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POPSThe Neuroscience of Sin! Why do we do it? Reading this article made me think of the proverbial "chicken and the egg." The article suggests that we sin because our brains are evolutionarily designed to do so. This leaves us to conclude that you cannot manage sin as it is hardwired in. I don't agree with that. I think sin is the chicken! The article does a great job of illustrating how various emotions and motives play out in the brain not the other way around. The good news is the very last paragraph. Read it for yourself...enjoy!
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POPSThat land that I live in has God on its side? "That land that I live in has God on its side," Bob Dylan sang in 1963, cynically reprising a go-to justification for war. That is, believers think they're doing the Lord's work—sometimes a dangerous inclination. http://www.psychologytoday.com/rss/pto-20080916-000003.html
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POPSAttention and Emotional Self Regulation 1) Alerting: helps us maintain an Alert State. 2) Orienting: focuses our senses on the information we want. For example, you are now listening to my voice. 3) Executive Attention: regulates a variety of networks, such as emotional responses and sensory information. This is critical for most other skills, and clearly correlated with academic performance. It is distributed in frontal lobes and the cingulate gyrus. The development of executive attention can be easily observed both by questionnaire and cognitive tasks after about age 3–4, when parents can identify the ability of their children to regulate their emotions and control their behavior in accord with social demands. Very interesting read.
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POPS“Thinking about Not-Thinking”: Neural Correlates of Conceptual Processing during Zen Meditation While behavioral performance did not differ between groups, Zen practitioners displayed a reduced duration of the neural response linked to conceptual processing in regions of the default network, suggesting that "meditative training may foster the ability to control the automatic cascade of semantic associations triggered by a stimulus and, by extension, to voluntarily regulate the flow of spontaneous mentation."
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POPSWhy you should go with your gut feeling To uncover this ability, Pessiglione and colleague Chris Frith, of University College London, tested 20 volunteers with a simple game based on winning and losing small amounts of money. On a computer screen, the volunteers watched an animated abstract pattern which for a couple of tenths of a second included one of three symbols part way through. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the symbols indicated whether they would lose or gain £1 or break even if they accepted the gamble. Surprisingly, subjects got better at predicting whether they would win or not, eventually plateauing at slightly above chance, strong evidence that volunteers do not consciously notice the symbols but are affected by them nonetheless.
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POPSSubliminal learning. "The researchers collected scans of the brain, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, to investigate the specific brain circuitry that is linked to subliminal instrumental conditioning. "The ventral striatum responded to subliminal cues and to visible outcomes in a manner that closely approximates our computational algorithm, expressing reward expected values and prediction errors," says Dr. Pessiglione. "We conclude that, even without conscious processing of contextual cues, our brain can learn their reward value and use them to provide a bias on decision making."
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POPSCultural Neuroscience I do believe this attention to culture as every bit as important as brain activity, indeed inseparable from it, is crucial for the way we think about thinkinfg and how we think we think we are.
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POPSEmotion and Confirmation Bias Where there is no skepticism and clear-thinking, we have the emotional attachment of those worshiping theory and living in a hypothetical world. Theirs is a devotion to an idea, which is actually a faith. Hope and change, anyone? Climate Change?
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POPSTo Trust or Not to Trust? It has been hypothesized that oxytocin, a hormone recognized for its role in social attachment and facilitation of social interactions, is also important in the formation of trust. For instance, application of oxytocin to “investors” in experimental games increases their tendency to engage in social risks and trust someone else with their money (see this and this). The study by Baumgartner and his colleagues highlights the neural mechanisms through which oxytocin acts to facilitate trust behavior by investigating what happens in the brain when trust breaks down.
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POPSSo You Think You Can Dance?: PET Scans Reveal Your Brain's Inner Choreography To explore that question, we conducted the first neuroimaging study of dance movement, in conjunction with our colleague Michael J. Martinez of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, using amateur tango dancers as subjects. We scanned the brains of five men and five women using positron-emission tomography,
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POPSAdversity Can Affect Brain While we have known for some time that serotonin, or lack of it , is linked to depression, substance abuse and other reckless behaviors, it appears that scientists already know there is a gene-environment interaction that can cause this to happen. Since serotonin can control reproductive systems, I was wondering if this might explain why only the Alpha female (normally) has the only litter in the wolf pack. Maybe the other females are so environmentally challenged through harassment by the dominant pair, that serotonin is reduced and that affects ovulation; just a thought...
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