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POPSOf Two Minds, One Consciousness But perhaps even more profound, he explains how, even though split-brain patients have isolated hemispheres, they experience a unified consciousness—that is, feel as though they are of one mind.
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POPSPain as an art form Mr. Collen wrote to pain doctors around the world to solicit examples of art from pain patients. Working with San Francisco college student James Gregory, 21, who suffers from chronic pain as the result of a car accident, the two created the Pain Exhibit, an online gallery of art from pain sufferers. The images are evocative and troubling.“Some of them are painful even to look at,'’ Dr. Basbaum said. Finding ways to communicate pain is essential to patients who are suffering, many of whom don’t receive adequate treatment from doctors.Mr. Collen said the main goal of the exhibit is to raise awareness about the problem of chronic pain.“People don’t believe what they can’t see,'’ Mr. Collen said. “But they see a piece of art an individual created about their pain and everything changes.'’
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POPSVery Sobering Images of the World Today Do not look at these if you are upset real easily, because they are awful, but they are real of what's going on round the world today. Still absolutely shocking though, it should't be going on anymore! Their is enough money in the world to stop this!
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POPSBrain Imaging Helps Explain Behavior The fMRI study showed that, during the viewing of angry faces, the activity of a structure called the insula, involved in the response to unpleasant situations, depended on which version of the CREB1 gene a participant inherited. “We were surprised to see that variation in the CREB1 gene would account for more than 20 percent of the difference in how healthy participants weighed different options and expressed specific preferences,”
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POPSBorderline Personality Disorder "...What defines borderline personality disorder--and makes it so explosive--is the sufferers' inability to calibrate their feelings and behavior. When faced with an event that makes them depressed or angry, they often become inconsolable or enraged. Such problems may be exacerbated by impulsive behaviors: overeating or substance abuse; suicide attempts; intentional self-injury. (The methods of self-harm that borderlines choose can be gruesomely creative. One psychologist told me of a woman who used fingernail clippers to pull off slivers of her skin.""
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POPSI Feel Your Pain: Neural Mechanisms Of Empathy
CIP patients showed decreased fMRI activation of visual regions, a result indicative of their reduced emotional arousal to the view of others' pain. On the other hand, in the CIP patients but not the controls, the capacity for empathy strongly predicted activation of key midline brain structures involved in processes linked to inferring the emotional states of others. These results suggest that in the absence of functional resonance mechanisms shaped by personal pain experiences, CIP patients might rely crucially on their empathetic abilities to imagine the pain of others, with activation of midline brain structures being the neural signature of this cognitive-emotional process. "Our findings underline the major role of midline structures in emotional perspective taking and in the ability to understand someone else's feelings despite the lack of any previous personal experience of it—an empathetic challenge frequently raised during human social interactions," concludes Dr. Danzig