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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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Measuring Stress is a Matter of Perception

No matter what you learn about stress, there remains one critical fact to keep in mind. Above all, stress is a disorder of perception.

It is not the actual degree of stress that determines its impact on health and well-being, but the perceived degree. What is stressful to one person may be ho-hum or even energizing to another.

There are obvious limits here, at least for most of us. Put someone in combat or in a persistently and intensely abusive situation, and the power of perception to create a positive spin substantially diminishes.

Nonetheless, there is evidence that, even in extreme circumstances, some folks fare far better than most. Their “secret” appears to be the capacity to mentally reframe what is happening around them into a less vile and more manageable scenario.

By Philip Chard (redorbit)

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How Your Mind Really Works

How is it that your mind is capable of handling new situations you’ve never previously encountered? How do you solve a problem you’ve never solved before? Is this just the magic of consciousness, or is there an underlying process — or algorithm — your mind uses behind the scenes to deal with the unique experiences you encounter each day? And if there is a process, how can you use it to improve your ability to think?

By Steve Pavlina (StevePavlina.com)

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The Mind and Choice

We live in an age where we are now exploring the mind and personal choice in society.  Living in a society that produces technology that can read into the mind to determine what a person is thinking, and moving towards a future where even our desires might be determinable by machine.  There is no doubt that these new discoveries that are coming to the forefront will bring about issues relating to mind control and manipulation of personal freedom.  People are panicking at the thought of loosing the ability to choose their own goals and the things in which they wish to experience in life and also personal thoughts.

The true question to ask in this situation is, ‘is it ever possible to loose control of the mind?’

By Stacey T Pollock

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Self Perception

Our self perception determines our behavior – if we think we are inadequate, we act that way. If we think we are splendid, we act that way.

The pathway forward towards happiness and authenticity is not determined by something outside ourselves. It’s determined by our own thinking, our own inner process, our self perception.

So if our way forward feels blocked, it is blocked by the way we perceive ourselves, by our fears and how they cause us to act toward ourselves. We take forward with us our unhealed inner negative perceptions and recreate the same situations over and over.

By (Authentic-Self.com)

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David Meyer and Tendzin Choegyal: Can computers have consciousness?

Many people are questioning today what consciousness really is. How will this concept be defined? Watch this interesting video that highlights some of the issues:

Bending Time’s Arrow

Psychologists suspect that this space-time continuum may be more than a social convention, an artifice that we all simply agree to. Perhaps the brain has wired our perceptions of space and time together for some reason. A team of researchers has been exploring this question in the laboratory, using an unusual pair of spectacles.

By Wray Herbert (We’re Only Human)

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Scientist: Humans Can See Into Future

Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist.

It’s nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur.

And the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions.

By Jeanna Bryner (FOX News)

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Political views ‘all in the mind’

Scientists studying US voters say our political views may be an integral part of our physiological makeup.

Their research, published in the journal Science, indicates that people who are sensitive to fear or threat are likely to support a right wing agenda.

Those who perceived less danger in a series of images and sounds were more inclined to support liberal policies.

The authors believe their findings may help to explain why voters’ minds are so hard to change.

By Matt McGrath (BBC News)

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Don’t Believe Everything You See Online

Why is our first impulse to believe something that we see, read or hear? Especially if it is in print, online or comes in an “officially” looking packaging?

How do we teach ourselves and our students, that another impulse has to follow the first one immediately: Evaluate…critical thinking… learn to listen for and to your own “gut feeling”… cross referencing…

By Langwitches

Read the article and watch the interesting videos here

Gullibility goes a long way, especially when people follow sites that are fictitious and when they get caught up in the hype that is associated with marketing strategies.  Take a look at this site linked to the upcoming movie of 2012, called the IHC, which claims to be an organization that is working towards the continuity of the human species.  Already a lot of gullible people have signed up for their lottery ticket from all around the world.  I’m sure Sony Pictures is having a good laugh at their expense.  This just shows how marketing and media manipulation can go a long way, and how truly gullible a lot of people really are.  Don’t believe all that you read, see and hear!

Follow through to the website here

Brain Time

The days of thinking of time as a river—evenly flowing, always advancing—are over. Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain and is shockingly easy to manipulate experimentally. We all know about optical illusions, in which things appear different from how they really are; less well known is the world of temporal illusions. When you begin to look for temporal illusions, they appear everywhere. In the movie theater, you perceive a series of static images as a smoothly flowing scene. Or perhaps you’ve noticed when glancing at a clock that the second hand sometimes appears to take longer than normal to move to its next position—as though the clock were momentarily frozen.

By David M. Eagleman (Edge)

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Inside the Mind of a Kid Genius

Tori has been different for as long as she can remember. When she was five, she scored more than 180 on an IQ test. It’s estimated that one in a million children is that intelligent.

Tori’s brain has outdeveloped her growth since birth. At three years old, she felt six. At six, she felt 12.

Her mother, Margaret, likens her daughter’s brain to a sponge: Tori absorbs information quickly, making connections between disparate ideas as she files them away.

By Brooke Lea Foster (Washingtonian.com)

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Positive Is Negative

Suggested by Pocholo Peralta (Plato On-line)

Despite what all those self-help books say, repeating positive statements apparently does not help people with low self-esteem feel better about themselves. In fact, it tends to make them feel worse, according to new research.

In one of their studies involving 32 male and 36 female psychology students, the researchers found that repeating the phrase did not improve the mood of those who had low self-esteem, as measured by a standard test. They actually ended up feeling worse, and the gap between those with high and low self-esteem widened.

By Shankar Vedantam (Science Digest:Washington Post)

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What is Mind Mapping?

A mind map is a graphical way to represent ideas and concepts. It is a visual thinking tool that helps structuring information, helping you to better analyze, comprehend, synthesize, recall and generate new ideas.

By Luciano Passuello (Litemind)

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Illusions In the Mind Create Irrational Fears

People will often refer to their emotions or fears as irrational. But if we learn how emotions are created, we can see that they are not irrational. They are actually the practical result of what the mind and imagination are doing. It is what the mind and imagination are doing that are completely irrational. Or I should say fabricated in a virtual reality of illusions.

When we understand how the mind creates illusions through stories and how emotions are created from believing these scenarios, then we see that emotions make complete sense. Once we understand this, we no longer fear our emotions. Emotions are just a result of the mind telling stories without our direction over the outcome. To gain self mastery over the mind and the direction of the imagination is how we will get a handle on our emotions.

By Gary van Warmerdam (Pathway to Happiness)

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Paradigms, idols, and the mind in matter

It doesn’t mean paradigms are irrational, only that they are made up of things besides evidence–things like the values of the relevant community, which lie outside the bounds of science. The bottom line, according to Kuhn, is that there is no irrefutable proof to support the choice of one paradigm over another.

It’s helpful to keep this in mind when thinking about Descartes’s paradigm. Viewing matter as devoid of mind is a paradigm choice. It’s not an irrefutable fact about the world. It is a useful model that has made possible incredible technological advances–like the communication we’re using now.

By Priscilla Stuckey, PhD (The Lively Earth)

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Mental processing is continuous, not like a computer

The theory that the mind works like a computer, in a series of distinct stages, was an important steppingstone in cognitive science, but it has outlived its usefulness, concludes a new Cornell University study. Instead, the mind should be thought of more as working the way biological organisms do: as a dynamic continuum, cascading through shades of grey.

By Susan S. Lang (Cornell University)

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World Science Festival: The Psychology of Time

Suggested by Pocholo Peralta (Plato On-line)

Time is a constant in modern life. We waste it. We obsessively track it. We continually wonder “where it goes.” We run out of it. We never have enough of it. Neurologist Oliver Sacks, psychologist Daniel Gilbert, and psychologist and neuroscientist Warren Meck from Duke University gathered Saturday evening at the World Science Festival’s “Time the Familiar Stranger” event for a discussion on our most precious commodity. They addressed both complex questions such as the existentialism and relativity of “the present,” and more mundane topics such as why children must continually ask “are we there yet?” on long car trips.

By Discover Magazine

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The Third Man Theory of Otherworldly Encounters

Some believe it’s a guardian angel. Others say it’s the brain’s way of coping under great duress. Whichever, the experiences are eerily similar: the sense of a presence that encourages, advises and even leads a person out of peril.

“Opinion is divided,” says Geiger. “There’s not a definitive explanation.”

By Nancy J. White (Mind Power News)

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Polymorphic Perception of the Fourth Dimension State – Distortion of time through our perception.

Distortion of time through our perception, the fourth dimension of space, is the area of space that creates our dream state. This reality is polymorphic in nature showing us that perception can be distorted depending on what we are focusing on.

For most people this will be a very difficult subject to grasp for the simple fact that it focuses on a topic that steps outside of our now state of awareness in third dimension to which we call the physical state of awareness.  Third dimension is the space we know as the physical body and the state of which we call human existence.  In this article, however, I will delve into discussing the next level of dimension state of fourth reality perception.  Not only will I attempt to detail it for how it is seen in a perceptional sense but also in a physically constructive manner.

By Stacey T Pollock

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