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POPSTim McGirk, friend to the Taliban and promotor of the 'secondary PTSD' defense for the murderer Hasa Noah Pollak at Commentary has discovered that Mr. McGirk has a rather interesting history: This shouldn’t be surprising coming from Tim McGirk. He went to Afghanistan after 9/11, had Thanksgiving with the Taliban, and wrote a long piece for National Geographic about what a great time he had and how we’re all just human beings doing our thing on this big blue marble, so let’s not judge. Then he went to Iraq and singlehandedly created the Haditha Massacre hoax. Then he went to Jerusalem and spent a few years slandering Israel. Now he’s trafficking in pop psychology on behalf of a likely domestic jihadist. It’s been quite a career.
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POPSSleep Amnesia: Why Do We Forget Our Dreams? The Mind in Sleep: Psychology and Psychophysiology mentions dream kinesthesia as a potential suspect. It happens when we lose the physical movements in our sleep as soon as we physically move after waking up (such as when we reach for the alarm clock). Another possibility is that our memories are formed through repetition and finding connections to other parts of our lives. So when dreams are especially unique (read: crazy) or too undefined to be relatable, it’s harder to tie them to real-life events and remember them. Christof Koch, points out the incongruity between our brains’ being so active during REM sleep (the deep-sleep stage in our sleep cycles) and only vaguely recalling dream details when we awaken. brain waves that roll through during deep sleep may impede information processing. This is a more scientific approach to the brain-recall conundrum.
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POPSBrain Tumor Survivors Shouldn't Take It Easy The mice that were able to exercise scored just as well on a memory test as normal mice did; however, the mice that did not have access to the exercise wheel did not. "It was remarkable that the irradiated, running mice were just like the normal, non-irradiated mice that didn't exercise," lead researcher and graduate student Sarah Wong-Goodrich of the Duke Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, was quoted as saying. "We were expecting some memory retention issues with a longer delay and there weren't any." The researchers believe exercise benefits the mind by improving blood flow to the hippocampus in the brain, a key area for learning and memory.
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POPSThe Tibetan Book of the Dead Transference is that period of transition between one life and the next that occurs just before, during, and after death. The video discussions greatly help convey the intent and meaning of the book since they are in terms more easily understood by the western world. You can access the video by clicking links that will appear along the left side of the pages as you read through the book.
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POPSWhy Women have Sex Sex health benefits - get rid of headaches, relieve stress, lose weight and better sleep. It's all good!
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POPSFree Lectures and Courses... This was clipped some time ago by someone to whom I add thanks. Newer clippers may find it interesting. I've detailed the astronomy items as that is what I was searching for.
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POPSHelp your child learn with mistakes No one wants their child to fail. You love seeing a perfect spelling or math grade at the end of the day. This article demonstrates that the best way to achieve that is to have kids make mistakes in their learning. This allows for them to have greater recall and understand the steps to solving problems. The worst thing you can do, possibly, is to "google" everything! Share your experiences with this by clicking the comment link below. Become part of our online support groups. We have been going 11 years strong. Click here to join for free.
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POPSWe are all multiple personalities: or, Why "I" don't know what's good for "me" More: Such contradictions arise all the time. If you ask people which makes them happier, work or vacation, they will remind you that they work for money and spend the money on vacations. But if you give them a beeper that goes off at random times, and ask them to record their activity and mood each time they hear a beep, you’ll likely find that they are happier at work. Work is often engaging and social; vacations are often boring and stressful. Similarly, if you ask people about their greatest happiness in life, more than a third mention their children or grandchildren, but when they use a diary to record their happiness, it turns out that taking care of the kids is a downer—parenting ranks just a bit higher than housework, and falls below sex, socializing with friends, watching TV, praying, eating, and cooking.
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POPSStudy Says Dabbling in Surrealism can Boost Your Brain Power During the study, Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia asked that participants to read an abridged and slightly edited version of Kafka"s "The Country Doctor," which involves a nonsensical -- and in some ways disturbing-series of events. And second group read a different version of the same short story, one that had been rewritten so that the plot and literary elements made sense.
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POPSA funny thing happened on the way to the cancer clinic... More: Being able to laugh in the face of cancer lets you continue to own yourself, as hard as that might be, rather than ceding ownership to the disease. A good laugh reminds you that you are not your cancer.… I know that sometimes laughter seems impossible. After my cancer diagnosis I plunged into a bleak funk. And these days I’m struggling with a post-treatment depression that leaves my days swaddled in wearying grays. But no matter how remorseless the gloom, we humans tend to have our antennae for humor out. We’re the animal that wants to laugh, wants to unlock itself through a chuckle and a chortle. And laughter lets us cope, even in awkward moments.
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POPSAm I crazy or did I just see a clown? Of those listening to MP3 players or walking without any devices, more than 50 per cent noticed the clown; 70 per cent of those walking in pairs saw the clown, while only 25 per cent of people on phones noticed.
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POPS "dumb" Well, they’re falling down on that score in Afghanistan. Hang on, Gates gets it. USA Today: ABOARD A U.S. MILITARY JET (AP) " The Obama administration needs to decide on a war strategy for Afghanistan without waiting for a government there to be widely accepted as legitimate, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday. Gates’ comments put him at odds with top White House and NATO officials who are balking at ordering more troops and other resources to Afghanistan until the disputed election crisis there is resolved. The Pentagon chief called the Afghan elections " and the larger issues of curbing corruption in its government " “an evolving process.” “We’re not just going to sit on our hands, waiting for the outcome of this election and for the emergence of a government in Kabul,” he told reporters en route to Tokyo. That part of the O admin doesn’t sound as dumb as the other part.
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POPSDo our brains interpret our values and beliefs as facts (objective truths)?
Such messages caused activation in the brain region that is responsible for error detection. So in other words (and yes, I am grossly simplifying here), it was as if people's brain's were indicating "error, error, error; this message does not compute." This is consistent with research by Emily Pronin (psychology professor at Princeton University), which shows that people of all beliefs see their own beliefs as LESS biased than others. In other words, republicans see themselves as less biased, and so do democrats, and for that matter, so do mailman, coperate CEO's and homeless people. I think this goes a long way in explaining the depth and extent to which people defend their beliefs. Perhaps, Berger and Luckmann are right; we do live, in some sense, in alternative forms of reality. Sure, we all know a rock won't bite us and 2 + 2 = 4, but what I "know" (George W. Bush was lousy) is not what many Republicans "knows" (George W. Bush was a good president).
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POPSDoes a nation's mood lurk in its songs and blogs? “And it’s going to change the social sciences; that to me is very clear.” ... From another site, http://wefeelfine.org/ , they pulled more than nine million sentences that used some form of the verb feel — as in “I feel relieved” — from 2.3 million blogs from 2005 to 2009.They then rated the psychological charge, or “valence,” of a significant subset of the words on a 10-point scale: from triumphant (8.82) and love (8.72) down to disgusted (2.45) and suicide (1.25). Some of the findings were expected. Sept. 11, 2001, was rock bottom, for instance. Others were less so: the day that Michael Jackson died also lowered people’s mood significantly. Christmas and Valentine’s Day regularly popped as positive times, although words like “guilty” were associated with Christmas and “waste” and “lonely” with Valentine’s Day. “Now, these are bloggers, and they certainly are not representative of everyone,” Dr. Dodds said. “But the pattern is very pronounced.”
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POPSAnimal hoarding:An expert illuminates the psychology behind this behavior Hoarders often have major dysfunction in work, social and daily activities, reduced awareness of surroundings, and impaired ability to form close relationships with people. Contrary to what we originally thought, animal hoarding does not seem to be strongly associated with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and it is not yet defined as an independent psychological condition. Clinical evaluations indicate that it is often associated with a wide variety of psychological disorders, including borderline personality disorder.
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POPSIn search of silence in a sickeningly loud world
More: It should come as no surprise that rats exposed to a buzzer sounding for six out of every 30 seconds, seven hours a day for 35 days suffer from high blood pressure. There is some sign of habituation over time, but these buzzer-rats are still darting back and forth across their cages by day 35, while rats in quieter cages have markedly lower blood pressure and tend not to pace so nervously. For humans, six hours of exposure to 90-decibel sound significantly elevates the heart rate and leaves it there up to an hour after the noise is gone. Nearly every significant study looking for a link between exposure to noise and risk of heart attack has found one. In 2005, research in Berlin hospitals looking at more than 4,000 cases (half of them heart attacks) revealed that people subjected to loud environments are at a 50 percent greater risk of having a heart attack. Among school kids, the effect of noise shows up in the form of learning disabilities.
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