Stanford Issues Findings from Cognitive and Brain Experts Urging Consumer Caution…

Stanford Issues Findings from Cognitive and Brain Experts Urging Consumer Caution on Memory Fitness Products.

“Fear of memory loss, mental impairment and Alzheimer’s disease lead many consumers to search for products — from supplements to software — that claim to ward off such ailments,” Laura L. Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, said. “Such products are becoming more prolific, but this burgeoning industry is completely unregulated and the claims can
range from reasonable though untested, to blatantly false. It is important for consumers to proceed with caution before buying into many of these product claims. There is no magic bullet solution for cognitive decline.”

By Stanford Center on Longevity (Reuters)

Read More Here

Without a guide humans walk in circles

Scientists have confirmed the popular belief that without anything to guide them humans really do walk in circles.

It suggests we shouldn’t trust our senses when lost.

The research, originally commissioned by a popular science TV program in Germany, is published in the journal Current Biology.

By Nicky Phillips (ABC Science)

Read More Here

Antidepressants, Bipolar Disorder and the Chemical Enslavement

With antidepressants, deeply depressed adults were targeted first. When that market was saturated, drug companies began selling the idea that antidepressants were “happy pills,” suitable for use in not merely serious depression states, but even as “depression prevention!” (So-called “early intervention,” where you use antidepressant drugs in perfectly healthy people in order to “prevent” depression from appearing.)

By Mike Adams (Natural News)

Read More Here

Ray Kurzweil about Singularity and Technology

The Singularity Summit 2009

Suggested by Pocholo Peralta (Plato Online)

The Singularity Summit is the premier dialog on the Singularity.

The first Singularity Summit was held at Stanford in 2006 to further understanding and discussion about the Singularity concept and the future of human technological progress. It was founded as a venue for leading thinkers to explore the subject, whether scientist, enthusiast, or skeptic.

Since 2006, the scope of this dialog has expanded dramatically. In 2008, the Singularity entered mainstream consideration. IEEE Spectrum, a sober and mainstream technology publication, issued a special report on the Singularity, and Intel CTO Justin Rattner remarked that “we’re making steady progress toward the Singularity” during his keynote to 2,000 people at the Intel Developer Forum. What was once a relatively unknown concept is now being discussed in corporate board rooms.

We invite you to join our extraordinary group of visionaries in business, science, technology, design, and the arts, as our community explores this exciting topic. Your participation offers a world of powerful ideas, a unique networking opportunity, and access to an exclusive directory of your peers.

We hope you will join us October 3rd.

Find out more about the Summit here

It’s Too Good to Be True!

One of the most prolific clichés in our culture is:

“Well, you know, if it sounds too good to be true, then it is!”

Yes, I know. I know why this precaution is so popular. I know why we let people get away with such a limiting pronouncement-over and over again! I know why we buy into such a dead end deal.

We’re scared. Or is it “scarred?”

It’s both.

By Keith Varnum (Healthy Wealthy Wise)

Read More Here

Spatial neglect not all in the mind

An international research team has used lotto to show that the condition ‘spatial neglect’, which affects how we see the world, isn’t connected to how is it is imagined.

The findings to be published in the journal Cortex, suggest that the way we represent the world in our heads can operate independently of how it is actually perceived.

By Annabel McGilvray (ABC Science)

Read More Here

Worth The Effort? Not If You’re Depressed

New research indicates that decreased cravings for pleasure may be at the root of a core symptom of major depressive disorder. The research is in contrast to the long-held notion that those suffering from depression lack the ability to enjoy rewards, rather than the desire to seek them.

By Science Daily

Read More Here

The mind’s eye scans like a spotlight

You’re meeting a friend in a crowded cafeteria. Do your eyes scan the room like a roving spotlight, moving from face to face, or do you take in the whole scene, hoping that your friend’s face will pop out at you? And what, for that matter, determines how fast you can scan the room?

Researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory say you are more likely to scan the room, jumping from face to face as you search for your friend. In addition, the timing of these jumps appears to be determined by waves of activity in the brain that act as a clock. The study, which appears in the Aug. 13 issue of the journal Neuron, sheds new light on a long-standing debate among neuroscientists over how the visual system picks out an object of interest in a complex scene.

By Deborah Halber (MIT News)

Read More Here

Beep, beep, oops, what was I doing?

“That blasted siren. I can’t focus.” That reaction to undesired distraction may signal a person’s low working-memory capacity, according to a new study.

Based on a study of 84 students divided into four separate experiments, University of Oregon researchers found that students with high memory storage capacity were clearly better able to ignore distractions and stay focused on their assigned tasks.

By University of Oregon (Lab Spaces)

Read More Here

Be aware of your thoughts

Have you ever thought about the fact that there is never a moment when you are not thinking—that whatever happens in this world begins with a thought? Here are five simple steps to help you manage your thoughts and achieve success and happiness in life.

By Anil Bhatnagar (Life Positive)

Read More Here

Body Swap Illusion Tricks Mind

Shaking hands with yourself is an amusing out-of-body experience. The illusion of having your stomach slashed with a kitchen knife, not so much.

Both sensations, however, felt real to most participants in a Swedish science project exploring how people can be tricked into the false perception of owning another body.

By Karl Ritter (Discovery News)

Read More Here

Artificial Neural Networks

Defining intelligence is tough. There is no absolute criterion for measuring intelligence. What makes the task more complex is that it is not known if there is a form of ‘intelligence’ that can solve all types of problems, or do we need different types of intelligence for different fields.

By Hassam (Hubpages)

Read More Here

Video Player Creativity: The Mind, Machines, and Mathematics: Public Debate

Two of the sharpest minds in the computing arena spar gamely, but neither scores a knockdown in one of the oldest debates around: whether machines may someday achieve consciousness. (NB: Viewers may wish to brush up on the work of computer pioneer Alan Turing and philosopher John Searle in preparation for this video.)

By MIT World

Watch the Video Here

Training the mind changes the brain

Whenever we talk about positive interventions, we are assuming that people are malleable. William James wrote about intentional activity to change habits in ways that make life better. That’s the premise of books like The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky: that research has shown that people can make lasting changes in their level of happiness, but it requires action, effort and persistence.

Richard DavidsonThat’s what psychologists have found. Neuroscientists are finding the same thing. Richard Davidson is a neuroscientist who uses brain imaging to study behavior and emotion. (See his site for a more technically correct description of what he does.) He claims, “Social and emotional learning changes the brain,” and “We can change the brain by training the mind.” Social and emotional learning is a process by which people become better at understanding and managing emotions and learn how emotions impact the choices they make, the relationships they have, and their outlook in life.

By Kathryn Britton (Positive Psychology News Daily)

Read More Here

Free Fall Experiment – Time Perception

Perceiving Touch And Your Self Outside Of Your Body

When you feel you are being touched, usually someone or something is physically touching you and you perceive that your “self” is located in the same place as your body. Neuroscientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, investigated the relationship between bodily self-consciousness and the way touch stimuli are spatially represented in humans. They found that sensations of touch can be felt and mislocalised towards where a “virtual” body is seen. These findings will provide new avenues for the animation of virtual worlds and machines.

By Science Daily

Read More Here

How Much of Your Memory Is True?

These recent insights into memory are part of a larger about-face in neuroscience research. Until recently, long-term memories were thought to be physically etched into our brain, permanent and unchanging. Now it is becoming clear that memories are surprisingly vulnerable and highly dynamic. In the lab they can be flicked on or dimmed with a simple dose of drugs. “For a hundred years, people thought memory was wired into the brain,” Nader says. “Instead, we find it can be rewired—you can add false information to it, make it stronger, make it weaker, and possibly even make it disappear.” Nader and Brunet are not the only ones to make this observation. Other scientists probing different parts of the brain’s memory machinery are similarly finding that memory is inherently flexible.

By Kathleen McGowan (Discover Magazine)

Read More Here

Language may be key to theory of mind

How blind and deaf people approach a cognitive test regarded as a milestone in human development has provided clues to how we deduce what others are thinking.

“Hearing language is particularly important for understanding others, while other kinds of experience, such as the visual modality, are less important,” says Alison Gopnik, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

By Anil Ananthaswamy (New Scientist)

Read More Here

Near-death myth alive and kicking

Most of us have a reasonable idea of what the near-death experience (NDE) is. It’s said to happen when you are in the actual process of dying, and you hear strange noises, then feelings of blissful peace and joy sweep over you.

You then float out of your body, seeing it from above, and head towards a tunnel and you enter the tunnel. At the far end of the tunnel is a bright light, but as you get close to the light, you are met by someone, already dead, who tells you that this is not yet your time, and regretfully, you are plunged back to our prosaic planet with other Earthlings.

In a nutshell, the common beliefs are that the NDE happens only to those who are dying, and that it is also proof of an afterlife. But neither belief is correct.

By Karl S. Kruszelnicki (ABC Science)

Read More Here

Culture influences brain function, study shows

People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging study of its kind.

Psychological research has established that American culture, which values the individual, emphasizes the independence of objects from their contexts, while East Asian societies emphasize the collective and the contextual interdependence of objects. Behavioral studies have shown that these cultural differences can influence memory and even perception. But are they reflected in brain activity patterns?

By Cathryn M. Delude (MIT News)

Read More Here

Can Brain Scans Read Your Mind?

Can neuroscience read people’s minds? Some researchers, and some new businesses, are banking on a brain imaging technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal hidden thoughts, such as lies, truths or deep desires.

New research by neuroscientists at UCLA and Rutgers University provides evidence that fMRI can be used in certain circumstances to determine what a person is thinking. At the same time, the research suggests that highly accurate “mind reading” using fMRI is still far from reality. The research is scheduled to be published in the October 2009 issue of the journal Psychological Science.

By Lockergnome

Read More Here

Our Metallic Reflection: Considering Future Human-android Interactions

Everyday human interaction is not what you would call perfect, so what if there was a third party added to the mix – like a metallic version of us? In a new article in Perspectives on Psychological Science, psychologist Neal J. Roese and computer scientist Eyal Amir from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign investigate what human-android interactions may be like 50 years into the future.

By Science Daily

Read More Here

Bitterness touted as sanctioned mental disorder

Bitterness should be classified an official brain illness, according to psychiatrists who say people who experience prolonged bitterness over a breakup or conflict at work are “ill” and need treatment.

They are proposing that “post traumatic embitterment disorder” be included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, psychiatry’s official catalogue of mental dysfunction.

By Sharon Kirkey (Canada.com)

Read More Here

Is Compulsion to Amputate Healthy Limbs Mind or Matter?

One day, after years of agony, an Australian man took a large quantity of dry ice and intentionally damaged his left leg, so that a surgeon would have to amputate it.

The action was intentional and the man, Robert Vickers, described the feeling of waking up in the hospital without his leg as “absolute ecstasy.” He’s one of a small number of people who have what psychiatrists have come to call body integrity identity disorder in which patients report the desire to have one or more of their limbs amputated because the extremities don’t feel like they “belong” to their bodies.

The disorder is the subject of a debate between psychiatrists and neuroscientists about whether the brain physiology causes the psychiatric condition or whether the causality runs in the other direction. New research by both sides has yielded fresh ammunition for both interpretations, highlighting how difficult it is to separate biological from psychological phenomena.

By Alexis Madrigal (Wired)

Read More Here

Mind Over Matter: Effective Chronic Pain Control Techniques

Chronic pain is not a simple sensation, but rather chronic pain is strongly influenced by the ways in which the brain processes the pain signals. Importantly, chronic pain can provoke strong emotional reactions, such as fear, anxiety or even terror, depending on what the individual believes about the pain signals.

If there is any good news with chronic pain, it is that to a certain extent the brain can learn how to manage the sensation of pain. Ideally, use of chronic pain management techniques outlined here can help people dealing with chronic pain feel more in control of their situation and less dependent on pain medications.

By Andrew Block (Spine Health)

Read More Here

The Brain Adapts in a Blink to Compensate for Missing Information

The human brain has long been known to perceive things that aren’t there—from phantom limbs to patterns in chaos. But a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) shows for the first time that it is surprisingly quick to bend reality when normal perception is disrupted. The results were published yesterday in The Journal of Neuroscience.

By Katherine Harmon (Scientific American)

Read More Here

Mind’s Clock Reacts as Two-Stage Rocket to Time Differences

The mind’s clock is a genetically inherent molecular pacemaker, which provides our entire body with a 24 hour rhythm. Natural fluctuations, such as the ones caused by season changes, can be handled easily by the mind’s clock, but our modern lifestyle stretches this natural balance to its very limits. An imbalanced mind clock can sometimes lead to serious dysfunction

, and cause illnesses such as depression. In most cases, however, the mind’s clock adjusts to the new circumstances; we know from experience that a jet lag disappears within a few days. How does the mind’s clock achieve this?  The mind’s clock makes use of a two-stage mechanism in adapting to artificial time differences caused by, for instance, a transatlantic flight or working irregular shifts. In adapting to the time difference, the two halves of the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the brain, where the mind’s clock is located, play very different parts.

By (Universiteit Leiden)

Read More Here

The experience of time

Suggested by Pocholo Peralta (Plato On-line)

Time research has been a neglected topic in the cognitive neurosciences of the last decades: how do humans perceive time? How and where in the brain is time processed? This introductory paper provides an overview of the empirical and theoretical papers on the psychological and neural basis of time perception collected in this theme issue. Contributors from the fields of cognitive psychology, psychiatry, neurology and neuroanatomy tackle this complex question with a variety of techniques ranging from psychophysical and behavioural experiments to pharmacological interventions and functional neuroimaging. Several (and some new) models of how and where in the brain time is processed are presented in this unique collection of recent research that covers experienced time intervals from milliseconds to minutes. We hope this volume to be conducive in developing a better understanding of the sense of time as part of complex set of brain–body factors that include cognitive, emotional and body states.

By Marc Wittmann and Virginie van Wassenhove (The Royal Society)

Read More Here

Brain Twister

BrainTwister is a cross-platform application (for Macintosh and Windows*) consisting of several cognitive training tasks in different variants. The training paradigms that are available in BrainTwister are based on various research projects carried out by the Department for Experimental Psychology and Neuropsychology at the University of Bern, Switzerland. The training tasks can be used for participants over the whole lifespan in either a single or in a group setting. There are no requirements of computer-related skills in order to train with these tasks. BrainTwister generates detailed training data for each training task and allows to visualize and print the obtained training results.

Division of Experimental Psychology and Neuropsychology

Read More Here