Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth

For centuries thinkers have assumed that the uniquely human capacity for reasoning has existed to let people reach beyond mere perception and reflex in the search for truth. Rationality allowed a solitary thinker to blaze a path to philosophical, moral and scientific enlightenment.

Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we'll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another. Certitude works, however sharply it may depart from the truth.

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Process Mind….Connecting with the Mind of God

The quantum mind is that aspect of our psychology that corresponds to basic aspects of quantum physics. The quantum aspect of our awareness notices the tiniest, easily overlooked "nano" tendencies and self-reflects upon these subliminal experiences. However, the quantum mind is not just a supersensitive self-reflecting awareness; it also is a kind of "pilot wave" or guiding pattern. . . . Physicists speak of the wave function "collapsing" to create reality. I speak about how our self-reflection uses and then marginalizes, rather than "collapses," our dreaming nature. For example, after reflecting on a dream, you might think, "Ah ha! Now I will do this or that"; then you put the dreamworld aside temporarily while you take action in order to create a new reality.

Besides the ability we share with other parts of our universe to sense possibilities, self-reflect, and move from dreaming to everyday reality, we may have the ability to be in two places or two states at the same time, just as quantum physics suggests that material particles can behave. For example, in a dream you may be at once dead and alive – even though upon awakening, you come out of this unitive experience and soon begin reflecting, identifying with one or another of the dream images. Thus, we can characterize our quantum nature as nonlocal or "bilocal" as well as highly sensitive and self-reflective…

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What Synesthesia Suggests about the Nature of Consciousness

Not long after synesthesia made its modest, respectable appearance on the world's scientific stage, a radical shift occurred in the field of psychology, foreshadowed by Galton's interest in the psychology of the behavior of twins: the school of behaviorism emerged. Led by American psychologist John B. Watson, this new school of thought banished personal experience in favor of people's observed interactions with one another. A paper Watson wrote in 1913 started the wave, and in his 1924 book, Behaviorism, he explained it further: "Behaviorism . . . holds that the subject matter of human psychology is the behavior of the human being. Behaviorism claims that consciousness is neither a definite nor a usable concept. The behaviorist, who has been trained always as an experimentalist, holds, further, that belief in the existence of consciousness goes back to the ancient days of superstition and magic.

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Physician, Heal Thyself, And Thy Healthcare System

Physician, Heal Thyself, And Thy Healthcare System

Why Our Current Healthcare System is Woefully Inadequate

Published on May 1, 2011 by Melanie A. Greenberg, Ph.D. in The Mindful Self-Express

The Integrative Medicine Model of Healthcare

Many mental health disorders carry risks for physical disease.

• Depression is a risk factor for many serious and life-threatening diseases, including heart disease, addictions, chronic pain, diabetes and obesity.
• Illness diagnosis can result in an anxiety disorder
• Chronic mental stress can cause muscle pain, fatigue, inflammation, and impaired immunity
• Stress can result in impaired self-care, such as not eating, exercising, or sleepingproperly, increasing risks of disease.
• Depressed mood can interfere with heart rate variability or the ability of the individual to put the brakes on and stop anxiety-related physiological arousal from spiraling out of control.
• PTSD has been linked to addictions, smoking, heart disease and autoimmune diseases.

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The Seven Sins of Memory

The Seven Sins of Memory

In Yasunari Kawabata's unsettling short story, Yumiura, a novelist receives an unexpected visit from a woman who says she knew him 30 years earlier. They met when he visited the town of Yumiura during a harbor festival, the woman explains. But the novelist cannot remember her. Plagued recently by other troublesome memory lapses, he sees this latest incident as a further sign of mental decline. His discomfort turns to alarm when the woman offers more revelations about what happened on a day when he visited her room. "You asked me to marry you," she recalls wistfully. The novelist reels while contemplating the magnitude of what he had forgotten. The woman explains that she had never forgotten their time together and felt continually burdened by her memories of him.

After she finally leaves, the shaken novelist searches maps for the town of Yumiura with the hope of triggering recall of the place and the reasons why he had gone there. But no maps or books list a town called Yumiura. The novelist then realizes that he could not have been in the part of the country the woman described at the time she remembered. Her detailed, heartfelt and convincing memories were entirely false.

Seven different ways that memory can mess with your head and your life, and ways to identify them.

By Daniel Schacter

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Why You Think You'll Never Stack Up

The pursuit of prestige has an upside. The quest for cash and cachet—and envy of others' good fortune—are not simply base instincts to be overcome. A bit of status anxiety is a good thing, so long as you understand what you really covet and why.

There are few non-legally binding documents as closely read but as coolly received as class notes from one's alma mater. "On the same day I was accepted to a traumasurgery/critical care fellowship, I asked my beautiful girlfriend, an internal medicine resident, to be my wife," reads one Ivy League entry. Another alum informs that while his wife "has continued her participation with the U.S. national women's lacrosse team and hopes to win her third World Cup, I've had much more modest success on the sailplane racing circuit."

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Anxiety, Allergies and kids

When I went to school, my mother packed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread for me. On some days, she'd switch to a couple of slices of bologna with mayonnaise—also on white bread. Cookies or an occasional apple finished off the meal. Packing food for lunch was pretty simple. We'd rush to long rows of tables when the bell rang, then stuff food into our mouths as fast as possible so that we'd have more time to play outside at recess.

Life has become more complicated for parents and kids. There are all sorts of dangers lurking out there, some real, others exaggerated, and some imagined. Food allergies appear to be the newest terror ready to pounce on unsuspecting children and their parents.

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Think like a shrink

Yes, you too can see through the defenses people hide behind. To guide you, just consult the handy primer below. Put together by psychiatrist Emanuel H. Rosen, it distills years of Freudian analytical training into a few simple principles that make sense of our psyches.

I have always thought it horribly unfortunate that there is such a tremendous gap between psychiatry and popular culture. Psychiatrists are regularly vilified in entertainment, media, and common thought, and our patients are regularly stigmatized. Indeed, I've yet to see a single movie that accurately portrays what we do. From Silence of the Lambs to The Prince of Tides, we shrinks have a reputation as crazy unbalanced people who can read people's minds. Even the hit comedyThe Santa Clause made us out to be bimbos.

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Hearing loss may be an early sign of dementia

Gradual hearing loss is a common symptom of aging, but in some people it may also be an early sign of Alzheimer's disease or other types of dementia, a new study suggests.

The risk of dementia appears to rise as hearing declines. Older people with mild hearing impairment -- those who have difficulty following a conversation in a crowded restaurant, say -- were nearly twice as likely as those with normal hearing to develop dementia, the study found. Severe hearing loss nearly quintupled the risk of dementia.

Health.com: 25 signs and symptoms of Alzheimer's Disease

Family Meals Linked to Improved Asthma in Kids

A new study suggests children with asthma who spend quality time with their families by eating together are healthier than those who eat alone, while watching TV, or while others are busy chatting or texting on cell phones.

Previous studies have already shown that family meals can improve the well-being of children and teens and make them less likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors like substance abuse or eating disorders. But this study suggests eating together is also directly related to health in children with chronic illnesses like asthma.

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Brain and Cognitive Sciences- MIT Open Courseware

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Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Stress Fixes for Better Sleep

Target the Enemy!

When stress interrupts your sleep on a nightly basis, it sets you up for a chronic insomnia that can send you sliding down the rabbit's hole toward sleeping pills, alcohol, and chocolate cake at night and a zillion cups of coffee during the day. Here's how to step back from that precipice.

Target the enemy. "Every night a couple of hours before bed, sit down and make a list of all the issues, problems, and things you have to deal with," says Donna Arand, Ph.D., clinical director of Kettering Hospital Sleep Disorders Center in Dayton, Ohio. "Next to each item, write a solution or plan." If you're mad at your mother-in-law, for example, the solution could be to call her and talk it out.

Even if it's not something you want to do, write down your ideas for dealing with each stressor you've listed, urges Dr. Arand. Then mull the solutions over.

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Can you control your dreams?

A lucid dreamer is a person who is aware that he or she is dreaming and is able to manipulate the plot and outcome of the dream, like a video game. It is not uncommon, and in children it can happen frequently, even as an expression of creativity, said Gary Schwartz, professor of psychology and neurology at the University of Arizona.

It appears that Jared Loughner, allegedly responsible for the shooting at a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona, on Saturday, took a keen interest in the phenomenon. In the YouTube video called My Final Thoughts: Jared Lee Loughner! that is said to belong to him, he talks about conscious dreaming and reflects a blurring between waking life and reality -- "Jared Loughner is conscience (sic) dreaming at this moment / Thus, Jared Loughner is asleep," he writes.

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Life’s missing white space

I'm not a designer, but I've always been in love with the design concept of white space.

It's the space in a design that isn't filled with things — as you can tell from the design of Zen Habits and my other blog, mnmlist, it's something I use (perhaps too) liberally.

But white space can be used in the design of our lives as well, not just the design of magazines and websites and ads. By using white space in our lives, we create space, balance, emphasis on what's important, and a feeling of peace that we cannot achieve with a more cramped life.

Let's look briefly at how to do this....

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Aerobics for the Brain

As people age, brain function slowly declines. Aside from improving physical fitness and overall health, exercise may also help improve brain function in older adults, researchers report.

In a study published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, researchers evaluated brain function by performing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans on 70 sedentary (but otherwise healthy) adults who were 60-80 years old. The participants were randomly divided into an aerobic walking group or a non-aerobic control group, which performed toning, stretching and strengthening exercises. Each exercise session lasted 40 minutes and was performed three times weekly for one year. The MRI scans of the older individuals were again taken after six months and one year, and compared to MRI scans of 32 healthy younger individuals (age 18-35).

No beneficial effects were observed in the aerobic group after six months of exercise. However, after one year, several improvements in brain function were noted in the aerobic exercise group.

Earlier studies suggested that impaired function in a brain circuit called the default mode network (DMN) may be a sign of aging or neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer's. The DMN is active when a person is at a state of wakeful rest, such as daydreaming. In the present study, researchers found that DMN activity significantly improved in the aerobics group compared to the control group. The subjects in the aerobic group also experienced significant improvements in another brain network, the frontal parietal network, which is important for complex tasks.

By the end of the study, participants in the aerobics group experienced significant improvements in cognition, including memory and attention, compared to the control group.

While the results are promising, additional research is warranted in this area.

For more information about aerobic and non-aerobic exercise, please visit Natural Standard'sSports Medicine database.

From Natural Standard Sources

Find stillness to cure illness

It's a busy day, and you're inundated by non-stop emails, text messages, phone calls, instant message requests, notifications, interruptions of all kinds.

The noise of the world is a dull roar that pervades every second of your life. It's a rush of activity, a drain on your energy, a pull on your attention, until you no longer have the energy to pay attention or take action.

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Heart Disease Risk Varies by Education Level

 Risk for stroke and heart disease falls as education levels rise in high-income countries, but not in nations where earnings are considerably lower, a new study shows.

The findings are published in the September 2010 issue of Circulation.

The study examined data on 61,332 people from 44 countries who had been diagnosed with heart disease, stroke, or peripheral arterial disease -- or who had cardiovascular risk factors such as smoking or obesity.

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Organizing Disorganized People

Imagine this scenario: After a week of hard work, you send an important report to your colleague. His task is to edit the wording and make a few key decisions to finalize some of the content. The deadline is still three weeks away, but you hope he'll finish it early because you'll have more work to do once he gives you his input.

Your colleague, however, delays making the changes. After numerous reminders from you, he sends it back the day before your deadline. This means that you have to rush to complete your final changes in time. His delay has caused you some serious stress, and it's not the first time that this has happened.

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Too Little Sleep May Raise Heart Disease Risk

 People who sleep for less than seven hours a day, including naps, are at a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. Sleeping fewer than five hours a day, including naps, more than doubles the risk of chest pain, heart attack, or stroke, according to a study conducted by researchers at West Virginia University's (WVU) faculty of medicine.

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Can a mother's affection prevent anxiety in adulthood?

Babies whose mothers are attentive and caring tend to grow into happy, well-adjusted children. But the psychological benefits of having a doting mother may extend well beyond childhood, a new study suggests.

According to the study, which followed nearly 500 infants into their 30s, babies who receive above-average levels of affection and attention from their mothers are less likely than other babies to grow up to be emotionally distressed, anxious, or hostile adults..

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Predicting the Unpredictable

People who suffer from anxiety tend to worry a lot, especially those who suffer from Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) which is a common type of anxiety involving excessive worry on an almost daily basis. It is generally accompanied by various physical symptoms such as fatigue, restlessness, and tension. Those with GAD often seem to believe that worrying can protect them from harm–as though their worry will help them see and avoid any number of potential calamities that may lie ahead.

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How to Simplify When You Love Your Stuff

Simplicity. It is a lovely ancient spiritual tradition that has seen a recent resurgence in popularity.  As we try to make sense of our erratic economy and the accompanying financial anxiety, it is natural to leap to a less risky lifestyle extreme — stop spending, scale back, live lean.

If you are a regular reader of Zen Habits, you are probably intrigued by the idea of simplifying. In fact, you may have even given up many material things and actively live a very simple life. People who have adopted this level of  simplicity, especially in the land of consumerism, are incredibly inspiring and fascinating.

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Ovulation gives women's brains a boost

THE size of a woman's brain changes throughout her menstrual cycle, with some areas growing by as much as 2 per cent in the run-up to ovulation, when women are at their most fertile.

So say Belinda Pletzer and colleagues at the University of Salzburg, Austria, who took MRI scans of the brains of women during their monthly cycles.

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How to Find Your Life's Passion When You Are Broke

Have you always had a problem achieving your goals? Do you feel like you have read every "How to" goal book ever written, but yet, you still fail at your goals?

Perhaps the problem is not you, but your goals. Do you know what you really, really want out of life?

We tend to want so much out of life. We feel like we will die if we don't get the new car, but a few weeks after getting the new car and the "newness" wears off, we realize the car no longer makes us happy. This happens because the car was not what we really, really wanted in the first place. We simply thought the car was what we wanted.

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Risk

In fact, as researchers are discovering, the psychology of risk involves far more than a simple "death wish." Studies now indicate that the inclination to take high risks may be hard-wired into the brain, intimately linked to arousal and pleasure mechanisms, and may offer such a thrill that it functions like an addiction. The tendency probably affects one in five people, mostly young males, and declines with age. It may ensure our survival, even spur our evolution as individuals and as a species. Risk taking probably bestowed a crucial evolutionary advantage, inciting the fighting and foraging of the hunter-gatherer.

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The elements of living lightly

Think about it: when we have expectations, and things don't go the way we expect (which happens quite often, as we're not good prognosticators), we are disappointed, frustrated. It's our expectations that force us to judge whether something is good or bad.

When you expect something of a friend, co-worker, family member, spouse, and they don't live up to that expectation, then you are upset with them, or disappointed. It causes anger. But what if you had no expectations — then their actions would be neither good nor bad, just actions. You could accept them without frustration, anger, sadness.

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Experiencing the Planetary Shift on an Uptilt...an energetic sparkle in the air.....

When you feel genuine hope, care and compassion, your heart is sending harmonious and coherent signals to the brain/ mind, replacing feelings of separation with a sense of connection. The heart and brain are aligned and in sync. The higher cortical functions are enhanced, facilitating objective, sober assessment and intuitive perception. You perceive more wholeness, and solutions to problems are more apparent. 

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How does multitasking affect memory

The human mind can shift rapidly between tasks, on the order of a few hundred milliseconds. Recent research has uncovered supertaskers, the 2.5 percent of the population who are better than everyone else at texting and driving. But the average mind prefers something closer to a second or two between changes in input. The faster this shift, the less sense we can make of the information....

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Cutting the Cord to Materialism

In America and much of western culture, our infatuation with materialism comes from the opportunity to have such. Being a minimalist pre-cable/satellite television was not just a fad. It was a way of life. People were these things called ACTIVE and ENERGETIC. Once television became such a monumental part of our lives, we began being consumed by this sedentary form of life that co-existed with unhealthy and unfit lives.

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The Large Hadron Collider May Allow us to Read the Mind of God

Today the LHC may have the potential to explain the origin of all four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Physicists believe that at the beginning of time there was a single superforce that unified these fundamental forces. Finding it could be the crowning achievement in the history of science.

Through the LHC, we hope to finally prove the existence of the Higgs boson, which is the only particle yet to be observed by the Standard Model. There is a hypothetical, ever-present quantum field that is supposedly responsible for giving particles their masses; this field would answer the basic question of why particles have the masses they do or why they have any mass at all. According to CERN, "The answer may be the so-called Higgs mechanism. According to the theory of the Higgs mechanism, the whole of space is filled with a 'Higgs field,' and by interacting with this field, particles acquire their masses. Particles that interact intensely with the Higgs field are heavy, while those that have feeble interactions are light. The Higgs field has at least one new particle associated with it, the Higgs boson. If such a particle exists, experiments at the LHC will be able to detect it."

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Java Technologies to Build Social Capital to achieve UN -MDGs- Java World Congress-Sri Lanka

How to integrate Open source Java Technologies to Build Social Capital to achieve United Nations Millennium Development Goals ( MDGs) will be the theme of the Java World Congress to be held in Colombo, Sri Lanka from 26-28 Nov this year. Humans are social animals. From time immemorial history is replete with a plethora of examples of how humans interacted with family, small groups, society , country and the world at large to transact his business. While these social contacts are salutary to building health networks, others have used them to build tension, conflict and anxiety in our dealings. While interacting with a global village we observe how the multi-faceted technology and communication expansions have brought us very close to each other redefining the old boundaries.

If we go deeper into social capital we observe that Social capital is an instantiated informal norm that promotes cooperation between two or more individuals. The norms that constitute social capital can range from a norm of reciprocity between two friends, all the way up to complex and elaborately articulated doctrines like Christianity or Confucianism. They must be instantiated in an actual human relationship: the norm of reciprocity exists in potentia in my dealings with all people, but is actualized only in my dealings with my friends. By this definition, trust, networks, civil society, and the like which have been associated with social capital are all epiphenominal, arising as a result of social capital but not constituting social capital itself.

Not just any set of instantiated norms constitutes social capital; they must lead to cooperation in groups and therefore are related to traditional virtues like honesty, the keeping of commitments, reliable performance of duties, reciprocity, and the like. A norm like the one described by Edward Banfield as characterizing southern Italy, which enjoins individuals to trust members of their immediate nuclear family but to take advantage of everyone else, is clearly not the basis of social capital outside the family

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World Congress