Slight Genetic Variations Can Affect How Others See You. When we meet new people, we assess their character by watching their gestures and facial expressions. Now a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA suggests that those nonverbal cues are communicating the presence of a specific form of a gene that makes us more or less responsive to others’ needs. The gene determines which type of receptor a person has for the hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin has been implicated in a variety of positive traits, such as trust, empathy and generosity. The hormone is detected by our body’s cells via their oxytocin receptors. In a past study, psychologist Sarina Rodrigues Saturn of Oregon State University and her collaborators found that people who have a certain variation of the receptor gene are more empathetic than those with the alternative form of the gene. In the new study, Saturn and her team showed volunteers 20-second silent video clips of individuals who were listening to their romantic partner recount an upsetting experience.
Energy / Therapy / Hypnosis / NLP. Ancient Egypt. Pyramids. Weird Russian Mind-Control Research Behind Homeland Security Contract -... By Sharon Weinberger MOSCOW -- The future of U.S. anti-terrorism technology could lie near the end of a Moscow subway line in a circular dungeon-like room with a single door and no windows. Here, at the Psychotechnology Research Institute, human subjects submit to experiments aimed at manipulating their subconscious minds. Elena Rusalkina, the silver-haired woman who runs the institute, gestured to the center of the claustrophobic room, where what looked like a dentist's chair sits in front of a glowing computer monitor. "We've had volunteers, a lot of them," she said, the thick concrete walls muffling the noise from the college campus outside.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has gone to many strange places in its search for ways to identify terrorists before they attack, but perhaps none stranger than this lab on the outskirts of Russia's capital. A dungeon-like room in the Psychotechnology Research Institute in Moscow is used for human testing. Notes on "The Semantics of the Information Elements" This important book was published in July 2006 by three socionists in St. Petersburg — Larisa Kochubeeva, Vladimir Mironov, and Milena Stoyalova — at the conclusion of three years of research without any outside funding. Their task was to clarify which topics, themes, phrases, and words were associated with each of the eight information elements. Obviously, the concept of information elements is central to the field of socionics, and until this book, an understanding of these "facets of reality" was often taken for granted in works on socionics, despite minor discrepancies in descriptions of the information elements from different authors.
In the beginning of the book the authors substantiate the relevance of speech patterns to psychic processes, citing Grigoriy Reinin's statement, "if it's not in one's awareness, it's not in one's speech. " Next, they talk about what influences speech and cite a number of psychological and psycholinguistic sources. Study methodology Introverted intuition. Scientists Are Mapping the Brain's Connections to Understand How Thoughts Form.
Emotion In Music Mirrors Speech: Scientific American Podcast. When you hear Western music, you generally get the emotional tone. A major key is happy. (music plays) A minor one? That’s sad. (music plays) And spoken voices reflect this tonality. The researchers wanted to know: Are these sounds international? The researchers analyzed music and 20 native Tamil and American English speakers for a variety of sound and tone parameters.
So we may often be able to understand the moods of a culture in music and even in speech – without understanding a word. —Cynthia Graber [The above text is a transcript of this podcast.] Stuttering Reflects Irregularities in Brain Setup. Put on a pair of headphones and turn up the volume so that you can’t even hear yourself speak. For those who stutter, this is when the magic happens. Without the ability to hear their own voice, people with this speech impediment no longer stumble over their words—as was recently portrayed in the movie The King’s Speech. This simple trick works because of the unusual way the brain of people who stutter is organized—a neural setup that affects other actions besides speech, according to a new study.
Normal speech requires the brain to control movement of the mouth and vocal chords using the sound of the speaker’s own voice as a guide. In the new study, published in the September issue of Cortex, researchers found that the unusual neural organization underlying a stutter also includes motor tasks completely unrelated to speech. The Brain: A Body Fit for a Freaky-Big Brain | Mind & Brain. Aiello and Wheeler noted that this dramatic increase in brain size would seem to have required a dramatic increase in metabolism—the same way that adding an air-conditioning system to a house would increase the electricity bill. Yet humans burn the same number of calories, scaled to size, as other primates. Somehow, Aiello and Wheeler argued, our ancestors found a way to balance their energy budget. As they expanded their brains, perhaps they slimmed down other organs. The scientists compared the sizes of organs in humans and other primates. Aiello and Wheeler christened their idea “the expensive tissue hypothesis.”
Then William Leonard, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University, put the expensive tissue hypothesis to a new test. This suggested that the gut-shrinking phenomenon within the primate groups was probably too subtle to explain our increase in brain size completely. Wray and his colleagues compared SLC2A1 in humans and other animals. The Mind's Hidden Switches: Scientific American Podcast. Podcast Transcription Meet Dr. Bechard Nor, pioneer transplant surgeon and one of the many achievers helping to unlock human potential at Cutter Foundation.
Steve: Okay, how do you do this again? You press this button, no wait. Okay, I'm going to try this one. Nestler: The ability of this chronic social stress to produce maladaptive changes in brain and behavior are mediated through epigenetic modifications of gene expression in particular emotional centers of the brain. Steve: That's Eric Nestler.
Steve: The old nature versus nurture thing is very simplistic. Nestler: Yes, I think that's true. Steve: You come at this from a particular vantage point, because you're an addiction researcher. Nestler: Yes. Steve: But the findings that your lab generated would apply to great many biological phenomena. Nestler: That's right. Steve: So, let's talk about the nuts and bolts of the research. Nestler: Right. Steve: Right and development is the clearest example. Steve: Right. Nestler: Exactly. UCSB scientists discover how the brain encodes memories at a cellular level. (Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have made a major discovery in how the brain encodes memories. The finding, published in the December 24 issue of the journal Neuron, could eventually lead to the development of new drugs to aid memory.
The team of scientists is the first to uncover a central process in encoding memories that occurs at the level of the synapse, where neurons connect with each other. "When we learn new things, when we store memories, there are a number of things that have to happen," said senior author Kenneth S. Kosik, co-director and Harriman Chair in Neuroscience Research, at UCSB's Neuroscience Research Institute. Kosik is a leading researcher in the area of Alzheimer's disease. "One of the most important processes is that the synapses –– which cement those memories into place –– have to be strengthened," said Kosik. "In strengthening a synapse you build a connection, and certain synapses are encoding a memory. This is a neuron. The 'rich club' that rules your brain - life - 02 November 2011. Not all brain regions are created equal – instead, a "rich club" of 12 well-connected hubs orchestrates everything that goes on between your ears.
This elite cabal could be what gives us consciousness, and might be involved in disorders such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease. As part of an ongoing effort to map – the full network of connections in the brain – Martijn van den Heuvel of the University Medical Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and Olaf Sporns of Indiana University Bloomington scanned the brains of 21 people as they rested for 30 minutes. The researchers used a technique called diffusion tensor imaging to track the movements of water through 82 separate areas of the brain and their interconnecting neurons. They found 12 areas of the brain had significantly more connections than all the others, both to other regions and among themselves. Members of the elite Best connected of all is the precuneus, an area at the back of the brain. Downfall of the rich More from the web. Please pay attention to the notes. | Science with Moxie.
The brain is an amazing organ. It gives us conscious control over our actions and is the seat of our thoughts and experiences. There are millions of things in our environment that enter our world everyday, but only a few of them get past the steely discrimination of our perception. Take a minute to pause your reading and think about the feeling of your clothes against your skin. You weren’t quite consciously aware of this until I mentioned it, right?
That is just one example of how the brain deals with many different types of sensory inputs every day, taking the relevant stimuli and bringing them to conscious experience while simultaneously discarding the irrelevant ones so you aren’t constantly overwhelmed with all the sights, sounds, and other sources of sensory input that constantly bombard your person. This discrimination is a matter of how the brain pays attention. The Kraus lab at Northwestern has spent time working on the effects of musical training on the brain. The Singularity is Far: A Neuroscientist's View. David J. Linden is the author of a new book,The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good. He is a professor of neuroscience at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Chief Editor of the Journal of Neurophysiology.
Ray Kurzweil, the prominent inventor and futurist, can't wait to get nanobots into his brain. In his view, these devices will be equipped with a variety of sensors and stimulators and will communicate wirelessly with computers outside of the body. "By the late 2020s, nanobots in our brain, that will get there noninvasively, through the capillaries, will create full-immersion virtual-reality environments from within the nervous system. Of course, there's no reason why these nanobots must be restricted in their manipulations to the sensory portions of the brain. At that point, boundaries between brain, mind, and machine would fall away. That's where I get off the bus. The Secret Language Code. Are there hidden messages in your emails? Yes, and in everything you write or say, according to James Pennebaker, chair of the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Pennebaker has been a leader in the computer analysis of texts for their psychological content.
And in his new book, “The Secret Life of Pronouns,” he argues that how we use words like “I,” “she,” and “who” reveal secrets of our psychology. He spoke recently with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. COOK: How did you become interested in pronouns? PENNEBAKER: A complete and total accident. Until recently, I never thought about parts of speech. Much to my surprise, I soon discovered that the ways people used pronouns in their essays predicted whose health would improve the most.
As I pondered these findings, I started looking at how people used pronouns in other texts -- blogs, emails, speeches, class writing assignments, and natural conversation. COOK: And what have you found? PENNEBAKER: It does. How Our Brains Navigate the City - Commute. To navigate certain parts of New York City — namely Queens and much of Manhattan — all you need to be able to do is count.
In Manhattan neighborhoods like the West Village, and most of Brooklyn, things get a good bit trickier. You can no longer depend on the logical numbered progression of streets and avenues, and must instead rely on some other picture inside your head. For a while now psychologists have debated just what that picture looks like. Some believe we need to orient ourselves by local reference points.
Under this theory, we're lost until we see that certain street or certain landmark, at which point the rest of the grid emerges in our minds. A third alternative suggests that our internal GPS system is informed by frequently looking at maps. Frankenstein and colleagues recruited 26 people from Tübingen to participate in a test of spatial knowledge of their home. The New Science Behind Your Spending Addiction.
Probing the Unconscious Mind. SIGMUND FREUD popularized the idea of the unconscious, a sector of the mind that harbors thoughts and memories actively removed from conscious deliberation. Because this aspect of mind is, by definition, not accessible to introspection, it has proved difficult to investigate. Today the domain of the unconscious—described more generally in the realm of cognitive neuroscience as any processing that does not give rise to conscious awareness—is routinely studied in hundreds of laboratories using objective psychophysical techniques amenable to statistical analysis.
Let me tell you about two experiments that reveal some of the capabilities of the unconscious mind. Both depend on “masking,” as it is called in the jargon, or hiding things from view. Subjects look but don’t see. A quartet of single-digit Arabic numbers (1 through 9, excluding the numeral 5) are projected onto a screen. Yet the cue still influenced the subject’s reaction to the main response. What’s Wrong with this Picture? The Neuroscience of Emotions. How the Mind Works | Video channel on TED.com. Family history of psychiatric disorders shapes intellectual interests, study suggests.
A hallmark of the individual is the cultivation of personal interests, but for some people, their intellectual pursuits might actually be genetically predetermined. Survey results published by Princeton University researchers in the journal PLoS ONE suggest that a family history of psychiatric conditions such as autism and depression could influence the subjects a person finds engaging.
Although preliminary, the findings provide a new look at the oft-studied link between psychiatric conditions and aptitude in the arts or sciences. While previous studies have explored this link by focusing on highly creative individuals or a person's occupation, the Princeton research indicates that the influence of familial neuropsychiatric traits on personal interests is apparently independent of a person's talent or career path, and could help form a person's basic preferences and personality.
"A person is not just what they do for a living," Wang said. "I am a scientist, but not just a scientist. Every textbook on the brain is wrong - and our brains are more similar to monkeys than we thought. The biology of dreaming. A brief history of the brain. This Is Your Brain On Caffeine. Think faster focus better and remember moreRewiring our brain to stay younger...
Why do You Turn Down the Radio When You’re Lost? No one has a photographic memory. Neuroscience. NLP. Why Does Beauty Exist? | Wired Science 10 Ways Our Minds Warp Time. Time on the Brain: How You Are Always Living In the Past, and Other Quirks of Perception. The Cognitive Science of Rationality. Scientists Are Mapping the Brain's Connections to Understand How Thoughts Form.
Becoming Human. Cognitive Computing: When Computers Become Brains. Emotion Selectively Distorts Our Recollections. Musicians use both sides of their brains more frequently. Silent Strokes May Cause Memory Loss In Seniors. Can dogs tell when we're talking to them? FaceTime for Apes: Orangutans Use iPads to Video Chat With Friends In Other Zoos. The Neuroscience Of Optimism. Where Optimism Lives.
Calculate the Best Time to Nap with This Interactive Nap Wheel. Multitasking: This Is Your Brain On Media. Neuroscience and Marketing Books. Cool Brain Art. The Best of Neuromarketing 2011. This is your brain on advertising - neuro-marketing lets marketers get inside your head — Commercial Alert.