Faith found to reduce errors on psychological test

At least for one type of test, be­lief in God can help re­duce mis­takes and anx­i­e­ty, ac­cord­ing to new re­search that al­so shows dis­tinct brain ac­ti­vity pat­terns in be­liev­ers.

In two stud­ies led by Uni­ver­s­ity of To­ron­to psy­cholo­g­ist Mi­chael In­zlicht, par­ti­ci­pants per­formed a Stroop task, a well-known psy­chological test that as­s­eses cog­ni­tive con­trol. Mean­while, elec­trodes meas­ured brain ac­ti­vity in the test-takers.

Com­pared to non-be­liev­ers, In­zlicht found, re­li­gious par­ti­ci­pants showed sig­nif­i­cantly less ac­ti­vity in a part of the brain called the an­te­ri­or cin­gu­late cor­tex. This struc­ture is be­lieved to help mod­i­fy be­hav­ior by sig­nal­ing when at­ten­tion and con­trol are needed, usu­ally as a re­sult of some anx­i­e­ty-producing event like mak­ing a mis­take.

The stronger their re­li­gious zeal and faith, the less cell ac­ti­vity in that zone—and the few­er er­rors sub­jects made, In­zlicht and col­leagues re­ported. They de­tailed the find­ings in the cur­rent on­line is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence.

Source: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090306_god

Language of music may really be universal

Africans who have never listened to radio can pick up on emotions in Western music, according to a new report.

Na­tive Af­ri­cans who have nev­er lis­tened to the ra­dio be­fore can none­the­less pick up on hap­py, sad, and fear­ful emo­tions in West­ern mu­sic, ac­cord­ing to a new re­port. The re­sult shows that the ex­pres­sion of those three bas­ic emo­tions in mu­sic can be un­iver­sally rec­og­nized, the re­search­ers said.

“These find­ings could ex­plain why West­ern mu­sic has been so suc­cess­ful in glob­al mu­sic dis­tri­bu­tion, even in mu­sic cul­tures that do not as strongly em­pha­size the role of emo­tion­al ex­pres­sion in their mu­sic,” said Thom­as Fritz of the Max Planck Institute for Hu­man Cog­ni­tive and Brain Sci­ences in Leip­zig, Ger­many.

Source: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090320_music

A seat of wisdom in the brain?

Two re­search­ers have com­piled what they say is the first schol­arly re­view of the ba­sis in the brain of wis­dom—once the sole prov­ince of re­li­gion and phi­los­o­phy.

The study by Dilip V. Jeste and Thom­as W. Meeks of the Uni­ver­s­ity of Ca­li­for­nia, San Die­go, was pub­lished in the re­search jour­nal Ar­chives of Gen­er­al Psy­chi­a­try on April 6.

“Defin­ing wis­dom is rath­er sub­jec­tive, though there are many si­m­i­lar­i­ties in def­i­ni­tion across time and cul­tures,” said Jeste, a psy­chi­a­trist and neu­ro­sci­ent­ist. But “our re­search sug­gests that there may be a ba­sis in neuro­bi­ol­o­gy for wis­dom’s most un­iver­sal traits.”

Wis­dom has been de­fined over cen­turies and civ­il­iz­a­tions to en­com­pass nu­mer­ous psy­cho­log­i­cal traits. Com­po­nents of wis­dom are com­monly agreed to in­clude such at­tributes as em­pa­thy, com­pas­sion or al­tru­ism, emo­tion­al sta­bil­ity, self-un­der­stand­ing, and pro-social at­ti­tudes, in­clud­ing a tol­er­ance for oth­ers’ val­ues.

“But ques­tions re­main: is wis­dom un­iver­sal, or cul­tur­ally based?” said Jeste. “Is it un­iquely hu­man, re­lat­ed to age? Is it de­pend­ent on ex­pe­ri­ence or can wis­dom be taugh­t?”


Source: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090424_wisdom

12 Surprising And Productive Brain Exercises

Dorothea Brande was an American writer and editor, well known for her books Wake Up and Live and Becoming a Writer (a useful resource for writers, by the way).

In Wake Up and Live, she suggests twelve mental exercises to make your mind keener and more flexible. These exercises are meant to pull you out of your usual habits and to put you in situations that will demand resourcefulness and creative problem-solving. Brande argues that only by testing and stretching yourself can you develop mental strength.

Even apart from the goals of creativity and mental flexibility, Brande's exercises make sense from a happiness perspective. One thing is clear: novelty and challenge bring happiness. People who stray from their routines, try new things, explore, and experiment tend to be happier than those who don't. Of course, as Brande herself points out, novelty and challenge can also bring frustration, anxiety, confusion, and annoyance along the way; it's the process of facing those challenges that brings the "atmosphere of growth" so important to happiness. (It's the First Splendid Truth: to be happy, you must think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.)

I have to confess that I've tackled just a few of Brande's mental exercises - #6 and #10 - and only because they come naturally to me, which is hardly in the spirit of the exercises. I keep toying with the idea of trying the others. Maybe I'll do them for Happiness Project II.

Here are Dorothea Brande's twelve mental exercises. Note: she wrote these in 1936, so you need to adapt of few of them.

1. Spend an hour each day without saying anything except in answer to direct questions, in the midst of the usual group, without creating the impression that you're sulking or ill. Be as ordinary as possible. But do not volunteer remarks or try to draw out information.

2. Think for 30 minutes a day about one subject exclusively. Start with five minutes.

3. Write a letter without using the words I, me, mine, my.

4. Talk for 15 minutes a day without using I, me, my, mine.

5. Write a letter in a "successful" or placid tone. No misstatements, no lying. Look for aspects or activities that can be honestly reported that way.

6. Pause on the threshold of any crowded room and size it up.

7. Keep a new acquaintance talking about himself or herself without allowing him to become conscious of it. Turn back any courteous reciprocal questions in a way that your auditor doesn't feel rebuffed.

8. Talk exclusively about yourself and your interests without complaining, boasting, or boring your companions.

10. Plan two hours of a day and stick to the plan.

11. Set yourself twelve tasks at random: e.g., go twenty miles from home using ordinary conveyance; go 12 hours without food; go eat a meal in the unlikelist place you can find; say nothing all day except in answer to questions; stay up all night and work.

12. From time to time, give yourself a day when you answer "yes" to any reasonable request.

If you'd like to read a more lengthy explanation of the twelve disciplines, or about Brande's explanation for these exercises, go here and search for Chapter 11 - Twelve Disciplines.


Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gretchen-rubin/12-surprising-and-product_b_147769.html

Same gene, different results

Sci­en­tists are learn­ing to their sur­prise that a sin­gle gene very of­ten func­tions dif­fer­ently in dif­fer­ent parts of the body.

Genes gen­er­ally work by pro­duc­ing some mol­e­cule that serves a giv­en func­tion in the body. How­ev­er, sci­en­tists have long known one gene can pro­duce slightly dif­fer­ent forms of the same mol­e­cule, by skip­ping or in­clud­ing cer­tain al­ter­na­tive bits of ge­net­ic code.

The new re­search in­di­cates this phe­nom­e­non, known as al­ter­na­tive splic­ing, is far more prev­a­lent and varies more be­tween tis­sues than pre­vi­ously be­lieved. Nearly all hu­man genes, about 94 per­cent, gen­er­ate more than one form of their prod­ucts, re­search­ers re­ports in the Nov. 2 on­line edi­tion of the re­search jour­nal Na­ture.

“A dec­ade ago, al­ter­na­tive splic­ing of a gene was con­sid­ered un­usu­al, ex­otic… it turns out that’s not true at al­l,” said Chris­to­pher Burge, sen­ior au­thor of the pa­per and a bi­olo­g­ist at the Mas­sa­chu­setts In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy.

Hu­man genes typ­ic­ally con­tain sev­er­al “ex­ons,” or DNA se­quences that code for ami­no acids, the build­ing blocks of large mol­e­cules called pro­teins. A sin­gle gene can pro­duce mul­ti­ple se­quences of ami­no acids, de­pend­ing on which ex­ons are in­clud­ed in the in­struc­tions that trav­el from the gene to a cel­l’s pro­tein-build­ing ma­chin­ery.

Two dif­fer­ent forms of the same pro­tein, known as iso­forms, can have dif­fer­ent, even op­po­site func­tions. For ex­am­ple, one pro­tein may set in mo­tion chains of ev­ents that lead cells to com­mit su­i­cide when nec­es­sary. A close rel­a­tive of the same pro­tein may in­stead pro­mote long­er cell sur­viv­al.

Source: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/081102_genes

Mind-Reading Game Headset to Hit Market

March 7, 2008 -- Imagine controlling a video game by thought alone. Two weeks ago at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Emotiv Systems showcased a new device, the Epoc, designed to help you do just that.

While Emotiv's futuristic, dueling-octopus looking headset will initially be developed for video games, it could eventually be used in medicine, virtual reality, robotics, education and many other areas.

The technology is based on electroencephalography, more commonly known as EEG. EEG has been around for over 100 years and is currently used to study sleep patterns and epilepsy by analyzing electrical activity in the brain. Until recently, though, EEG readings were regarded as too broad for most applications.

The breakthrough, notes Emotiv Systems' President Tan Le, is in the software algorithm that decodes a person's thoughts by analyzing the electrical impulses in the brain.

Many brain signals originate deep inside the brain and radiate outward. By time the signal reaches the outside of the brain, or cerebral cortex, the brain can appear to be firing randomly.


Source: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/03/07/mind-control-games.html

Helmet to Convey Messages by Thought

Oct. 13, 2008 -- Vocal cords were overrated anyway. A new Army grant aims to create email or voice mail and send it by thought alone. No need to type an email, dial a phone or even speak a word.

Known as synthetic telepathy, the technology is based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalograph, or EEG. Similar technology is being marketed as a way to control video games by thought.

"I think that this will eventually become just another way of communicating," said Mike D'Zmura, from the University of California, Irvine and the lead scientist on the project.

"It will take a lot of research, and a lot of time, but there are also a lot of commercial applications, not just military applications," he said.

The idea of communicating by thought alone is not a new one. In the 1960s, a researcher strapped an EEG to his head and, with some training, could stop and start his brain's alpha waves to compose Morse code messages.

Source: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/10/13/thought-helmet.html