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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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 brain controls perception of emotional events

What do emotions mean and how do we retain past events in the mind? Such questions have bugged people for long. Now, scientists have found key processes in the brain that control the emotional significance of experiences and how individuals form memories of them.

By Thaindian News

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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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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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Can consciousness be artificially created?

Suggested by Pocholo Peralta (Plato On-line)

Some of the most profound questions in science are also the least tangible.

A physician and cell biologist who won a 1972 Nobel Prize for his work describing the structure of antibodies, Edelman is now obsessed with the enigma of human consciousness—except that he does not see it as an enigma. In Edelman’s grand theory of the mind, consciousness is a biological phenomenon and the brain develops through a process similar to natural selection.

We construct what we call brain-based devices, or BBDs, which will be increasingly useful in understanding how the brain works and modeling the brain. They may also be the beginning of the design of truly intelligent machines.

Article by Susan Kruglinski (Discover Magazine)

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Can the Mind Shape the Brain?

Conventional wisdom holds that the human mind is nothing more than the human brain. This belief derives from materialism. By “materialism” I don’t mean the mania to shop unceasingly at the mall. Rather, I mean the philosophy that material reality is all that there is. Immaterial or spiritual realities are, in this view, simply epiphenomena of the material world.

By Dinesh D’Souza (AOL News)

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How Technology May Soon “Read” Your Mind

How often have you wondered what your spouse is really thinking? Or your boss? Or the guy sitting across from you on the bus? We all take as a given that we’ll never really know for sure. The content of our thoughts is our own – private, secret, and unknowable by anyone else. Until now, that is.

By CBS

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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.

By Kathryn Britton (Positive Psychology News Daily)

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Cognitive enhancers stimulate the mind

What if taking one little pill could give you the boost and focus you need to get everything done, without ever losing steam? WRC-TV’s Doreen Gentzler reports.

By (msnbc)

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All in the mind’s eye

Has anyone ever let their imagination run away with them? For example, we recently had a problem with moths in our house, and for a while afterwards, I was convinced I could see moths everywhere. Luckily, I’m not going mad, as researchers from Vanderbilt University in the US have now proved that what you see with your ‘mind’s eye’ might have a direct impact on what you see back in reality. This is the first study to show that imagining something changes your vision both while you are imagining it and afterwards.

By The Naked Scientists

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Puzzling Optical Illusions that challenge perception and perplex the mind

What you see isn’t always what you get!

Since ancient times, humans have known that immediate perception is not a reading of physical reality. Vision is the most creative act that a human being is capable of. Seeing is depicting the world on the living canvas of our mind. As we depict well only what we really know, our mind is both the canvas and the artist. In this creative process, the eyes represent nothing other than a medium with which our mind interprets and reconstructs our near environment. Some illusions teach us to doubt and to question the many appearances of the reality – they are a kind of school of life!

View Illusions Here

Microsoft mind reading

Not content with running your computer, Microsoft now wants to read your mind too.

The company says that it is hard to properly evaluate the way people interact with computers since questioning them at the time is distracting and asking questions later may not produce reliable answers. “Human beings are often poor reporters of their own actions,” the company says.

By New Scientist

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Happiness Lies Within

As a hypnotherapist, I challenge people to change their thoughts to change their destiny. I believe the whole purpose of this incarnation is to learn to love ourselves first, and then to extend that love to others. Until we really learn to fully love ourselves, we put on a protective shield because we do not feel safe in the world. We create self-imposed limitations to love. The good news is that we can free ourselves from our self-limitations. We can change our mind about how we see the world by getting in touch with our inner spirit. At the core of our being we are love, so there is no need to search for it, just acknowledge it.

(E Not Alone)

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Attention, Memory and the Mind: A Synergy of Psychological, Neuroscientific, and Contemplative Perspectives

Beginning in the twentieth century, science has become the dominant paradigm for understanding the natural world by way of objective, quantitative measurements, using the instruments of technology. The integration of scientific knowledge and technology has vastly contributed to our understanding of the physical world and to improving the human standard of living. Furthermore, over a much longer time period spanning the past 2,500 years, Buddhism has emerged in multiple cultures throughout Asia as the dominant paradigm for understanding the natural world by way of subjective, qualitative observations by way of highly sophisticated meditative training.

By (Mind & Life Institute)

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Debunking Materialism: Mind over matter

The dogma held by most scientists until the 1990’s was that after adolescence the brain cannot be significantly changed. Today this doctrine is buried in the cemetery of scientific dogma. Also dead, but not buried, is materialism.

By Leo Kim (Healing the rift)

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Perception – The reality beyond matter

An interesting video and study on the perception of reality.

Thought Power – Your Thoughts Create Your Reality

Thought power is the key to creating your reality. Everything you perceive in the physical world has its origin in the invisible, inner world of your thoughts and beliefs. To become the master of your destiny, you must learn to control the nature of your dominant, habitual thoughts. By doing so you will be able to attract into your life anything you choose with exact precision as you come to know the Truth that your thoughts create your reality.

By Tania Kotsos (Mind Your Reality)

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Mental Illness: Is it Mind over Matter?

In many respects, mental illness can be overcome with a concerted effort that applies the mind to the task of creating change. The problem for most is they feel overwhelmed by and completely identify with whatever condition has been applied to their particular problem. Does this mean you’ve been diagnosed incorrectly? Not necessarily. It means you have more power over creating change than you might otherwise believe.

By leedman (One man can make a difference)

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Mind over matter

Mind over matter is a topic that has at times left me wondering if I am responsible for all that happens in life.

That is not the limited thinking we want to concern ourselves with. When we worry about weather it’s our fault that we did not heal our selves we are missing the point.

By Successful Mind Training

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Mind May Affect Machines

For 26 years, strange conversations have been taking place in a basement lab at Princeton University.

No one can hear them, but they can see their apparent effect: balls that go in certain directions on command, water fountains that seem to rise higher with a wish and drums that quicken their beat.

Yet no one hears the conversations because they occur between the minds of experimenters and the machines they will to action.

Wired Website

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Mind over Matter Experiments (Psychokinesis, Telekinesis)

Part 1

Part 2

Color Perception Shifts From Right Brain to Left

Learning the name of a color changes the part of the brain that handles color perception.

Infants perceive color in the right hemisphere of the brain, researchers report, while adults do the job in the brain’s left hemisphere.

Discovery Channel

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‘Mind’s eye’ influences visual perception

Letting your imagination run away with you may actually influence how you see the world. New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery –what we see with the “mind’s eye”– directly impacts our visual perception.

The School for Self Healing

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Inside the mind of an autistic savant

Autistic savant Daniel Tammet shot to fame when he set a European record for the number of digits of pi he recited from memory (22,514). For afters, he learned Icelandic in a week. But unlike many savants, he’s able to tell us how he does it. We could all unleash extraordinary mental abilities by getting inside the savant mind, he tells Celeste Biever.

New Scientist

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Why the Mind Wanders

Mind-wandering is that pervasive psychological phenomenon in which an individual loses focus on something he is supposed to be paying attention to. Can this mental mystery be solved?

With the many “How To” guides sprouting all around, I have thought of coming up with my own pointers on….. wait, I forgot. Oh, okay that’s it – “How to Keep Your Mind from Wandering”. Sounds very challenging, don’t you think?

By Bernadette Dalao (Triond)

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