealthy inventor of the Xerox copying process who'd been introduced to Stevenson's interests in reincarnation by his spiritualist wife, dropped dead of a heart attack in a Manhattan movie theatre, leaving a million dollars to UVA on the condition it be used to fund Stevenson's paranormal investigations. That money enabled Stevenson to devote himself full-time to studying the minds of the dead, and over the next four decades, Stevenson's discoveries as a parapsychologist served to sway more than a few skeptics and to lead his blushing acolytes to compare him to the likes of Darwin and Galileo.

Comment: For more on reincarnation and Dr. Stevenson's work, see:

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Butterfly

The geography of sorrow: Interview with Francis Weller

Francis Weller
Science and Nonduality
Sat, 26 Oct 2019 15:29 UTC
sorrow, sadness, melancholy
For a man who specializes in grief and sorrow, psychotherapist Francis Weller certainly seems joyful. When I arrived at his cabin in Forestville, California, he emerged with a smile and embraced me. His wife, Judith, headed off to garden while Francis led me into their home among the redwoods to talk.

I had wanted to interview Weller ever since the publisher I work for, North Atlantic Books, had agreed to publish his new book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. Over the previous few years my father, grandfather, grandmother, father-in-law, and sister-in-law had all died, and I'd also moved across the country and was missing the friends and community I'd left behind. I'd been living with a free-floating state of unease, but I'd largely sidestepped direct encounters with my losses.

In his book Weller invites us to view grief as a visitor to be welcomed, not shunned. He reminds us that, in addition to feeling pain over the loss of loved ones, we harbor sorrows stemming from the state of the world, the cultural maladies we inherit, and the misunderstood parts of ourselves. He says grief comes in many forms, and when it is not expressed, it tends to harden the once-vibrant parts of us.

Weller's own experience with grief began at the age of fifteen, when his father suffered a massive, disabling stroke, dying eight years later. The long process of dealing with his sorrow eventually led Weller to his current vocation. Today, at fifty-nine, he uses what he learned whenever he sits down with a client in his psychotherapy practice or facilitates one of the grief retreats he organizes. Having been a therapist for more than thirty years, Weller says, "I sometimes think my work is simply to let people feel their losses."

Comment:

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Doberman

A dog's size and head shape predicts its temperament

Stanley Coren
Psychology Today
Fri, 25 Oct 2019 19:03 UTC
dogs
© SC Psychological Enterprises Ltd
The old saying goes that you can't judge a book by its cover, suggesting that first impressions based upon the look of something don't give you much information. However a recent study suggests that for dogs, their appearance (in terms of their size and their head shape), may well give you a lot of information about the personality and behavioral characteristics of the dog.

Although the initial domestication of dogs may have occurred 14,000 years or more in the past, humans have continued to transform dogs to fulfill many different functions associated with guarding, herding, hunting, or simply companionship. Our selective breeding of dogs has modified their size and their shape dramatically so that the more than 400 recorded breeds of dogs are easily recognizable based on their physical characteristics. It also appears that there is some correlation between a dog's head shape and the functions that they perform for humans; for example the sighthounds (who pursue game over open ground) tend to have long narrow heads, while many of the guarding breeds tend to have more square shaped heads.
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Car Black

Fast and the furriest: Rats enjoy driving tiny cars, US researchers discover


RT
Thu, 24 Oct 2019 11:00 UTC
rat in a tiny car
© HO / University of Richmond / AFP
A group of scientists in the US trained rats to drive tiny cars in return for bits of Fruit Loops cereal, and found that both the training and the satisfaction of the task itself reduced the rodents' stress levels.

While readers may scoff that such research was carried out in the first place, senior author Kelly Lambert of the University of Richmond thinks the investigation could one day improve the development of non-pharmaceutical forms of treatment for mental illness.

The basis for her theory? Neuroplasticity.

Comment: No doubt mastering a new skill will help with overall stress levels. Feeling stressed is almost antithetical to learning to control ones environment. Perhaps we could all learn something from these rats.

See also:

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Bullseye

Best of the Web: Why it's wrong to cast stones at Jordan Peterson for seeking treatment

Jonathan N. Stea Ph.D., R. Psych
Psychology Today
Tue, 22 Oct 2019 00:00 UTC
Jordan Peterson
Benzodiazepines can be thought of as wolves in sheep's clothing.

It is no secret that while social media can be a wonderful world of learning and connection, it can equally be an ignorant cesspool that serves as a window into the darker corners of human nature.

Recently, Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson — author of the international bestseller 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos — along with his daughter, decided to bravely pre-empt a foreshadowed character assassination by disclosing on social media that he had sought treatment for clonazepam dependence at a rehabilitation center.

Peterson had been prescribed clonazepam — a type of anti-anxiety medication of the benzodiazepine class — to help manage the stressors associated with the recent devastating news of his wife's cancer diagnosis.

When it comes to the addiction and mental health treatment world, benzodiazepines can be thought of as wolves in sheep's clothing, with the exception of their beneficial use in the treatment of alcohol withdrawal. If benzodiazepines are used repeatedly and temporarily to avoid or cope with uncomfortable emotions, thoughts, and memories, their use could lead to the development or worsening of psychiatric symptoms, such as anxiety.
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