Dreaming – motivated or meaningless? - Vol. 22, Part 8 ( August 2009) Dreams can be a matter of great personal and scientific interest, or derision. There is good reason not to be interested in dreams: most are easily forgotten and usually appear senseless. Despite the parallels between dreaming and the characteristics of the brain during sleep, it could still be a purposeless epiphenomenon. But many of us will have had the experience of dreams that affect how we feel or act after waking; and while asleep we produce what are often very complex dream plots without conscious or effortful deliberation. How and why do we produce them? And is there any meaning to it all? There are two widely held views about dreams. One view is that they contain information about our waking life, including our waking cognition and emotions, and possibly even some information that we are motivated to ignore when awake: On this view, dreams are worth examining. Dreams can be defined as the images and thoughts that are experienced during sleep.
Does dreaming have a function? One brain - two visual systems - Vol. 19, Part 11 ( November 2006) Mel Goodale and David Milner, winners of the Society’s Book Award, outline their research. Why would anyone think we have two visual systems? After all, we have only one pair of eyes – and clearly we have only one indivisible visual experience of the world. Surely it would be more sensible to assume, as most scientists throughout the history of visual science have assumed, that we have only one visual system. But of course, what seems obvious is not always correct. Why would anyone think we have two visual systems? After all, we have only one pair of eyes – and clearly we have only one indivisible visual experience of the world.
Recent developments In the years since our 1995 book, the field of visual neuroscience has advanced rapidly. Seeing inside the headThe greatest advances in cognitive neuroscience over the years since we first published our ideas have come about through the development of functional MRI. Where do we go from here? References. Liminality. In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold"[1]) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete. During a ritual's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold" between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the ritual establishes. Rites of passage[edit] Arnold van Gennep[edit] Van Gennep, who invented the term liminality, published in 1908 his Rites de Passage, a work that is essential to the development of the concept of liminality in the context of rituals in small-scale societies.
Van Gennep began his book by identifying the various categories of rites. This three-fold structure, as established by van Gennep, is made up of the following components:[9] Victor Turner[edit] Communitas[edit] Types[edit] Site links to Lesson 1 (wound-recovery) articles, resources, and applications. Hot Tips for Relationship Success, Part 2. Owl and heart. By Elizabeth Boorstein. Seymour Boorstein, M.D., was my main mentor during my psychiatry residency. Every Tuesday for two years, I left the skyscrapers and academic institutions of San Francisco, traversed the Golden Gate Bridge, and ranged over the Marin hills to meet with him.
There was something elemental and magical about the trip; San Francisco clouds and fog would part and disappear as I crossed the ocean, and then the sun would smile on me, a harbinger of enlightenment. It was like a weekly pilgrimage to the mountaintop to receive teachings from my guru. Seymour stood at the opposite end of the spectrum from that approach, which led other supervisors to snort derisively at ‘errors' made by their charges as they struggled to care for their patients. I'm pleased to announce that Seymour's sage wisdom is now available to everyone through his new book, Who's Talking Now? "A light bulb went on. " Owl hugging crocodile. Who will talk now? Dr. (continued on page 2) Math Skills: Nature or Nurture? Source: Wikimedia Commons (author: Melchoir) This week, the media picked up on a recently published article in Developmental Science by researchers at Johns Hopkins (Libertus, Fiegneson, and Halbreda, 2011) suggesting that children as young as three with the ability to quickly differentiate smaller vs. bigger amounts-- a "math sense" of sorts-- also performed better in a more formal math task.
The New York Times proclaims "in future math whizzes, signs of 'number sense.'" And in this column , Chris Matyszczyk of CNET news concludes that this research shows that math skills "might entirely be handed down by one's forefathers"-in other words, genetically based. The idea that individual differences in young children point to genetic differences is appealing, and very popular in our culture. It makes for a fast, tidy explanation: you are who you are because of your genes, and there is nothing you can do about it. The results of the intervention were striking. Placebo Effect Stronger Than We Thought? In July 2001, the Amgen Corporation announced the failure, in a second-stage clinical trial, of an experimental drug to treat Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative illness that affects nerve cells in the brain.
Such a failure was hardly unusual; only a minority of the drugs that undergo trials make it to the marketplace. But for Perry Cohen, who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s several years before, at age 50, the announcement brought both surprise and disappointment. Cohen, an MIT-trained PhD who had spent decades advising health-care organizations on how to evaluate medical care, had hopes for the Amgen drug, called NIL-A. Studies on animals had suggested that the drug could help regrow damaged nerve cells. Cohen had figured that if it worked, and he could get that kind of therapy early in his disease, he might have a chance of slowing or reversing the process that would otherwise rob him of the ability to control his body.
[class name="dont_print_this"] The Jan-Feb 2012Miller-McCune. The Physics of Terror. Last summer, physicist Aaron Clauset was telling a group of undergraduates who were touring the Santa Fe Institute about the unexpected mathematical symmetries he had found while studying global terrorist attacks over the past four decades. Their professor made a comment that brought Clauset up short. “He was surprised that I could think about such a morbid topic in such a dry, scientific way,” Clauset recalls. “And I hadn’t even thought about that. It was just … I think in some ways, in order to do this, you have to separate yourself from the emotional aspects of it.” If the professor’s remark gave Clauset pause, it was the briefest instant of hesitation in a still-unfolding scientific career marked by a string of self-assured, virtuoso performances.
This story originally posted on Dec. 13, 2010. He also has the unusual distinction (at least for a scientist) of having once been a cast member on a reality television show. Call it the physics of terrorism. [class name="dont_print_this"] Morals Authority. Jonathan Haidt is hardly a road-rage kind of guy, but he does get irritated by self-righteous bumper stickers. The soft-spoken psychologist is acutely annoyed by certain smug slogans that adorn the cars of fellow liberals: “Support our troops: Bring them home” and “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” “No conservative reads those bumper stickers and thinks, ‘Hmm — so liberals are patriotic!’”
He says, in a sarcastic tone of voice that jarringly contrasts with his usual subdued sincerity. “We liberals are universalists and humanists; it’s not part of our morality to highly value nations. So to claim dissent is patriotic — or that we’re supporting the troops, when in fact we’re opposing the war — is disingenuous. “It just pisses people off.” The University of Virginia scholar views such slogans as clumsy attempts to insist we all share the same values.
Huge differences in emphasis. “Well, if we knock down all the walls, we’re sitting out in the rain and cold! • Harm/care. Once Again, Believers Have it Wrong: Atheists Don't Just Want Sex, Drugs, and Lack of Morality | Belief. January 23, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. The death of Christopher Hitchens last month sparked an outpouring of tributes. Most of them praised his best qualities: his ferocious courage, his seemingly effortless erudition, and his crusading defense of free speech and rationalism. Of course, he had his faults as well -- most notably his support for the Iraq war -- and I was happy to see that relatively few of the eulogies, even those written by his personal friends, overlooked or excused this. Given how averse Hitchens himself was to whitewashing the lives of the deceased, I have no doubt that this is how he would have wanted it. There was one item, however, that caught my attention -- this column in the New York Times, which had the following line: There's something so ironic -- almost Shakespearean -- about two siblings whose viewpoints diverged so dramatically.
Why You Don't Need God to be Good: the Rise of Atheist Charities | Belief. "Good without God" has become a catch-phrase of the increasingly vocal atheist and freethinker movement -- from books to billboards, the non-religious are asserting the strength of their humanist ethics. As atheists emerge from the closet and stand up for themselves, one message they're bringing along is that charity is far from an inherent monopoly of the religious. In his book "Who Really Cares," social scientist Arthur C. Brooks hypothesized a “gap in virtue” that might explain why he found religious people donate 25% more to charity than secular individuals. But Dale McGowan, who founded the Foundation Beyond Belief in 2010, didn't buy it. “I find the question of churchgoing really telling,” McGowan says. In place of a virtue gap between the religious and secular, he sees a structural advantage in the church system.
Even Brooks admits that his findings don’t prove any connection between believing in God and an natural imperative to give. Secular Humanism Can We All Just Get Along? Are Conservatives More Fearful Than Liberals? | Tea Party and the Right. Photo Credit: Shutterstock February 5, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. The tone of this year’s Republican presidential primary (which now seems destined to last much longerthan Mitt Romney had been planning) seems sort of, well, fearful.
Their political advisers must understand a psychological phenomenon that researchers have been studying for some time now: conservatives appear to be motivated by fear in a way that liberals are not. Researchers at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln showed people a series of photos — some endearing, some disgusting — and then measured their physiological and cognitive reactions. The photos were plucked from the International Affective Picture System, a database containing hundreds of images that have been rated by a broad audience on dimensions such as how positive or negative, threatening or fearful they appear to people. In this experiment, the results are all relative. Dream Theories: Carl Jung. This web site designed and maintained by Dream Moods, Inc. Email the webmaster at dreammoods dot com with questions or comments about this web site. View our Disclaimer and Privacy Policy. Copyright 2000-2013 Dream Moods, Inc.
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