April 2013
3 posts
A Momentary Flow: Many Neuroscience Studies May Be... →
wildcat2030:
See on Scoop.it - The future of medicine and health The fields of psychology and cognitive neuroscience have had some rough sledding in recent years.
The bumps have come from high-profile fraudsters, concerns about findings that can’t be replicated, and criticism from within the…
“it is possible for core body temperature to be controlled by the brain. The...”
– Mind over matter? Core body temperature controlled by the brain (via myserendipities)
March 2013
1 post
February 2013
2 posts
“Playing video games before bedtime may give people an unusual level of awareness...”
– Video Gamers Can Control Dreams, Study Suggests | LiveScience (via new-aesthetic)
December 2012
3 posts
Brain waves synchronize to environmental sounds →
metaconscious:
Our world is full of cyclic phenomena: For example, many people experience their attention span changing over the course of a day. Maybe you yourself are more alert in the morning, others more in the afternoon. Bodily functions cyclically change or “oscillate” with environmental rhythms, like…
As Above, So Below: Why words are as painful as... →
metaconscious:
Rejection and heartbreak can have effects every bit as physical as cuts and bruises, and understanding why could change your life.
It is only in the past 10 years that we have begun to unravel the basis of these hurt feelings in the brain. Scientists have found that the sting of rejection fires…
November 2012
3 posts
As Above, So Below: Synchronous Isopraxis →
metaconscious:
Human tendencies to imitate clothing styles and to pick up the nonverbal mannerisms of others are rooted in paleocircuits of the reptilian brain. Paleocircuits are subcortical nerve nets and pathways which link bodily arousal centers, emotion centers and motor areas of the forebrain and midbrain, with muscles for the body movements required by nonverbal signs. Imitation is a deep,...
As Above, So Below: When You Inject Spirit... →
metaconscious:
Are spirit mediums really communicating with the dead? My Magic 8 Ball says “Outlook not so good.”
But a new brain study of Brazilian mediums shows that something decidedly strange is occurring during the famous “trance state,” and no one has a ready answer to explain exactly what’s going on.
Ten mediums—five less expert and five experienced—were injected with a radioactive...
As Above, So Below: How walking through a doorway... →
metaconscious:
Like information in a book, unfolding events are stored in human memory in successive chapters or episodes. One consequence is that information in the current episode is easier to recall than information in a previous episode. An obvious question then is how the mind divides experience up into…
October 2012
6 posts
Why Some People See Sound?
They found the smaller a person’s visual cortex was — the part of the brain linked with vision —the more likely he or she experienced the illusion.
“If we both look at the same thing, we would expect our perception to be identical,” de Haas told LiveScience. “Our results demonstrate that this not quite true in every situation — sometimes what you perceive depends on your...
As Above, So Below: Psilocybin and Personality:... →
metaconscious:
Recent research suggests fascinating connections between the effects of the psychedelic drug psilocybin and personality traits related to inner experience. Personality appears to influence response to psilocybin and psilocybin can promote changes in personality, suggesting a reciprocal…
Technoccult: The Dangers Of Meditation →
technoccult:
Klint Finley
Scott Carney wrote a long piece for Details about “India Syndrome” — one of may place specific menal disorders (see Wired’s coverage of Jerusalem Syndrome, which mentions that the majority of people dealing with these syndromes have pre-existing psychiatric issues).
But…
3 tags
Sceptics subconsciously repress supernatural... →
I would like to see the original research, as presented without a particular set of agenda, but, as I said a few weeks back: Reality is the biggest case of Confirmation Bias I have Ever Seen. There’s another old saying, and I think it goes, “If you can’t see the Fnords they can’t eat you.” Anyway, whatever. (H/T @davidbmetcalfe).
Stress: The roots of resilience : Nature News &... →
Why do people react differently to traumatic stress?
September 2012
3 posts
Technoccult: U.S. Military Funding Research On... →
technoccult:
Klint Finley
The Office of Naval research wants to fund more research on intuition:
esearch in human pattern recognition and decision-making suggest that there is a “sixth sense” through which humans can detect and act on unique patterns without consciously and intentionally analyzing them….
“Could your unconscious mind be making you feel better or worse, based on cues...”
– Placebo effect can be triggered by subliminal cues
“People tend to think of the conscious, reasoning mind as the unique, intangible...”
– British pro wrestling mystery man of the 70s, and now neural guru, Kendo Nagasaki.
Welcome to kendonagasaki.org
May 2012
5 posts
Atheists & Neuroscience
Lengthy look from Robert McLuhan, author of Randi’s Prize: Not just linked ‘cos I got a nice reply to my comment, honest!
A member of a Facebook forum pointed out this extended essay by Adam Lee, an atheist, and asked whether anyone had a response. I’ve been thinking about these things of late, so I thought I’d have a shot. Lee takes aim at the idea of the soul, arguing...
“Psychopaths show areas of reduced gray matter volume in the temporal pole...”
– Psychopathy linked to brain abnormalities | KurzweilAI
“A team of psychologists at Ohio State has found that people reading fictional...”
– Psychologists find that fiction seeps into real life (Wired UK)
How dopamine impacts your willingness to work |... →
This explains a lot about me (high dopamine generally) - and I worry about treating not-driven-to-protestant-work-ethic as a disorder…
Stowe Boyd: What Do Babies Know At Age 1? →
stoweboyd:
Elizabeth Spelke studies human cognition in babies, and has discovered some universals in what babies know by the age of 1:
Insights in Human Knowledge, From the Minds of Babies - Natalie Anger via NYTimes.com
They know what an object is: a discrete physical unit in which all sides move…
April 2012
5 posts
Dunbar Number & the Monkeysphere
The best introduction to the Dunbar Number concept is from David Wong - creator of Cracked.com & author of the splendid horror-comedy John Dies At The End.
First, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We’ll call him Slappy.
Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and...
“Professor Robin Dunbar is best known for his work related to how many stable...”
– Study: The Bigger Your Brain, the More Friendships You Can Manage - Forbes
Attire Affects Perceptual Processes Which Affect...
wolvensnothere:
The first line pretty much says it all:
“If you wear a white coat that you believe belongs to a doctor, your ability to pay attention increases sharply. But if you wear the same white coat believing it belongs to a painter, you will show no such improvement. “
Attire, Belief, Perception, Ability.
Yup.
Time to go teach.
“When we dream, the body is out for the count, but the mind is still a stew of...”
– Do science fiction and fantasy cause recurring dreams?
“What is the relation between selective attention and consciousness? When you...”
– Consciousness Does Not Reside Here: Scientific American
March 2012
7 posts
“Although auditory verbal hallucinations are often thought to denote mental...”
– The Brain’s Voices: Comparing Nonclinical Auditory Hallucinations and Imagery
PROBLEM: Good intentions have a bad reputation. They’re often described as useless, and some even claim they pave the road to hell.
METHODOLOGY: To test the effect of kindness and benevolence on physical experiences, University of Maryland psychologist Kurt Gray conducted three experiments. In the first trial, which examined pain, the participants received identical electric shocks at the...
Did Cats Inadvertently Start Human Civilisation? →
shadowfirebird:
Bear with me on this one.
First, dopamine. Increased dopamine in the human brain causes behaviour to be more aggressive, more active, more thrill-seeking and goal-seeking. There is a theory that human civilisation really started when our dopamine levels got raised because we switched to eating…
“A drastic procedure called a corpus callosotomy, first used as a treatment for...”
– The split brain: a tale of two halves | KurzweilAI
“For thousands of years, human beings have looked down on their emotions. We’ve...”
– Are Emotions Prophetic? | Wired Science | Wired.com
Consciousness: Eight questions science must answer... →
1. What are the critical brain regions for consciousness?
The brain contains about 90 billion neurons, and about a thousand times more connections between them.
But consciousness isn’t just about having a large number of neurons. For instance, the cerebellum, which contains over half the neurons in the brain, doesn’t seem much involved. We now think that consciousness depends...
“To be outside—black, jewish, gay, woman, mutant, whatever—is to be...”
– Ta-Nehisi Coates, Twitter
January 2012
1 post
What your mind really looks like on shrooms,... →
All this and a reference to a David Nutt paper on Synthehol…
December 2011
1 post
This is Your Brain on Sex and Religion:... →
If you attended the recent Society for Neuroscience conference, you had the chance to see some unprecedented 3D imaging of the brain — images that showed the exact order in which women’s brain regions (80 in total) are activated in the sequence leading to an orgasm. For Barry Komisaruk(professor of psychology at Rutgers University), this imaging isn’t gratuitous. The whole point is to demystify...
November 2011
4 posts
Banishing consciousness: the mystery of... →
I have had two operations under general anaesthetic this year. On both occasions I awoke with no memory of what had passed between the feeling of mild wooziness and waking up in a different room. Both times I was told that the anaesthetic would make me feel drowsy, I would go to sleep, and when I woke up it would all be over.
What they didn’t tell me was how the drugs would send me into the...
Skilled readers rely on their brain's 'visual...
wildcat2030:
Via Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future Skilled readers can recognize words at lightning fast speed when they read because the word has been placed in a visual dictionary of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) neuroscientists. Via medicalxpress.com
What synesthesea tells us about consciousness: →
Among the beneficiaries of the various shifts in human consciousness now underway are a little-known group of outliers known as synesthetes. Synesthesia is defined as a blending of senses or a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Those definitions are only a...
A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are... →
stoweboyd:
Good recap of the rise of embodied cognition as a rich field of inquiry, and especially George Lakoff’s contributions:
Samuel McNerney via Scientific American
Metaphors We Live By [by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson] was a game changer. Not only did it illustrate how prevalent metaphors are in everyday language, it also suggested that a lot of the major tenets of western thought,...
October 2011
7 posts
The Splintered Mind: Is the United States... →
It would be bizarre to suppose that the United States has a stream of conscious experience distinct from the streams of conscious experience of the people who compose it. I hope you’ll agree. (By “the United States” here, I mean the large, vague-boundaried group of compatriots who sometimes act in a coordinated manner.) Yet it’s unclear by what materialist standard the...
Scientific evidence of hypnotic state
Researchers have found evidence for the existence of a hypnotic state -- the key was in the glazed staring eyes.
A multidisciplinary group of researchers from Finland (University of Turku and Aalto University) and Sweden (University of Skövde) has found that strange stare may be a key that can eventually lead to a solution to this long debate about the existence of a hypnotic state. One of the most widely known features of a hypnotized person in the popular culture is a glazed, wide-open look in the eyes. Paradoxically, this sign has not been considered to have any major importance among researchers and has never been studied in any detail, probably due to the fact that it can be seen in only some hypnotized people. This study was done with a very highly hypnotizable participant who can be hypnotized and dehypnotized by just using a one-word cue. The change between hypnotic state and normal state can thus be varied in seconds.
The researchers used high-resolution eye-tracking methodology and presented a set of well-established oculomotor tasks that trigger automatic eye behavior. They found the glazed stare was accompanied by objectively measurable changes in automatic, reflexive eye behavior that could not be imitated by non-hypnotized participants.
In the field of hypnosis research this result means that hypnosis can no longer be regarded as mental imagery that takes place during a totally normal waking state of consciousness. On the other hand, the result may have wider consequences for psychology and cognitive neuroscience, since it provides the first evidence of the existence of a conscious state in humans that has previously not been scientifically confirmed.
Neuroskeptic: Life With Low Serotonin, Revisited →
Unexplained communication between brain... →
Could the brain be using electromagnetic fields to communicate between hemispheres — theelectromagnetic field theory of consciousness proposed by Johnjoe McFadden (School of Biomedical and Life Sciences, University of Surrey)?
Neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology(Caltech) have made a puzzling finding: people born without a corpus callosum (which links the two hemispheres of...
“Neurosurgeon recounts near-death experience:
Eben Alexander was your typical...”
– Near-Death Experiences: 30 Years of Research - Part 5 | Science | Epoch Times
taracrow asked: Not a question; a response. I've experienced synesthesia and studied it extensively. You're wrong about the MRI scans. Synesthesia CAN actually be studied and viewed via MRI's. The cross sensory modes can be, and have been, viewed, studied, and published in a variety of major scientific journals on this incredibly interesting phenomenon. It's not simply an experience. It is the...
