Advice vs. experience: Genes predict learning style Researchers at Brown University have found that specific genetic variations can predict how persistently people will believe advice they are given, even when it is contradicted by experience. The story they tell in a paper in the April 20 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience is one of the byplay between two brain regions that have different takes on how incoming information should influence thinking. The prefrontal cortex (PFC), the executive area of the brain, considers and stores incoming instructions such as the advice of other people (e.g., "Don't sell those stocks.") The striatum, buried deeper in the brain, is where people process experience to learn what to do (e.g., "Those stocks often go up after I sell them.") Researchers including Michael Frank, assistant professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown, have studied the striatum intensely, but have been curious about the effect that the advice-influenced PFC has on its function.
10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong Is your gym locker room crawling with drug-resistant bacteria? Is the guy with the bulging backpack a suicide bomber? And what about that innocent-looking arugula: Will pesticide residue cause cancer, or do the leaves themselves harbor E. coli? These days, it seems like everything is risky, and worry itself is bad for your health. The human brain is exquisitely adapted to respond to risk—uncertainty about the outcome of actions. Still, uncertainty unbalances us, pitching us into anxiety and producing an array of cognitive distortions. I. Risk and emotion are inseparable. Fear feels like anything but a cool and detached computation of the odds. As a result of these evolved emotional algorithms, ancient threats like spiders and snakes cause fear out of proportion to the real danger they pose, while experiences that should frighten us—like fast driving—don't. II. Fear skews risk analysis in predictable ways. After 9/11, 1.4 million people changed their holiday travel plans to avoid flying.
BEING CRAZY IS NOISY | More Intelligent Life - StumbleUpon John Sterns is diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder (a co-diagnosis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder), chronic depression and chronic anxiety. He describes a lifetime of fighting demons ... Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE I. I hear voices (“auditory hallucinations”, technically). But the most persistent and long-standing of my voices, which began when I was eight years old, pounds on my left shoulder like a jackhammer, repeating, “I hate myself. Before my treatment, hospitalisations and incarcerations, these voices were all separate and distinct, with individual sounds, tones, rhythms and pitches. II. I immediately hated Kevin. III. Art therapy required me to sit around a table with seven other inmates and a social worker, and stare at a blank piece of paper and a torn box of broken crayons. The next day brought another art therapy session and once again I turned in a blank sheet of white paper. “John,” she began ominously, “you are failing art therapy.” I misheard her, clearly.
Sharpened focus: Improving the numbers, utility of medical imaging The idea of probing the body's interior with radiation stretches back to experiments with X rays in the 1800s, but more than a century later, images taken with radiological scans still are not considered reliable enough to, for example, serve as the sole indicator of the efficacy of a cancer treatment. Lisa Karam, a biochemist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and a few dozen of her colleagues across North America have set out to change that. The group of radiology specialists from a number of institutions has recently published a pair of papers that Karam describes as part of a major effort to turn medical imaging -- CT scans, PET scans, MRIs, X rays and the like -- into a quantitative research tool, one that produces reliable numbers. The many coauthors of the two papers are members of a subgroup of the Radiological Society of North America called the Quantitative Imaging Biomarker Alliance (QIBA).
Personality test based on Jung - Myers-Briggs typology A good and stable relationship between partners is conducive to a happy marriage, and we often don't know what the underlying cause of our conflicts is. The ability to assess the likelihood of a healthy long term relationship is one of the main challenges in dating and matchmaking. Jung Marriage Test™ addresses this challenge. Extraversion - Introversion Sensing - Intuition Thinking - Feeling And the fourth criterion added by Isabel Briggs Myers *: Judging-Perceiving The different combinations of these four criteria define sixteen possible personality types. ENFP - Extravert iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving Once you know the type formula and strengths of the preferences of both partners (or prospective partners), it is possible to calculate the index of compatibility (MatchIndex) between the partners. A high MatchIndex ensures a good and stable long-term relationship.
Lucid Dreaming | Cracked.com - StumbleUpon By lucid dreaming, you can gain complete control over the one place that no one will ever care about: your imagination. Just The Facts Lucid dreaming is a scientifically proven phenomenon. While some get into lucid dreaming in order to treat chronic nightmares, or to experience all facets of the human experience, approximately 99.8% of people use it as a tool for cheap and interactive 3D porn. How to Take Control of Your Dreams: So, you've doubled your weight over the past five years, you own a record-shattering collection of greasy pizza boxes and broken aspirations, and you're beginning to consider installing a toilet bowl in the place of your computer chair? In order to even begin to get control over your dreams, there are a few preliminary tasks you must complete. Your fake and imagined rendition of Yvonne won't care how much your cry before, during, and afterward! The Tasks: 1. "What?" Calm down! 2. Your dreams are not unique, and that is a wonderful thing. Wake Initiated Lucid Dreams:
Mind-Controlled Musical Instrument Helps Paralysis Patients Rehabilitate Music Through the Mind Eduardo Miranda Paralysis patients could play music with their minds , using a new brain-control interface that senses brain impulses and translates them into musical notes. Users must teach themselves how to associate brain signals with specific tasks, causing neuronal activity that the brain scanners can pick up. Then they can make music. It’s a pretty unique use of brain-computer interfaces, which are already being used to do things like drive cars , control robots and play video games. Patients with neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s can use music to walk to a rhythm or even to trigger memories or emotions. Like other brain-computer interfaces, a user calibrates the system — and his or her brain — by learning to associate certain brain signals with a stimulus. By varying levels of concentration, she learned to vary the amplitude of the EEG, which allowed her to choose among the different notes, like striking piano keys. [ Nature News ]
The Key to Understanding Body Language Since writing “ What Every Body is Saying ,” the question I am most often asked is, “What nonverbal behaviors should I be looking for and are they different at home, at work, or in relationships?” Perhaps this will help to clarify the matter. Somewhere in our hominid past, as with most animals, we developed the ability to communicate nonverbally and that still remains our primary method of communication, especially when it comes to emotions. Charles Darwin first and Paul Ekman much later, have written about the universality of emotions in part because, as Joseph Ledoux has pointed out, these and other survival behaviors are governed by our very elegant limbic brain. The governance of homeostasis, procreation, emotion, spotting and reacting to threats, as well as assuring our survival, are all heavy responsibilities of the limbic system. Our needs, feelings, thoughts, and intentions are processed by the limbic brain and expressed in our body language. Darwin, C. (1872). Ekman, P. (2003).
5 Psych Experiments That Sounded Fun (Until They Started) So you see an ad in the paper from a lab looking for test subjects. They say they want to study the effects of getting high, or eating too much, or having sex. Oh, and they'll pay you to do all of those things. Preposterous, right? The Have Sex For Money Experiment Wanted: a healthy, sexually functional male to have sex with a woman. Yes, that happened, and yes, it was legal. No, he needed to study the humping first hand. For the subjects, it offered all of the benefits of prostitution without the constant threat of genital sores and being locked in a rape dungeon that normally goes along with it. The Harsh Reality First, you found out that these people would be watching you the whole time: That's Masters and Johnson. Putting the "strange" in "sex with a total stranger," partners were matched randomly (if you still think that sounds awesome, the next time you're in line at Burger King, imagine getting randomly matched up for sex with any one of the people around you). This won't help.
Silicon Chips Wired With Nerve Cells Could Enable New Brain/Machine Interfaces It's reminiscent of Cartman's runaway Trapper Keeper notebook in that long-ago episode of South Park, but researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison may be scratching the surface of a new kind of brain/machine interface by creating computer chips that are wired together with living nerve cells. A team there has found that mouse nerve cells will connect with each other across a network of tiny tubes threaded through a semiconductor material. It's not exactly clear at this point how the nerve cells are functioning, but what is clear is that the cells seem to have an affinity for the tiny tubes, and that alone has some interesting implications. To create the nerve-chip hybrid, the researchers created tubes of layered silicon and germanium that are large enough for the nerve cells' tendrils to navigate but too small for the actual body of the cell to pass through. What isn't clear is whether or not the cells are actually communicating with each other they way they would naturally.
Are Role-Playing Gamers Insane? For the benefit of my readers who don't get out much: Role playing games are a popular form of amusement in which players assume the identity of fictional characters and embark upon adventures. Some of the parameters of these adventures are specified by the game one is playing, but these games also allow for lots of imaginative improvisation by the players. When I began researching role-playing games for my book Caught in Play , I read stories about players who had gone over the edge and had been swallowed up in the imaginary world of the game. I also heard such stories from many of the role-players I interviewed. Why tell these stories, then? This in turn raises the question of why so many role-players are so eager to claim that they have no problem with maintaining the boundaries of reality. But none of this means that role players have a tenuous grip on reality. To learn more, visit Peter G.
6 Weird Things That Influence Bad Behavior More Than Laws Diligent readers of Cracked already know that our brains can be tricked by just about anything: manipulated images, our birth order and shiny things. But we can also be tricked into being generous, good people by our surroundings. Of course, it goes the other way, too. Your morality at any given moment can be influenced by ... Obviously, we are more honest when someone (or a security camera) is watching us, but studies have actually shown that if any depiction of an eye is in view, even if it is cartoonish or nonhuman, it makes people less likely to cheat or to behave immorally. Put the bong down until the article is over. In one experiment, all a professor had to do to drastically influence the actions of her colleagues was change the clip art on a piece of paper. A picture of a cartoon eye was placed at the top of the reminder notice, and the amount of money left in the honesty box tripled. Just to be sure it wasn't a coincidence, the next week the eye was replaced with a flower.
Your flaws are my pain: Experience of vicarious embarrassment is linked to empathy Today, there is increasing exposure of individuals to a public audience. Television shows and the Internet provide platforms for this and, at times, allow observing others' flaws and norm transgressions. Regardless of whether the person observed realizes their flaw or not, observers in the audience experience vicarious embarrassment. For the first time, such vicarious embarrassment experiences as well as their neural basis have been investigated in research published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE. In two consecutive studies, using behavioral measures and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the authors show that the experience of vicarious embarrassment is linked to empathy and neural activations in brain areas constituting the affective component of the pain matrix: the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula (Hein & Singer, 2008; Singer et al., 2004). "Today, nearly any aspect of one's personal life may reach a broad audience.