Psychopaths have faulty brain connections, scientists find

Suggested by Pocholo Peralta (Plato Online)

Psychopaths who kill and rape have faulty connections between the part of the brain dealing with emotions and that which handles impulses and decision-making, scientists have found.

In a study of psychopaths who had committed murder, manslaughter, multiple rape, strangulation and false imprisonment, the British scientists found that roads linking the two crucial brain areas had “potholes,” while those of non-psychopaths were in good shape.

By Kate Kelland (Reuters)

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Playing computer games improves brain power of older adults, claim scientists.

Psychologists discovered that playing video games exercised the mind and improved memory and alertness.

It also reversed “cognitive” decline making the brain more agile, allowing it to carry out and switch between tasks more quickly.

Previous studies have shown that elderly brains improve during the playing of video games but this is the first to prove that the benefits remain for weeks afterwards and can transfer to everyday tasks.

By Richard Alleyne (Telegraph.co.uk)

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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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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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Daydreamers might solve problems faster

Suggested by Pocholo Peralta (Plato On-line)

Contrary to common opinion, daydreaming is not slacking off because when the brain wanders it is working even harder to solve problems, new research has shown.

Scientists scanned the brains of people lying inside magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, as they alternately pushed buttons or rested.

The scans showed that the “default network” deep inside a human brain becomes more active during daydreaming.

By Cosmos

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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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Two dimensions of mind perception

Scientists want to figure out how individuals can tell whether someone or something else has a mental life. Controversial studies have addressed whether chimpanzees and children with autism are capable of making such an inference about others.

However, investigators shouldn’t assume that organisms perceive another’s mind as a single entity, assert psychologist Heather M. Gray of Harvard University and her colleagues. Instead, people attribute to others two distinct dimensions of mental activity, Gray’s team reports in the Feb. 2 Science.

By Science News (Bnet)

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Science Daily

Multiple Dimensions Shape Our Perception Of Mind, Harvard Study Suggests

Through an online survey of more than 2,000 people, psychologists at Harvard University have found that we perceive the minds of others along two distinct dimensions: agency, an individual’s ability for self-control, morality and planning; and experience, the capacity to feel sensations such as hunger, fear and pain.

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A Question of Mind Over Matter

MIT assistant professor Hugh Herr is an advanced prosthetics researcher and a bilateral leg amputee, two conditions that have allowed him the rare experience of testing his gadgets on himself.

By Rachel Metz (Wired)

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The Mind and Materialist Superstition

Materialists have taken note of the growing efforts by non-materialist neuroscientists to point out the deep problems with the inference that the brain is entirely the cause of the mind. Materialist neuroscience, like materialist evolutionary biology, is a vacuous orthodoxy, and its proponents resent threats to their dogma. Darwinian explanations for functional biological complexity are nonsense, but some familiarity with the relevant science is necessary to understand that it is nonsense. Materialist explanations for the mind are transparent nonsense.

Consider the six characteristics of the mind, generally accepted by materialist and non-materialist scientists and philosophers. Each of the six poses enormous problems for a materialistic explanation.

By Michael Egnor (Evolution News & Views)

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Robots and the Future

Science and technology is starting to delve into the possibility of creating a humanoid robot that can feel, think and act in the same way as any human.  They are experimenting on the human brain, linking robotic hands to our brain synapses, creating full models of humanoid robots that are now in the beginning stages in their design, now taken on as a technological challenge.  What is to become of this technology in the future and to what limits will we take our exploration into the arena of creating humanoid robots?

By Stacey T Pollock (Creation Theory Revised)

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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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Mind Over Matter: Monkey Feeds Itself Using Its Brain

A monkey has successfully fed itself with fluid, well-controlled movements of a human-like robotic arm by using only signals from its brain, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine report in the journal Nature. This significant advance could benefit development of prosthetics for people with spinal cord injuries and those with “locked-in” conditions such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

By Science Daily

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Thoughts on unconscious perception

Modern studies of consciousness actually date back to the last quarter of the nineteenth century when the comparatively new science of psychology started to emerge from its roots in philosophy and physiology.

By  John Cowley (Helium)

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Why Dreams Mean Less Than We Think

Most people dream enthusiastically at night, their dreams seemingly occupying hours, even though most last only a few minutes. Most people also read great meaning into their nocturnal visions. In fact, according to a new sudy in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the vast majority of people in three very different countries — India, South Korea and the United States — believe that their dreams reveal meaningful hidden truths.

By John Cloud (Time Magazine)

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Do Past and Future Really Exist?

As every second ticks away, with every event that we experience, it turns into past, a moment that once was, but no longer exists. It is scientifically proven that memory is stored in the brain and that what we remember only encompasses around the average of eight percent of what we experience.

By Stacey T Pollock (Creation Theory Revised)

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Sniffing activates the mind’s nose – Whiffs of Perception

A rose by any other name smells as sweet, even when you only conjure up its fragrance in your mind. That’s because people use their noses to sniff imaginary as well as real aromas, and the mere act of sniffing scentless air kick-starts odor perception, a new study finds.

By B. Bower (Bnet)

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Skip the Robotics: Paralyzed Limbs Come to Life with New Connection to Brain

Rerouting signal from neuron to muscle allows the brain to move deadened limbs.

Scientists have forged a promising avenue in the quest to restore mobility to patients paralyzed by disease or injury. Researchers at the University of Washington devised a way to reroute signals from the brain’s motor cortex to trigger hand movement directly.

Scientific America

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