Welcome to the Possibilium Habits: How They Form And How To Break Them Routines are made up of a three-part "habit loop": a cue, a behavior and a reward. Understanding and interrupting that loop is key to breaking a habit, says journalist Charles Duhigg. iStockphoto.com hide caption itoggle caption iStockphoto.com Think about something it took you a really long time to learn, like how to parallel park. At first, parallel parking was difficult and you had to devote a lot of mental energy to it. Parallel parking, gambling, exercising, brushing your teeth and every other habit-forming activity all follow the same behavioral and neurological patterns, says New York Times business writer Charles Duhigg. How Habits Form It turns out that every habit starts with a psychological pattern called a "habit loop," which is a three-part process. "Then there's the routine, which is the behavior itself," Duhigg tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. The third step, he says, is the reward: something that your brain likes that helps it remember the "habit loop" in the future.
47 Mind-Blowing Psychology-Proven Facts You Should Know About Yourself - StumbleUpon I’ve decided to start a series called 100 Things You Should Know about People. As in: 100 things you should know if you are going to design an effective and persuasive website, web application or software application. Or maybe just 100 things that everyone should know about humans! The order that I’ll present these 100 things is going to be pretty random. So the fact that this first one is first doesn’t mean that’s it’s the most important.. just that it came to mind first. Dr. <div class="slide-intro-bottom"><a href="
Neuroscience of Music - How Music Enhances Learning - Neuroplasticity Neuroscience research into the neuroscience of music shows that musicians’ brains may be primed to distinguish meaningful sensory information from noise. This ability seems to enhance other cognitive abilities such as learning, language, memory and neuroplasticity of various brain areas. Scientific review of how music training primes nervous system and boosts learning Those ubiquitous wires connecting listeners to you-name-the-sounds from invisible MP3 players, whether of Bach, Miles Davis or, more likely today, Lady Gaga, only hint at music’s effect on the soul throughout the ages. Now a data-driven review by Northwestern University researchers that will be published July 20 in Nature Reviews Neuroscience pulls together converging research from the scientific literature linking musical training to learning that spills over to skills including language, speech, memory, attention and even vocal emotion. Contact: Pat Vaughan Tremmel Source: Northwestern University
Your left side is your best side: Our left cheek shows more emotion, which observers find more aesthetically pleasing Your best side may be your left cheek, according to a new study by Kelsey Blackburn and James Schirillo from Wake Forest University in the US. Their work shows that images of the left side of the face are perceived and rated as more pleasant than pictures of the right side of the face, possibly due to the fact that we present a greater intensity of emotion on the left side of our face. Their work is published online in Springer's journal Experimental Brain Research. Others can judge human emotions in large part from facial expressions. Our highly specialized facial muscles are capable of expressing many unique emotions. Blackburn and Schirillo investigated whether there are differences in the perception of the left and right sides of the face in real-life photographs of individuals. The authors explain: "Our results suggest that posers' left cheeks tend to exhibit a greater intensity of emotion, which observers find more aesthetically pleasing.
The Battle for Your Mind: Brainwashing Techniques Being Used On The Public By Dick Sutphen - StumbleUpon Authoritarian followers Mind Control Subliminals By Dick Sutphen Summary of Contents The Birth of Conversion The Three Brain Phases How Revivalist Preachers Work Voice Roll Technique Six Conversion Techniques 1. keeping agreements 2.physical and mental fatigue 3. increase the tension 4. Uncertainty. 5. Jargon 6. Summary of Contents The Birth of Conversion/Brainwashing in Christian Revivalism in 1735. I'm Dick Sutphen and this tape is a studio-recorded, expanded version of a talk I delivered at the World Congress of Professional Hypnotists Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. Although I've been interviewed about the subject on many local and regional radio and TV talk shows, large-scale mass communication appears to be blocked, since it could result in suspicion or investigation of the very media presenting it or the sponsors that support the media. Everything I will relate only exposes the surface of the problem. In talking about this subject, I am talking about my own business. Alright.
Is the Internet Warping Our Brains? - Technology Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily, says Sparrow. For instance, for years people in the educational community have known that rote learning—that is, forcing children to memorize facts and dates—is a poor way to educate. If that's the case, allowing computers to do some of the memorizing for us might be a way to focus more on the more philosophical aspects of learning. "Perhaps those who teach in any context, be they college professors, doctors or business leaders, will become increasingly focused on imparting greater understanding of ideas and ways of thinking, and less focused on memorization," Sparrow told Time. Of course, while you might think that this research suggests people on the internet are using less of their brains than those not online, you'd be wrong.
Uncommon Act of Design: Fake Bus Stop Helps Alzheimer's Patients One of the most pernicious symptoms of Alzheimer's is that patients, in a fit of confusion, feel suddenly disoriented from their surroundings and wracked with a need to just get home. As a result, Alzheimer's patients in nursing homes often escape--wandering at large, with no memory of who they are, oblivious to danger. The obvious (and common) solution is to lock up Alzheimer's wards. But then, that seems cruel and it often aggravates a panicking patient even more. Via Radiolab's podcast comes a remarkable story of how the Benrath Senior Center in Dusseldorf, Germany, found an alternative solution. So they built a fake bus stop, right in front of the clinic. That's a brilliant act of design, in the same manner as the "@" sign: The idea's inventor, an adviser to the senior center, managed to re-appropriate the common bus stop--and everything it symbolizes--in a way that essentially hacks the mind. Check out the full story at Radiolab--it's a tearjerker. [Image by emrank]
MSNBC - How to Think About the Mind How to Think About the MindNeuroscience shows that the 'soul' is the activity of the brain Sept. 27 issue - Every evening our eyes tell us that the sun sets, while we know that, in fact, the Earth is turning us away from it. Astronomy taught us centuries ago that common sense is not a reliable guide to reality. Modern neuroscience has shown that there is no user. This resistance is not surprising. The disconnect between our common sense and our best science is not an academic curiosity. Prozac shouldn't be dispensed like mints, of course, but the reason is not that it undermines the will. To many, the scariest prospect is medication that can make us better than well by enhancing mood, memory and attention. In Galileo's time, the counter-intuitive discovery that the Earth moved around the sun was laden with moral danger. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the psychology department at Harvard. © 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
An afternoon nap markedly boosts the brain’s learning capacity If you see a student dozing in the library or a co-worker catching 40 winks in her cubicle, don’t roll your eyes. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that an hour’s nap can dramatically boost and restore your brain power. Indeed, the findings suggest that a biphasic sleep schedule not only refreshes the mind, but can make you smarter. Students who napped (green column) did markedly better in memorizing tests than their no-nap counterparts. Conversely, the more hours we spend awake, the more sluggish our minds become, according to the findings. “Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap,” said Matthew Walker, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the lead investigator of these studies. In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups — nap and no-nap.
Where is the Mind? The Mind Exists Without the Brain | Suite101.com Imagine a TV or a radio. The television does not create the images it shows and the radio does not create the music it plays – they are just machines projected to capture the waves that are passing through the air. If you destroy the radio device, you won't be able to listen to music, but you haven't destroyed the music, it exists independently from the machine that captures it, right? According to some schools of thought of the eastern world, believing that the human brain creates the thoughts is the same as believing that the TV or the radio create the waves. But if the thoughts are not located in people's brains, where are they created? The Seven Levels of Consciousness Ancient eastern philosophy divides the human experience into seven levels of consciousness. The three most subtle levels, correspond to the world of ideas, where all archetypes, all truth and all knowledge is. Philosophy of Mind – Is the Brain a Data Processor? What Are Thoughts and Where Are the Thoughts? Sources:
The Brain's Dark Energy Imagine you are almost dozing in a lounge chair outside, with a magazine on your lap. Suddenly, a fly lands on your arm. You grab the magazine and swat at the insect. What was going on in your brain after the fly landed? And what was going on just before? Many neuroscientists have long assumed that much of the neural activity inside your head when at rest matches your subdued, somnolent mood. It turns out that when your mind is at rest—when you are daydreaming quietly in a chair, say, asleep in a bed or anesthetized for surgery—dispersed brain areas are chattering away to one another. Select an option below: Customer Sign In *You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subscription to access this content