Circuit-based human

Drugs for the circuit-based human by vaughanbell In a recent article for The Observer I noted that almost all the major drug companies had closed down their neuroscience divisions as evidence for a move away from a 'chemical-based' to a 'circuit-based' approach to treatments. So to my surprise, a new Nature News article has just appeared discussing the re-launch of pharmaceutical giant Novartis's neuroscience section. However, as I read the beginning of the article, it seems they are just banking on the fact that they can design drugs good enough to hit individual brain circuits. In a sign that psychiatric-disease research is entering a new era, the pharmaceutical giant Novartis has hired an expert in neural circuitry, rather than pharmacology, to head its relaunched neuroscience division. The appointment of 42-year-old Ricardo Dolmetsch, who has spent his entire career in academic research, signifies a radical policy shift for the company, as it moves away from conventional neurotransmitter research to concentrate on analysing the neural circuitry that causes brain diseases. Well. Best of luck with that.

Brain: Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience on the Brain?

Dr. Paul Zak shares his views on the crisis in confidence in psychology, science communication, and how to differentiate between sound science and overblown hype.

By: Tamara Johnson | posted August 2, 2013

A series of unfortunate events over the last few years has sparked a "crisis in confidence" in the field of psychology.This introduction to an Association for Psychological Sciences journal dedicated to the subject details cases of research fraud, misleading statistics, questionable research practices, and downright pseudoscience. Meanwhile, scientists and journalists have expressed frustration and fatigue with claims purporting to answer grandiose questions about human nature and experience with neuroscience. "A new branch of the neuroscience-explains-everything genre may be created at any time by the simple expedient of adding the prefix "neuro" to whatever you are talking about," complains Steven Poole in this emphatic New Statesman article. "'Neuroeconomics' is the latest in a long line."

Dr. Paul Zak is a neuroeconomist whose work focuses on the role of oxytocin (OT) in decision-making. He also engages in public education outreach efforts that draw some flak for presenting an overly simplistic version of the scientific story. In this interview, Dr. Zak addresses some of these issues and shares recommendations for discerning good science from hype./.../

Meditation

Mindfulness meditation can be effective tool in reducing stress

Tribune Content AgencyMedical Edge from Mayo Clinic

8:30 a.m. CDT, September 30, 2013

DEAR MAYO CLINIC: Is it true that mindfulness exercises can help reduce stress? What does it involve?

ANSWER: Meditation is a group of practices that train the mind to be more focused and relaxed, as well as more compassionate and less judgmental. Mindfulness is one form of meditation that involves focusing intently on the present: what you're feeling or sensing in each moment. It can be a very effective tool in reducing stress, increasing self-awareness, and bringing an overall sense of calm to everyday life.

Expand Your Mind

www.QuantumJumping.com

The Key to Change Your Life is to "Jump" Into Your Subconscious...

It's normal for people's minds to wander throughout the day. In fact, studies have shown that the average person is distracted for nearly 50 percent of the day. And unfortunately, nearly two-thirds of that time that the mind is wandering, it's actually focused on neutral or negative thoughts. Thinking about how much there is to do, or about regrets from the past can cause stress, anxiety, or even depression.

People who practice mindfulness and other forms of meditation, however, learn how to better control what they focus on, or direct their attention to. This allows them to move away from negative thinking, which can lead to reduced stress and anxiety, as well as better overall mood. And it works not only during the actual time spent meditating, but also throughout the day. Those who regularly practice mindfulness can quickly recognize when the mind is wandering, and are therefore able to redirect it to focus on something more positive./.../

Success

Wisdom from a MacArthur Genius: Psychologist Angela Duckworth on Why Grit, Not IQ, Predicts Success

by Maria Popova

“Character is at least as important as intellect.”

Creative history brims with embodied examples of why the secret of genius is doggedness rather than “god”-given talent, from the case of young Mozart’s upbringing to E. B. White’s wisdom on writing to Chuck Close’s assertion about art toTchaikovsky’s conviction about composition toNeil Gaiman’s advice to aspiring writers. But it takes a brilliant scholar of the psychology of achievement to empirically prove these creative intuitions: Math-teacher-turned-psychologistAngela Duckworth, who began her graduate studies under positive psychology godfather Martin Seligman at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, has done more than anyone for advancing our understanding of how self-control and grit — the relentless work ethic of sustaining your commitments toward a long-term goal — impact success. So how heartening to hear that Duckworth is the recipient of a 2013 MacArthur “genius” grant for her extraordinary endeavors, the implications of which span from education to employment to human happiness./.../

Ilusory correlation

NEUROHACKS| 27 August 2013

Why other queues always seem to move faster than yours

Tom Stafford

• Health
• Brain
• Human body
• Psychology
• Stress
• Science & Environment

(Copyright: Thinkstock)

Whether it is supermarkets or traffic, there are two possible psychological explanations for why you feel the world is against you, explains Tom Stafford./../

Psychology

Don’t panic but psychology isn’t always a science by vaughanbell

Every so often, the 'is psychology a science?' debatesparks up again, at which point, I start to weep. It's one of the most misplaced, misfiring scientific discussions you can have and probably not for the reasons you think.

To understand why it keeps coming around you need to understand something about the politics of studying things.

Science has higher status in academia and industry than the humanities so suggesting to a practitioner that "they're not a scientist" can be the equivalent of suggesting "you're not as valuable as you make out".

This plays in out in two ways: less scientific disciplines get less funding and people start being knobs at parties. The second is clearly more serious./.../

Freedom

The Psychology of Freedom

By William Skaggs | August 20, 2013 |  

Lembrei-me de um amigo já falecido Ernst Greiner, de cujas conversas tenho saudade. Um vez chegou em nossa casa dizendo que descobrira uma grande novidade: que a Liberdade era provavelmente o maior valor, maior mesmo do que o amor.

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I’d like to examine the concept of freedom in a somewhat unusual way — from the viewpoint of motivational psychology.

The starting point is to realize that there are basically four ways of influencing behavior: reward, punishment, restraint, and compulsion. Reward means offering the subject something good for performing an action. Punishment means threatening the subject with something bad for performing an action. Restraint means physically blocking the subject from performing an action, for example preventing the subject from walking on a lawn by putting a fence around it. Compulsion means physically forcing the subject to perform an action, as for example causing a man to get on an airplane by dragging him onto it. (Footnote: by rewards, I don’t just mean physical things like money or food. A smile, a kind word, or even a moment of attention also function as rewards. Conversely, punishment doesn’t just mean physical harm. A frown, a sharp word, a withdrawal of attention, or a time-out also function as punishments.)/.../

Long Distance Relationships

Let’s Spend Some Time Apart: Long Distance Relationships Are Deeper

A study takes a closer look at why absence makes the heart grow fonder.

By Belinda Luscombe @youselessJuly 18, 2013

Absence, according to the latest research, does make the heart grow fonder — as long as there’s videochat, IMing, telephones or texting.

About three million spouses in the U.S. live far each away from each other, even though they’d prefer to live together, and the new study, published in the Journal of Communication, found that the separation did not have such a negative effect on their relationships.

The researchers asked 63 heterosexual couples, half of whom lived together, and half who were in long distance relationships, to keep a diary of one week of interactions with their beloved. The couples were young (mostly college students around age 21) and in love. The ones who lived apart had been separated geographically for an average of 17 months. The researchers, L. Crystal Jiang of City University of Hong Kong and  Jeffrey T. Hancock of Cornell University, found, not surprisingly, that far-flung couples interacted fewer times per day. But these interactions were more meaningful./.../

Beauty

The Science of Beauty

by Maria Popova

“Attitudes toward beauty are entwined with our deepest conflicts surrounding flesh and spirit.”

“That is the best part of beauty, which a picture cannot express,” Francis Bacon observed in his essay on the subject. And yet for as far back as humanity can peer into the past, we’ve attempted again and again to capture and define beauty. For Indian philosopher Tagore, beauty was the Truth of eternity. For Richard Feynman, it was the mesmerism of complexity. For E. B. White, it was the power of simplicity. For the influential early art theorist Denman Waldo Ross, it was a supreme instance of order. For legendary philosopher Denis Dutton, it was “a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors.” But despite all these metaphysical explanations, we continue to strive for a concrete, tangible, material answer./.../

Emotions = faces

About Face

For half a century, one theory about the way we experience and express emotion has helped shape how we practice psychology, do police work, and even fight terrorism. But what if that theory is wrong?

By Shannon Fischer | Boston Magazine | July 2013

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESSE BURKE

Forty-six years ago a young San Francisco–based cowboy of a psychologist named Paul Ekman emerged from the jungle with proof of a powerful idea. During the previous couple of years, he had set out trying to prove a theory popularized in the 19th century by Charles Darwin: that people of all ages and races, from all over the world, manifest emotions the same way. Ekman had traveled the globe with photographs that showed faces experiencing six basic emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise. Everywhere he went, from Japan to Brazil to the remotest village of Papua New Guinea, he asked subjects to look at those faces and then to identify the emotions they saw on them. To do so, they had to pick from a set list of options presented to them by Ekman. The results were impressive. Everybody, it turned out, even preliterate Fore tribesmen in New Guinea who’d never seen a foreigner before in their lives, matched the same emotions to the same faces. Darwin, it seemed, had been right.

Taking emotions at face value

Boston Magazine has a fascinating article on the work of psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett who has been leading the charge against the idea that we recognise the same facial expression of emotion across the world.

This was first suggested by Paul Ekman whose work suggested that humans can universally recognise six emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.

His research involved showing people from different cultures pictures of faces and asking them to label each expression from a choice of emotional words.

But Barrett has found a simple flaw in the procedure:

She returned to those famous cross-cultural studies that had launched Ekman’s career—and found that they were less than watertight. The problem was the options that Ekman had given his subjects when asking them to identify the emotions shown on the faces they were presented with. Those options, Barrett discovered, had limited the ways in which people allowed themselves to think.

Barrett explained the problem to me this way: “I can break that experiment really easily, just by removing the words. I can just show you a face and ask how this person feels. Or I can show you two faces, two scowling faces, and I can say, ‘Do these people feel the same thing?’ And agreement drops into the toilet.”

The article is on much more than this controversy in cognitive science and also tracks how research on emotion and facial expression is playing an increasing role in law enforcement – with not all of it well supported by evidence.

And if you want links to some of the scientific papers, the always interestingNeuroanthropology blog has more at the bottom of this post.
 

Link to Boston Magazine article ‘About Face’.

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Workout music

Workout music and your supplementary motor cortex by tomstafford

Why do we like to listen to tunes when we exercise? Psychologist Tom Stafford searches for answers within our brains, not the muscles we are exercising.

Perhaps you have a favourite playlist for going to the gym or the park. Even if you haven't, you're certain to have seen joggers running along with headphones in their ears. Lots of us love to exercise to music, feeling like it helps to reduce effort and increase endurance. As a psychologist, the interesting thing for me is not just whether music helps when exercising, but how it helps.

One thing is certain, the answer lies within our brains, not the muscles we are exercising. A clue comes from an ingenious study, which managed to separate the benefits of practicing a movement from the benefits of training the muscle that does the movement. If you think that sounds peculiar, several studies have shown that the act of imagining making a movement produces significant strength gains. The benefit isn't a big as if you practiced making the movement for real, but still the benefit of thinking about the movement can account for over half of the benefit of practice. So asking people to carry out an imaginary practice task allows us to see the benefit of just thinking about a movement, and separates this from the benefit of making it./.../

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This is my BBC Future column from last week. The original had the much more accessible title of “The Psychology of Workout music“, but mindhacks.com is our site (dammit) and I can re-title how I want.

Mastering our Creative Routine

The Pace of Productivity and How to Master Your Creative Routine

by Maria Popova

“When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly.”

We seem to have a strange but all too human cultural fixation on the daily routines and daily rituals of famous creators, from Vonnegut toBurroughs to Darwin — as if a glimpse of their day-to-day would somehow magically infuse ours with equal potency, or replicating it would allow us to replicate their genius in turn. And though much of this is mere cultural voyeurism, there is something to be said for the value of a well-engineered daily routine to anchor the creative process. Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (public library), edited by Behance’s 99U editor-in-chief Jocelyn Glei and featuring contributions from a twenty of today’s most celebrated thinkers and doers, delves into the secrets of this holy grail of creativity./.../

Under the Mask

Gotham psychologist by vaughanbell

Andrea Letamendi is a clinical psychologist who specialises in the treatment and research of traumatic stress disorders but also has a passionate interest in how psychological issues are depicted in comics.

She puts her thoughts online in her blog Under the Mask which also discuss social issues in fandom and geek culture.

Recently, she was paid a wonderful compliment when she appeared in Batgirl #16 asBarbara Gordon's psychologist./.../
 

Heart variability and art appreciation

Wolfgang Tschacher, psychologist, on how we appreciate art

By Christie Nicholson | February 8, 2013, 4:39 AM PST

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We might think art experts and artists have a leg up on art appreciation that rewards them with a deeper enjoyment of art. But it turns out art literacy makes little difference in how much one appreciates art works. This was one finding from a recent study done with nearly 600 museum visitors that ranged from art experts to regular members of the public who may have only had limited engagement with art.

Researchers had volunteers wear a glove that not only tracked their movement through a Swiss art museum but also measured their heart rate and galvanic skin response (a measurement of sweat due to arousal) as they viewed individual pieces. And these measurements were then compared with survey responses—gathered after the visitors left the exhibition—that described how much they enjoyed different pieces within the exhibition./.../

Why Riots?

We are now one year away from global riots, complex systems theorists say

September 11, 2012

(Credit: Marco Lagi, Karla Z. Bertrand, Yaneer Bar-Yam)

What’s the number one reason we riot? Hunger — food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense, Motherboard reports.

In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute (CSI) unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.

Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.” Plot the data, and it looks like this the above graph.

IT, Mind, Consciousness, Reality...

WHOA, DUDE, ARE WE INSIDE A COMPUTER RIGHT NOW?

THIS NASA SCIENTIST THINKS WE COULD BE

By Ben Makuch

Illustration By Julian Garcia

Two years ago, Rich Terrile appeared on Through the Wormhole, the Science Channel’s show about the mysteries of life and the universe. He was invited onto the program to discuss the theory that the human experience can be boiled down to something like an incredibly advanced, metaphysical version of The Sims.

It’s an idea that every college student with a gravity bong and The Matrix on DVD has thought of before, but Rich is a well-regarded scientist, the director of the Center for Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and is currently writing an as-yet-untitled book about the subject, so we’re going to go ahead and take him seriously./.../

Man Interacting with a Woman

Why Interacting with a Woman Can Leave Men "Cognitively Impaired"

In one experiment, just telling a man he would be observed by a female was enough to hurt his psychological performance.

By Daisy Grewal  | March 13, 2012 | 66

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WHY DO MEN HAVE TROUBLE THINKING?Image: iStock/Iconogenic

Movies and television shows are full of scenes where a man tries unsuccessfully to interact with a pretty woman. In many cases, the potential suitor ends up acting foolishly despite his best attempts to impress. It seems like his brain isn’t working quite properly and according to new findings, it may not be.

Researchers have begun to explore the cognitive impairment that men experience before and after interacting with women. A 2009 study demonstrated that after a short interaction with an attractive woman, men experienced a decline in mental performance. A more recent study suggests that this cognitive impairment takes hold even w hen men simply anticipateinteracting with a woman who they know very little about./.../