49
POPSSwearing at Work Good for You Perhaps not earth shattering news, but a reminder that much of our talk is not to convey information but to maintain group solidarity, identity etc. and answer our most basic psychological needs.
38
POPSThe language you speak affects your personality A study of bilingual women suggests that when you switch from speaking one language to another, your personality and your perceptions change as well. I've experienced this myself switching between German and English.
38
POPSWhat it takes to question and resist those in positions of authority? "For people who learned of the study, this became devastating proof, not only of human beings' slavish compliance in the face of authority, but of our willingness to do horrible things to other people. The study has been used to explain everything from Nazi Germany to the torture at Abu Ghraib" See:http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/0C2AA816-FD91-4DCD-B2A3-911C65F84C51/
34
POPSSchizophrenia: The Curse That's Almost a Blessing
A recent study may have found what kind of process goes awry in schizophrenic brains. Researchers found that DISC1 regulates the migration of new neurons in the adult brain. When the levels of DISC1 were reduced in mice during adult neurogenesis, the newborn neurons sped up and overshot their intended targets within the hippocampus, When the neurons finally reached their destinations, they forged an unusual number of connections with neighboring cells, a series of events that might give rise to the abnormal—and quite crippling—brain functions associated with schizophrenia, according to Hongjun Song, a Johns Hopkins neurologist who also worked on the study. It is possible, Song says, that further research will lead to a drug that treats schizophrenia by restoring normal neurogenesis. So what evolutionary advantage could schizophrenia-related genes bring to people who have some of the genes but not the disease? For now, this remains one of the many open questions.
33
POPSWe're Unable to Read Our Own Body Language "When applied to the question of how people may gain knowledge about their unconscious self, the present set of studies demonstrates that self-perceivers do not appear to pay as much attention to and make as much use of available behavioural information as neutral observers"
32
POPSComplex decision? Don't sleep on it Since its publication two years ago by a Dutch research team in the journal Science, the earlier finding had been used to encourage decision-makers to make "snap" decisions (for example, in the best-selling book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell) or to leave complex choices to the powers of unconscious thought ("Sleep on it", Dijksterhuis et al., Science, 2006). But in the new study, to be published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, scientists ran four experiments in which participants were presented with complex decisions and asked to choose the best option immediately ("blink"), after a period of conscious deliberation ("think"), or after a period of distraction ("sleep on it"), which is claimed to encourage "unconscious thought processes". In all experiments, there was some evidence that conscious deliberation can lead to better choices and little evidence for superiority of choices made "unconsciously".
32
POPSSCIENTISTS SHOW HALLUCINOGEN CREATES UNIVERSAL “MYSTICAL” EXPERIENCE in the 1950s, showed signs of therapeutic potential or value in research into the nature of consciousness and sensory perception. “Human consciousness…is a function of the ebb and flow of neural impulses in various regions of the brain-the very substrate that drugs such as psilocybin act upon,” Schuster says. “Understanding what mediates these effects is clearly within the realm of neuroscience and deserves investigation.” “A vast gap exists between what we know of these drugs-mostly from descriptive anthropology-and what we believe we can understand using modern clinical pharmacology techniques,” says study leader Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor with Hopkins’ departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry and Behavioral Biology. “That gap is large because, as a reaction to the excesses of the 1960s, human research with hallucinogens has been basically frozen in time these last forty years.”
31
POPSHomosexual behavior due to genetics and environmental factors “Overall, genetics accounted for around 35 per cent of the differences between men in homosexual behavior and other individual-specific environmental factors (that is, not societal attitudes, family or parenting which are shared by twins) accounted for around 64 per cent. In other words, men become gay or straight because of different developmental pathways, not just one pathway.” For women, genetics explained roughly 18 per cent of the variation in same-sex behavior, non-shared environment roughly 64 per cent and shared factors, or the family environment, explained 16 per cent. The study shows that genetic influences are important but modest, and that non-shared environmental factors, which may include factors operating during fetal development, dominate.
30
POPSWhy Life Originated (And Why it Continues)
Although the researchers don’t speculate on the specific chemical reactions that created life, they explain that the molecules involved most likely underwent a series of more and more complex reactions to minimize mutual energy differences between matter on Earth and with respect to high-energy radiation from Sun. The process eventually advanced so far that it cumulated into such sophisticated functional structures that could be called living. The researchers considered a primordial pool that contained some basic compounds. By reacting with one another and coupling with an external energy source such as the Sun, the compounds formed a chemical system. The compounds continually engaged in chemical reactions, thriving the most when capturing and distributing more and more of the Sun’s energy in the quest for a steady state. The evolutionary process was and still is non-deterministic, even chaotic, since the energy flows create energy differences that in turn affect the flows.
28
POPSLanguage Without Numbers: Amazonian Tribe Has No Word To Express 'One,' Other Numbers However, the MIT team decided to add a new twist--they started with 10 objects and asked the tribe members to count down. In that experiment, the tribe members used the word previously thought to mean "two" when as many as five or six objects were present, and they used the word for "one" for any quantity between one and four. This indicates that "these aren't counting numbers at all," said Gibson. "They're signifying relative quantities." He said this type of counting strategy has never been observed before, although it may also be found in other languages believed to have "one," "two," and "many" counting words.
Most Pops
see Most Pops
8
Clips
Latest Pops
Latest Comments
Tags
Print
Save
Turn on live update