Neurofeedback Training For Insomnia No Better Than Sham

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Neurofeedback training (NFT) is a procedure that tries to shape a participant's pattern of brain activity by providing real-time feedback, often in the form of a video game combined with other sensory stimuli that provide rewards when the “correct” state is achieved. The most common form of NFT uses EEG (brainwave) activity recorded non-invasively from the scalp. The EEG is a complex mixture

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February 28, 2017 at 04:26PM

7 Easy Ways to Triumph Over Any Negative Day

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You're reading 7 Easy Ways to Triumph Over Any Negative Day, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you're enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

You’re on your way to work and that’s when it happens. The car breaks down. You try to stay positive, but nothing seems to work. To make matters worse, you’re already exhausted because you slept in and had to skip your morning coffee. So when you finally get to work, you can’t help but wonder how you could possibly get ahead on the mountain of tasks you have to do today. The truth is that negative situations are inevitable and happen to us all. The trick, then, is to be proactive and have a plan in place to counter them when they do. Here are 7 easy ways to see the positive in everything that happens to you. 1) You Can Always Choose What You Fixate On Sometimes when you focus so strongly on the negative things in your life, your mind gets blurry. You lose focus because you start to get discouraged and soon that becomes all you can see. But what if you viewed your setbacks in a positive way? The next time you experience adversity in your life, choose to see it as an experience and something to learn from in your future. Remind yourself what you are grateful for to avoid slipping into negative tracks of thinking. If you choose to see the good in everything, your mind will reward you for it. 2) Don’t Expect Good Things to Happen William Shakespeare said that “expectation is the root of all heartache.” In other words, if you expect good things to happen and they don’t, you’re only setting yourself up for failure. Life doesn’t care about your intentions. Life doesn’t care that you want to have a positive day because it will make things happen to you, good or bad, regardless of how you feel. And the sooner you accept that, the sooner you can start incorporating greatness into every day. 3) Always Ask: “How Did I Get Here?” If you are where you are now, what really got you here? Was it luck, chance, hard work, opportunity? Or something else? Be honest with yourself. If you know what you did to get where you are right now—deserved or not—how can you adapt your circumstances to achieve the future you want to see in your own life today? 4) Relish the Small Things Focusing on the small things can catapult you 10x forward on your way to a more positive life. It sounds like a cliché, but it works. Because if you don’t stop to smell the roses, one day you may look back and wonder “why did I move so hastily through everything, instead of enjoying life after all?” 5) Do Random Acts of Kindness Every Day As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.” Don’t be frustrated at others when they don’t do something your way. Instead, go out of your way to be courteous and perform one little random act of kindness for others every day. 6) Don’t Forget to Vent Sometimes the worst thing we can do is try to reject our feelings and bury them under more positive ones. So instead of feeling like you shouldn't be angry or sad, try embracing these negative attitudes as they come. It seems paradoxical, but adopting a state of constant acceptance in your life can help you be more positive in the long term. 7) Empathize with Others Constantly Empathy is important. It’s key to understanding one another and a cornerstone when it comes to building friendships and forging new connections in our lives. As Stephen Covey says, we each have our own paradigms. These viewpoints shape how we see the world and define what’s right and what’s wrong, what we like and don’t like, and what we choose to see and focus on around us. Yet it’s not always easy to understand where someone else is coming from. Because, as Covey mentions, these paradigms mould our personalities and shape what we choose to see by giving us something resembling what we want to see out of every person or situation. Yet, when someone violates our paradigm, we get offended. In cases like these, it can be helpful to step outside of ourselves and ask what would make a person act in a way we may find offensive. For example, we can ask: What are they going through? What battle are they fighting we know nothing about? How would I feel if I was them right now, experiencing what they have to go through every day? It’s helpful to step back outside of ourselves and realize that if we were somebody else, we would be doing exactly what they’re doing right now because we’d be feeling exactly as they are right now. By adopting these behaviours, we can adopt a positive understanding of the world around us. It starts with understanding ourselves first, so that we can better interact with others and see the good out of everything, rather than the negative. If we can do that, we can effectively set ourselves on a grand journey to come.

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Blake helps writers simplify the creative process so they can start writing more effectively today. Discover how to boost your writing by downloading his free guide "The Bulletproof Writer's Handbook" today.

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February 28, 2017 at 03:23PM

Muslims Unite to Help Fix Vandalized Jewish Cemeteries

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Source: CNN - US News

Once again, dozens of Jewish headstones have been vandalized, stoking fears of heightened anti-Semitism. And once again, members of the Muslim community are rallying to help.

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February 28, 2017 at 02:09PM

Trump Keeps All-Gender Bathroom That Obama Put in White House

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Source: Time Magazine

The Trump Administration is maintaining a gender-neutral restroom at the White House, despite recently rolling back a key Obama-era policy designed to protect transgender youth. The White House’s “All-Gender Restroom” was established during the Obama Administration in 2015 in Room 180 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just steps from the West Wing. A White….

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February 28, 2017 at 02:02PM

Born-Into-Slavery Narratives Discovered in Newspaper

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Source: U.S. News and World Report

William Smallwood was born into slavery in the South, and as an ornery child, his tricks occasionally drew a slapping from his "old mammy," he told a newspaper reporter in 1893.

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February 28, 2017 at 02:02PM

Research Global Universities That Support LGBT Students

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Source: U.S. News and World Report

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender international students should know what to expect before choosing a school.

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February 28, 2017 at 02:02PM

Trump Signs Bill Revoking Obama-Era Gun Checks for Mental Illness

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Source: MSNBC - US News

The new law nullifies an Obama-backed rule that added people with mental illnesses to the national background check database.

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February 28, 2017 at 02:02PM

Marc Savard Comedy Hypnosis Show Tickets

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1G0sglj_ao

#1 INNER Shift to find more COURAGE, action and enthusiasm in marketing yourself

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDzPF-ycla0

Self Love: 3 HOURS Loving Kindness Meditation Music for Loving Yourself

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7cYA4auMtM

Abraham Hicks - Practice the vibration of your desire again and again

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4isLwfkf6zQ

Abraham Hicks - How does vibration turn to reality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncIO5EKMmFk

Creepypasta Hypnotic Bedtime Story Series 01 Episode 06 Water Treatment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bklrz7rRK2s

Abraham Hicks - The receptive mode of abundance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBTMxGcm0Qc

GUIDED MEDITATION for Anxiety and Stress

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ0eCONKhxU

7 Ways to Keep Fear from Stopping Creativity

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The process of creating something from nothing can be terrifying, especially when thinking you have to do it all by yourself. Knowing how to be open and permeated by the world you are living in helps, because then everything around you becomes material for your creation. The world around starts to look like a friendly collaborator — with the design to inspire and inform you.

All of a sudden the woman talking too loudly in the coffee shop is dropping lines that work their way into the character you are writing about, the jerk who stepped in front of you in the elevator has a saying on his t-shirt that becomes the title to your next chapter, and that smell you notice while walking past the bakery has cardamom in it, the missing ingredient you have been searching for.

But there is a process between throwing up your antennae to the heavens for inspiration, grounding to the earth for the energy, and opening your system to be permeated by the universe so that the act of creation becomes a wild collaborative act with everything around you.

Because fear can get in the way. Fear is, without doubt, an enemy of the creative process — until you know how to channel it. What’s worse, if you don’t know how to listen to fear, and hear it as something separate from yourself, you might actually believe that what it is saying is true.

When fear comes to me, it often says things like, “There is someone out there who could do this better. You won’t finish, why should you waste so much time on it? You don’t know enough to write about this.”

The only way to work with fear, it to face it straight on. Here is one of my favorite meditations and exercises when working with students:

1. Imagine that you are in an empty white room. You notice that there is door. You approach that door, knowing that when you open it, you are going to see fear standing on the other side.
2. When you are ready, open the door. What do you see? What shape does it take? Does it look like someone you know? Has it shown up as an animal? A symbol? How tall is it? (mine often looks like a great big mop monster).
3. Ask it to tell you what it has to say to you. Start to recognize the script that has been going on in your head that you might not have known was fear talking. What does its voice sound like? It is high? Low? Squeaky? Convincing? Does it sound ridiculous now that are you actually giving it your full attention? Or more convincing than ever?
4. Notice that in its right hand it has something for you. It is a gift. When it opens its palm, you can see what the gift is. What is it? It may be a symbol that you don’t immediately understand. That’s ok. Say thank you to your fear for showing itself to you today and close the door.
5. Now return to your journal and start writing about what you saw. Make note of the script that Fear likes to repeat. And take a look at the gift and what it means to you. If the symbol is mysterious, you can do a free write beginning with, “I am Fear,” I am here to say…” Or “I am the gift of fear, my message is…” and see what wants to come through.
6. Draw a picture of your fear. Give it a place in your life so you know where it lives. If you sit down to write and it rears it’s ugly head, rather than become paralyzed by it say, “Ok Fear, you got 60 seconds, go.” On the page that you have drawn fear, now let yourself write for 60 seconds everything it wants to say that day. But only for 60 seconds, because you have more important things to do, like create that amazing creation that is begging for your attention.

One of the most powerful things you can do is take the time to face and listen to your fear. It might be just trying to scare you away from the page, or it might be begging you to face the fact that you just wrote 300 pages in the wrong direction of your book. But when you get in the habit of making the distinction between fear being a voice in your head, rather than the truth, then you can start to use it as an ally and a tool.

This post courtesy of Spirituality & Health.

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February 28, 2017 at 08:36AM

How Brain Scientists Forgot That Brains Have Owners: Five neuroscientists argue that fancy new technologies have led the field astray

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February 28, 2017 at 08:27AM

7 Ways to Ease Your Anxious Mind

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No matter where you live in the world right now, for a certainty, anxiety is high with many of us. After the election there was a number attacks on mosques internationally and now there has been an onslaught of over 60 bomb threats at Jewish synagogues in the U.S. in January alone.

To me this means we need to not act out of anxiety and anger, but instead to calm our nervous systems, get some perspective and then choose how we’d like to respond to our emotional tumult.  For some it will be signing petitions, for others it may be creating awareness for cultural sensitivity, and yet others may be so overwhelmed they need more direct self-care and self-compassion.

One thing we know for sure is we are active participants of our health and well-being. The first thing we need to do is regulate our emotions, creating a sense of stability and control. From this place we are level headed, have perspective and can make wiser choices.

In my work I have found 7 Ways You Can Ease an Anxious Mind.

1. Slow down – At the first sign of things speeding up – thoughts racing, heart pounding, breathing accelerating – move a little slower.
   
2. Come to your senses – Take a few moments to connect with your five senses to bring you back into the moment.
3. Do a reality check – Ask yourself, “Is this thought absolutely true?” Chances are your worst fears are just that – fears.
4. Release the critic – Interrupt the self-critic by dropping into your heart and saying, “May I learn to be kinder to myself.”
5. Lie down and look up – Look up at the sky from time to time, and watch the clouds for a natural experience of mindfulness.
6. Listen – As an experiment, take the day and set an intention to listen to the sounds of leaves in the wind, of kids playing, or someone speaking to you.
7. Know your triggers – What makes you anxious? If you know your triggers, you can prepare soothing practices better.

These are just tips to play with in life to help give you the chance to settle into that space between stimulus and response where choice, possibility and freedom lie.

Below you’ll find a nice infographic that you can print out and take with you wherever you might find it supportive.

Warmly,

Elisha

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February 28, 2017 at 06:53AM

Dreams: 10 Fascinating Things You Should Know

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Why dreams are remembered or forgotten, where dreams are controlled in the brain, what they mean and more…

1. Why the brain remembers dreams

Some people recall all kinds of dreams, others hardly anything. Why the big difference?

Part of the reason that some people recall more of their dreams is that they wake up more in the night, even if only for short periods.

We need to be awake to encode dreams into long-term memory, otherwise they are generally lost to the night.

2. The dream control centre

Whether you remember dreams, then, depends on whether you are a light or heavy sleeper.

A brain imaging study has found those who recall more of their dreams have higher activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (Eichenlaub et al., 2014).

In addition, those who recalled most dreams showed greater activity in the temporo-parietal junction: this area of the brain is associated with attention towards things happening in the external world.

Together these two areas are very important in dream recall.

One of the study’s authors Perrine Ruby, explained:

“This may explain why high dream recallers are more reactive to environmental stimuli, awaken more during sleep, and thus better encode dreams in memory than low dream recallers. Indeed the sleeping brain is not capable of memorizing new information; it needs to awaken to be able to do that.”

3. Daydreamers are also night-dreamers

The overlap between waking and dreaming states was at the heart of the Matrix films.

Sci-fi aside, though, the film asked: when we’re awake, are we really awake or is this just another dream?

…all heady philosophical stuff of course, but actually this has some neurobiological truth.

Neuroscientists have found that the parts of the brain responsible for daydreaming while we’re awake are also responsible for our dreaming while we sleep.

Effectively the neural substrate responsible for dreaming may be a sub-system of that responsible for our waking lives.

“…dreaming may be the quintessential cognitive simulation because it is often highly complex, often includes a vivid sensory environment, unfolds over a duration of a few minutes to a half hour, and is usually experienced as real while it is happening.” (Domhoff, 2011)

4. Some people cannot dream

Some say that they don’t have dreams, but in all likelihood they do, it’s just that they don’t remember their dreams because they are heavy sleepers.

There are some people, though, who genuinely cannot dream.

Often as a result of brain damage from strokes, these patients can be awoken repeatedly during the night and asked about their dreams: they claim never to be dreaming (Bischof & Bassetti, 2004).

5. The purpose of dreams

Of course we don’t know what dreams are for.

It could be that dreams have no purpose, but are merely distracting by-products of losing consciousness in the particular way we do when we sleep.

Being human, though, means searching for explanations, so there’s no shortage of theories about what dreams are for.

They may be for testing out ideas, they may be for consolidating information, they may allow us to work on problems while we sleep, or they may be a way of getting rid of all the emotions we’ve built up during the day.

Which you believe probably has less to do with science than your own personal preference. So, believe whatever makes life more fun for you!

6. Myth: dreaming only occurs in REM sleep

Since the 1950s it’s been thought that dreaming is only associated with the so-called ‘Rapid Eye Movement’ portions of sleep, which make up around 20-25% of total sleep-time.

But this idea has now been challenged.

Studies have found that sometimes when people are awakened from REM sleep they report no dreams. And, sometimes when awakened from non-REM sleep they do report dreams (e.g. Nielsen, 2000).

Although much of our dreaming is done in REM sleep, some is probably also done in non-REM sleep.

7. People everywhere dream about the same stuff

A study of 50,000 dream reports by US psychologist Calvin S. Hall and colleagues found that there are remarkable similarities in the way people dream all around the world:

• Dreams are usually phantasmagoric: people, places, events and objects tend to merge into one another.
• The most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety and negative emotions are much more prevalent than positive.
• The vast majority of people dream in colour–if you watched monochrome TV growing up, though, you’re more likely to dream in black-and-white.
• Only around 10% of dreams are sexual in nature, although the percentage is higher amongst adolescents.

8. What do dreams mean?

Nothing.

At least I personally don’t believe dreams mean anything in the sense that most people understand this question.

But I’m in the minority, as demonstrated by a study which found that 56% of Americans endorse the Freudian view of dreams, in that they reveal deep psychological truths about the self (Morewedge & Norton, 2009).

Indeed this may even be an underestimate of how much store people put by dreams.

Morewedge and Norton’s study found that the majority of people think their dreams will influence their waking life, often more so than a similar waking thought.

So apparently I’m wrong: dreams mean a lot to people–even if it’s only because of the importance people ascribe to them.

→ Read the full study: The Over-Interpretation of Dreams.

9. Recording a lucid dream

Recording what happens in the brain during a particular dream is hard.

You can put people inside brain scanners while they’re asleep and then ask them afterwards what they dreamed about, but the problem is they don’t know when they dreamed it.

So it ends up being tricky matching up the brain imaging results with a particular dream.

One solution is to use lucid dreamers. These are people who have trained themselves to be aware of when they are dreaming and who can also take control of their dreams.

A recent study which used lucid dreamers this way found significant overlaps between the activity in the brain during wakefulness and during sleep (Dresler et al., 2011).

One of the authors, Michael Czisch, explained:

“Our dreams are therefore not a ‘sleep cinema’ in which we merely observe an event passively, but involve activity in the regions of the brain that are relevant to the dream content.”

10. Do blind people ‘see’ in their dreams?

Have you ever wondered if blind people can see in their dreams?

This is a question blind people get asked a fair amount.

Here is Youtube star, radio presenter and ‘blind film critic’, Tommy Edison, explaining the answer:

Studies back this up, finding that people who never had sight or who lost their sight before they were five do not dream visually.

→ Read on: The Miracle and Mystery of Sleep: 12 Remarkable Psychological Studies

Image credit: Simon Pais-Thomas

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February 28, 2017 at 06:27AM

The Power of Overlearning

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When you want to learn something new, you practice. Once you get the hang of it, you can hopefully do what you learned—whether it’s parallel parking or standing backflips—on the next day, and the next. If not, you fall back to stage one and practice some more.

But your brain may have a shortcut that helps you lock in learning. Instead of practicing until you’re decent at something and then taking a siesta, practicing just a little longer could be the fast track to solidifying a skill. “Overlearning” is the process of rehearsing a skill even after you no longer improve. Even though you seem to have already learned the skill, you continue to practice at that same level of difficulty. A recent study suggests that this extra practice could be a handy way to lock in your hard-earned skills. 

In the experiment, participants were asked to look at a screen and say when they saw a stripe pattern. Then two images were flashed one after the other. The images were noisy, like static on an old TV, and only one contained a hard-to-see stripe pattern. It took about twenty minutes of practice for people to usually recognize the image with stripes in it. The participants then continued to practice for another twenty minutes for the overlearning portion.

Next, the participants took a break before spending another twenty minutes learning a similar “competitor” task where the stripes were oriented at a new angle. Under normal circumstances, this second task would compete with the first and actually overwrite that skill, meaning people should now be able to detect the second pattern but no longer see the first. The researchers wanted to see if overlearning could prevent the first skill from disappearing.

The next day, researchers tested the participants to see which stripe patterns they could still detect. Remarkably, those participants who spent an extra twenty minutes practicing with the first pattern could not only perform the overlearned task, but they could not perform the second task. Somehow, extending their practice had crystallized the first task and blocked out competing learning afterwards. As researcher Kazuhisa Shibata says, overlearning made the first skill “resilient.”

Practicing something new seems to activate a period of learning (and unlearning) as the balance of neurotransmitters changes in the brain. Researcher Takeo Watanabe explains that overlearning can cut that period short. “In a sense, it makes the hot brain cool down.”

Overlearning is probably helpful for quick motor sequences as in basketball or ballet. For other things we typically commit to memory, like languages or facts, overlearning has not been rigorously tested. Watanabe notes that these functions tend to use less specialized information processing in the brain. Compared with vision or motion, there is more of the competition effect when learning two similar things. Watanabe speculates that overlearning might work even better here. “I think there are more cases of interference in higher cognitive memory,” he said, and “overlearning may be more effective.”

Years of research point to sleep as essential for entrenching memories. A study used sleep to cement motor learning in much the same way that overlearning was used to enhance visual learning. People who took a midday nap could produce similar results to overtraining, at least when measured on the following day—someone asked to tap fingers to thumb quickly in a given order was able to avoid overwriting that skill with a different sequence if they napped for ninety minutes in between training sessions. Unfortunately, most people cannot take a ninety minute nap every time they learn something important. However, sleep may better preserve memory after overlearning, so the two might act as a useful combination. 

But what about when we don’t want to overlearn? In real life, we sometimes want to learn more than one similar task. In that case, we’d prefer avoiding the competition between skills altogether, so we can retain all of them. The researchers found that participants could be trained to detect both stripe patterns, but this process required more time. Participants who waited for several hours between training sessions retained both tasks and performed well the next day. This was true whether or not they overlearned the first task, suggesting that the “hot” period will cool down of its own accord, given enough time.   

Sometimes, we do want to forget, or overwrite. This might be the case in post-traumatic stress disorder, where drug or non-drug therapies may one day reopen the “hot” period as treatment. Scientists hope that they can crack open the memory vault just enough to rewrite traumatic memory without touching other memories, though it would be extremely difficult and has only been tried in mice. More promising might be administering drugs to facilitate forgetting after a traumatic incident, though that has its own moral and legal quandaries. In general, we need to to forget in order to adjust to our surroundings, as when we visit a foreign country and change which way we look while crossing the road. Even when we do want to overlearn, we cannot overdo the training or we may actually reverse our gains. There is more to discover about where in our lives overlearning is relevant, and how much is actually helpful.

Still, when we want to learn something well and learn it fast, this scientific finding tells us to not underestimate the value of pushing on with practice when it seems unnecessary. “Overlearning is not useless,” says Shibata. Gesturing to the back of his head, where visual learning takes place, he says, “Although there is no further improvement, something happens.” Whether you are are picking up an obscure language like Esperanto or learning to spot Waldo with your kids, overlearning might preserve the skills you really need.

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February 28, 2017 at 06:24AM

Research Reveals How Time Will Change Your Personality

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Longest ever study of personality dramatically answers the old question of whether people really change with age.

Will you still be the same person in 10 years time? Or 40 years time?

Perhaps, like many people, you guess that you will be much the same person. Certainly it may well feel that way from the inside.

But, what if we measured your personality at 14-years-old and then again when you reached 77.

What would our personality tests find? That same old you, or a different you?

This is no idle speculation. Psychologists did just that to a group of 1,208 teenagers in the late 1940s.

In 2012, they managed to track down 174 of them to give them another personality test.

This is thought to be the longest ever span over which personality has been tested.

The surprise result — well, it’s a surprise to me at any rate — is that there was no relationship whatsoever between people’s personality at age 14 and at age 77.

It was as if the second set of tests — administered 63 years later — had been given to a totally different person.

Of course, the result is partly due to the huge length of time between assessments.

The study’s authors write:

“The longer the interval between two assessments of personality, the weaker the relationship between the two tends to be.

Our results suggest that, when the interval is increased to as much as 63 years, there is hardly any relationship at all.”

Also, personality tests only account for part of what it feels like to be you.

Still, the change in personality is massive.

The reality is that the reason we don’t notice these huge shifts in personality is that they happen so slowly.

Like a glacier constantly moving under its own weight, our personalities continue to shift imperceptibly as time and circumstances do their work.

We might feel like the same person 20 years later — but perhaps it is only an illusion?

The study was published in the journal Psychology and Aging (Harris et al., 2016).

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February 28, 2017 at 05:22AM

Abraham Hicks - Can past attractions come about in the now

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCceIORMPo0

Throat Chakra Healing Meditation Music || vishuddha || Tibetan Singing Bowls Chakra Healing Music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJmJNHsyK48

ASMR Whispering Hypnosis for deep sleep with Maggie softley spoken anxiety relief deep relaxation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhx2mkd7VmU

This Neural Probe Is So Thin, The Brain Doesn't Know It's There

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February 28, 2017 at 03:51AM

Guy Therapy: Why It’s So Important!

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Most people who seek out psychotherapy are women. The reason for this, it’s been said, is that women are more open to expressing their emotions and asking for help and support. Guys, in contrast, are viewed as too macho or too self-contained to consider therapy.

Damn, they can’t even ask for directions, how are they going to ask for help when feeling vulnerable, weak or confused? Why would they want to yakity yak about their problems to a complete stranger? This is akin to exposing the chink in one’s armor. And who would want to do that?
 
But, it seems to me that we’re unfairly judgmental, because we don’t appreciate that traditional talk therapy has always been more oriented toward women’s ways. When you are in therapy, you are supposed to talk about emotional stuff, self-disclose, explore feelings, reflect on the past, trust your therapist and be open to receiving help, suggestions and advice. This is a woman’s dream. Expressing feelings is easy for most of us. Opening up to a non-judgmental, listening ear is heaven for us. Feeling understood is what we crave. Trusting others who know more than we know makes us feel secure. 
 
For most men, however, it’s different. It’s harder for men to trust another person with their innermost feelings. From the time they were little boys, they’ve gotten the message that they need to be “tough” and “competitive.” Showing fear or weakness is shameful. A boy learns early on that he is not supposed to be “too sensitive.” If he is, he pays the heavy price of being ridiculed or ostracized by his peers. 
 
As adults, many men still feel that there is no safe environment in which they can express their feelings. They may long for emotional intimacy, but expressing themselves often backfires on them. Why? 
 
Because when men finally open up and “talk about it,” they often feel worse, not better.  Too often, they end up (at home and at work) with unsolicited advice. He’s told what’s wrong with him, what he should or shouldn’t be doing or what he never should have done. Feeling bruised, he withdraws to his cave to lick his wounds.
 
Hence, it’s no wonder that many guys resist traditional talk therapy. They know that it requires them to do things they are uncomfortable with: “open up”, “trust”, “express feelings” and “accept help.”
 
Therapy is viewed as even more threatening if he is “sent” to it by a spouse making an ultimatum, a work situation that demands it or a family intervention. He may fear, sometimes rightly so, that he will be criticized, ridiculed, patronized or asked questions that will make him look like he’s stupid. As a defense against these feelings, he may enter therapy with an attitude of superiority (you can’t teach me anything), entitlement (I’ll do whatever I want to do) and contempt for others and for the process of psychotherapy (this is all bull shit).
 
Now, before I receive a slew of angry letters, the description above is not true for all men. Yet, it is true for many men. So rather than expecting men to set aside their socialization experience and adapt to traditional therapy, I think it’s well past time for therapy to become oriented toward guy’s ways.
 
Here’s my idea of effective guy therapy:

• An emphasis on exploring how you “think” rather than how you “feel.”
• Appealing to a man’s competence and strengths to remedy whatever problem he faces.
• Exploring “fix-it” solutions that bolster men’s egos.
• Being sensitive to a man’s discomfort with vulnerability.
• Using metaphors that men use (sports, business, computers, cars, tools) as a way of  “running the ball down the field.”

 As men come to believe that therapy respects and values their ways of being in the world, they might be much more open to the process.

©2017

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February 28, 2017 at 03:51AM

Abraham Hicks - You can't find the path for someone else

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlsYYuA6rcs

The Insomniac Files: Hypno-sleep 'til Brooklyn? - Metro.us

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Metro.us

The Insomniac Files: Hypno-sleep 'til Brooklyn? Metro.us Modrn Sanctuary in NoMad is offering free classes on March 1 "to help New Yorkers accomplish their 2017 de-stress, relax, revitalize and reach their health and wellness goals." If you've ever wanted to try acupuncture, yoga or pilates, hypnosis or ...

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February 28, 2017 at 03:39AM

New Subreddit for cogsci experiments /r/selfexperiment

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Maybe someday we'll be able to sign up to be an organ donor for our brain, but it'll only kick in just before I die of old age or cancer or whatever, and they'll be able to do some real experiments on my brain and try to figure out what's really going on up there.

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February 28, 2017 at 03:17AM

Abraham Hicks - You have power only in the now

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtL7DxREtHs

A paper in Psychological Science explores things people do psychologically to recover from disasters.

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A community for those who are interested in the mind, brain, language and artificial intelligence.

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Want to know more? Take a look at our reading list here. If you have any suggestions for further inclusions, post them here.

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February 28, 2017 at 02:26AM

9 Ways to Have an Emotional Spring Clean

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Last weekend, I very nearly fetched my Geraniums out of the greenhouse where they’ve been hibernating all Winter, but chose to leave them there for a bit longer and I am pleased I did so as we’ve had a couple of frosty mornings since! It is almost Spring and time for that annual ritual known […]

The post 9 Ways to Have an Emotional Spring Clean appeared first on Adam Eason.

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February 28, 2017 at 02:15AM

9 Ways to Have an Emotional Spring Clean

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Last weekend, I very nearly fetched my Geraniums out of the greenhouse where they’ve been hibernating all Winter, but chose to leave them there for a bit longer and I am pleased I did so as we’ve had a couple of frosty mornings since! It is ALMOST Spring and time for that annual ritual known […]

The post 9 Ways to Have an Emotional Spring Clean appeared first on Adam Eason.

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February 28, 2017 at 01:28AM

The Exact 3 Closing Words That Maximize Email Results

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If you’re like most people, you write a LOT of emails. And, you probably spend your time focusing on your email’s contents while giving little thought to your closing. However, a new study from email software provider Boomerang suggests that [...]

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February 28, 2017 at 12:51AM

Done Right, Online Health Tools Can Promote Healthy Behaviors

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Researchers are learning online health tools that communicate well can promote healthier lifestyles.

However, investigators warn that the tone of such messages must be professional and inspiring. Otherwise, if the message is delivered in too much of a conversational format, the online tools may lull users into a false sense of comfort.

In a study, people who experienced a back-and-forth interaction with an online health risk assessment website were more likely to follow the health behaviors suggested by the tool, according to Penn State researcher S. Shyam Sundar.

“This shows that delivering information on health risks through dialogue can help users get engaged with the tool and may positively affect their health,” said Sundar. “In general, it speaks to the design of interactive delivery of health information that it is not only engaging, but also inspiring.”

The researchers, who present their findings in the journal Human Communication Research, suggest that the display of interconnected questions and answers promotes a feeling of contingency and that leads to better engagement with the site.

Better engagement, then, may increase the likelihood that the user will adopt strategies for better health.

“When you are having this back and forth interaction with a system, you are having a conversation with that system,” said Sundar. “We think that interactivity has been achieved when the system’s output is contingent on the user’s input in a continuous threaded way.”

Although the back-and-forth feel of a conversation could lead to improved health intentions, a more conversational tone in the messages may make users feel less susceptible to health risks such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease, according to Sundar, who worked with Dr. Saraswathi Bellur, assistant professor of communication at the University of Connecticut.

The study found that when the online tool used short phrases, such as “Mm-hmm” and “Go on” to promote an informal conversational tone, users felt less susceptible to health risks, according to Bellur.

“This conversational tone may make them warm and fuzzy, but that’s not what you want to do with a health assessment tool,” Bellur said.

“If you want people to stand up and take action, this type of friendly turn-taking softens the effect. However, if the goal of the interaction is to promote a sense of comfort among individuals, the same conversational tone strategy could work well, with the online tool acting like a virtual coach and providing reassurance,” she added.

The researchers suggest that as more people become frustrated with the lack of face-to-face interaction with their doctors, patients may be more willing to try online health assessments and applications.

In 2012, 61 percent of people said they were dissatisfied with the time doctors spent talking with patients, according to a poll conducted by National Public Radio, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.

“We are seeing a growth in e-medicine,” Sundar said. “People are trying to compensate for this lack of face-to-face time with doctors by using online tools, which are becoming increasingly conversational.”

The design of these e-health tools need not be highly sophisticated, according to the researchers.

“A simple instant-message-like feature that enables a dialogue between the user and the system is sufficient to evoke rich perceptions of interactivity, which, in turn, could favorably influence health behaviors and attitudes,” said Bellur. “Therein lies the power of interactive health tools.”

The researchers recruited 172 undergraduate students to take part in the study. Participants were assigned to one of six versions of a health risk assessment website. The sites were designed to have either low, medium, or high interactivity with either conversational or no conversational tone.

Participants took part in a question and answer session delivered through the website’s instant messaging interface.

The low-interactivity site did not display any signs or visual cues that there was an ongoing interaction between the user and the system. The medium-interactivity site visually called out the user’s response in a box titled “Your response.” In the high-interactivity condition, the system referred to the user’s previous answers by displaying “previously, you mentioned” or “earlier, you reported” following his or her answers.

Websites with more conversational tone added phrases such as “Let’s move onto the next question” and “OK, let’s talk about exercise” during the question and answer session.

Source: Penn State

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February 28, 2017 at 12:50AM

10 Ways to Make More Money

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI7ppd6IcTs

Recovery of visual function through neural stimulation: Key Neurotech Patent #22

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– Illustrative image from U.S. Patent No. 6,990,377

Today we are sharing a very interesting 2006 patent, assigned to Advanced Neuromodulation Systems, spanning both invasive and non-invasive neurotechnologies.

U.S. Patent No. 6,990,377: Systems and methods for facilitating and/or effectuating development, rehabilitation, restoration, and/or recovery of visual function through neural stimulation.

• Assignee(s): Advanced Neuromodulation Systems, Inc.
• Inventor(s): Bradford E. Gliner, Warren D. Sheffield
• Technology Category: Hybrid
• Issue Date: January 24, 2006

SharpBrains’ Take:

The ‘377 patent discloses treatments combining multiple neurotechnologies, coupling neurostimulation techniques (e.g., electrical, magnetic, etc.) with software-based visual training programs. Although some embodiments are explicitly directed towards implantable stimulation devices, at least some of the claims do not require implantation — making the patent span both invasive and non-invasive techniques. The five independent claims include, in some instances, elements directed towards both neural stimulation and visual training systems, while in other instances primarily focus on only neural stimulation techniques applied to specific stimulation sites associated with a population of neurons. The independent claim scope, sometimes possessing only two major limitations (and hence quite broad), along with the combination of two complimentary but diverse treatments modalities of (1) electrical/ magnetic stimulation and (2) computer software program applications, are among the factors contributing to making the ‘377 patent a key non-invasive neurotech patent.

Abstract:

System and methods for effectuating and/or facilitating visual function in a patient. One embodiment of a system comprises a neural stimulation system and a visual training system. The neural stimulation system can include a pulse generator and a stimulus delivery device coupled to the pulse generator. The stimulus delivery device is configured to deliver a stimulus to the brain of the patient. The visual training system can include a computer and a display coupled to the computer. The computer has a computer operable medium containing instructions to provide a visual output to the patient via the display.

Illustrative Claim 1. A system for effectuating and/or facilitating visual function in a patient, comprising:

• a neural stimulation system including a pulse generator and a stimulus delivery device coupled to the pulse generator, the stimulus delivery device being configured to deliver a stimulus to the brain of the patient via a pathway that does not include the cornea; and
• a visual training system including a computer and a display coupled to the computer, the computer having a computer operable medium containing instructions to provide a visual output to the patient via the display.

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To learn more about market data, trends and leading companies in the digital brain health space –digital platforms for brain/ cognitive assessment, monitoring and enhancement– check out this market report. To learn more about our analysis of 10,000+ patent filings, check out this IP & innovation neurotech report.

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February 28, 2017 at 12:33AM

Do Long Day-Care Hours Stress Toddlers?

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A Norwegian study has found that toddlers who spend the longest time in day care (8-9 hours) have higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol during the day, compared to days they spend at home. Children who go to day care seven hours per day or less show no increase.

Based on the findings, it appears that toddlers who have the longest day-care days must mobilize extra emotional resources to handle the challenges of being there full-time, and/or the long separation from their parents. Higher levels of stress may trigger emotional reactions in young children which may require extra patience and understanding from their caregivers and parents.

Several international studies have previously shown that young children show increased levels of cortisol on their full-day child care days, while their levels at home remain steady or decline. This has led to speculation that childcare settings pose challenges for young children — from being in a large group, managing interactions with other children, to being away from their parents.

There are no studies examining whether child care stress can have negative effects in the long term, so it remains unknown.

For the study, researchers at three Norwegian regional centers for child and adolescent mental health — the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s RKBU Central Norway, RBUP East & South, and the University of Oslo — measured cortisol levels in 112 toddlers from 85 different child-care centers in six municipalities, approximately five months after they started attending. The children’s cortisol levels were measured around 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.

The results show that Norwegian toddlers with the longest day-care days (8-9 hours) had an increase in the stress hormone cortisol on their child-care days, with lower levels on their days at home. Children who were in childcare seven hours per day or less showed no increase.

The findings indicate a correlation between the amount of time children spend in childcare and their stress levels. This is particularly relevant In Norway, as most one- and two-year olds here spend more than 40 hours per week in day care.

The researchers stress that the study has several limitations and that the findings therefore should be interpreted with caution. They say that the study should be followed up by a larger study with a broader range of participants, to determine whether the results can be replicated and to have the opportunity to examine any differences between different groups of children.

Source: Norwegian University of Science and Technology

 

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February 28, 2017 at 12:13AM

Unveiling the Real Evil Genius

Sleep Science Still in Early Stages

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A new research review finds that sleep remains an enduring biological mystery with major clinical relevance.

Thomas Scammell, M.D., of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and colleagues discovered that in recent decades, new technologies have allowed neuroscientists to identify multiple brain circuits that govern the sleep/wake cycle, as well as the factors that can influence it, such as caffeine and light.

But the investigators also discovered the brain’s complexity is still a stumbling block in understanding sleep.

“In the last ten years, neuroscientists have had access to new tools with which we can test the roles of very specific neurons in the brain,” said lead author Scammell, a professor in the department of neurology at BIDMC.

“When we know the specific relevant players in the brain, it allows us to develop therapies to help people get to sleep or help sleepy people be more alert during the day.”

Specifically, two technologies developed since 2000 allow neurologists to switch specific neurons on or off. In a process called chemogenetics, researchers use drugs that have an effect only in a genetically-defined group of cells to determine the neurons’ role.

Optogenetics uses laser light to turn on or turn off targeted brain cells. These techniques have revealed which neuronal circuits promote wakefulness and sleep throughout the brain, especially in the brain stem and the hypothalamus.

“We can now interrogate neurons in a more precise way,” said Scammell. “The techniques are very similar, but optogenetics works over a short time scale, on the order of seconds. With chemogenetics, we can watch over several hours what happens when we turn certain neurons on or off.”

Sleep researchers have also made important discoveries about the fundamental chemistry of sleepiness in recent years. In a major breakthrough in the late 1990s, scientists discovered a previously unknown chemical, a neurotransmitter called orexin, required for maintaining long periods of wakefulness.

The loss of orexin production causes the common sleep disorder narcolepsy, which is characterized by chronic sleepiness and irregular REM sleep. Today, pharmaceutical companies make drugs that intentionally block the orexin system to treat insomnia. Researchers are also trying to develop drugs that mimic orexin to wake people up.

“A drug that acts like orexin could be as great for patients with narcolepsy as insulin is for people with diabetes,” said Scammell.

Neuroscience research has also revealed the brain circuity governing circadian rhythms, the biological clock that synchronizes sleepiness and wakefulness with night and day.

Located deep in the hypothalamus, the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) regulates circadian rhythms and is capable of maintaining them for some time even in total darkness. However, the SCN is no match for the digital environment when it comes to people’s sleep habits.

“People increasingly use their electronic devices in bed, which tricks the brain into thinking it’s being exposed to daylight,” said Scammell. “The internal clock gets reset, making it much harder to wake up in the morning.”

Phones and tablets are just one of the reasons about a third of all American adults are sleep deprived, getting much less than the recommended seven to eight hours of sleep per night.

That raises more questions about why some people need more or less than that, and why some people can tolerate a sleep deficit so much better than others. The links among lack of sleep or poor sleep and metabolic disease, cancer risk and mood disorders also require further study.

With each of the brain’s hundreds of thousands of neurons networked to each other, scientists will need a deeper knowledge of the brain’s inner workings to understand how the circuits that regulate sleep interact.

“There’s tremendous dialog back and forth among these circuits,” said Scammell, who said today’s technology allows scientists to monitor dozens of neurons at a time within one region of the brain.

“Our ability to record activity in just a handful of neurons simultaneously is still not anything close to understanding the whole brain, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.”

Study findings appear in the journal Neuron.

Source: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

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February 27, 2017 at 11:20PM

The Rise of Evidence-Based Psychiatry

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On January 2, 1979, Dr. Rafael Osheroff was admitted to Chestnut Lodge, an inpatient psychiatric hospital in Maryland. Osheroff had a bustling nephrology practice. He was married with three children, two from a previous marriage. Everything had been going well except his mood.

For the previous two years, Osheroff had suffered from bouts of anxiety and depression. Dr. Nathan Kline, a prominent psychopharmacologist in New York City, had begun Osheroff on a tricyclic antidepressant and, according to Kline’s notes—which were later revealed in court—he improved.

But then Osheroff decided, against Kline’s advice, to change his dose. He got worse. So much worse that he was brought to Chestnut Lodge.

For the next seven months, Osheroff was treated with intensive psychotherapy for narcissistic personality disorder and depression. It didn’t help. He lost 40 pounds, suffered from excruciating insomnia, and began pacing the floor so incessantly that his feet became swollen and blistered.

Osheroff’s family, distressed by the progressive unraveling of his mind, hired a psychiatrist in Washington D.C. to intervene. In response, Chestnut Lodge held a clinical case conference yet decided to not change treatment. Importantly, they decided to not begin medications but to continue psychotherapy. They considered themselves “traditional psychiatrists”—practitioners of psychodynamic psychotherapy, the technique used by Sigmund Freud and other pioneers.

At the end of seven months, in a worse state yet, Osheroff’s family had him transferred from Chestnut Lodge to Silver Hill in Connecticut. Silver Hill’s doctors immediately diagnosed him as having a psychotic depressive episode and began him on a combination of phenothiazine and tricyclic antidepressants—a combination that recent clinical trials had shown to be effective.

“Within weeks after his transfer,” Dr. Alan Stone later wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine, “biological treatment with antidepressants [produced] a dramatic recovery.” Three months after his transfer, Osheroff left Silver Hill with a diagnosis of manic-depression, an early name for bipolar disorder. A quick turn-around.

Yet the previous year had destroyed Osheroff’s life. Kidney patients cannot wait a year to be seen, so Osheroff lost his lucrative medical practice. Concerned about her children, Osheroff’s ex-wife gained custody of two of his children. His reputation in the community was shattered.

Osheroff sued Chestnut Lodge for not providing the latest, evidence-based treatment. He sued “for negligence, because the staff failed to prescribe drugs and instead treated him according to the psychodynamic and social model.”

As Dr. Gerald Klerman described in the American Journal of Psychiatry: at the time, there was no evidence for psychodynamic therapy for psychotic depression. “In contrast, there are numerous randomized, controlled trials of the efficacy of ECT and the combination of tricyclic and neuroleptic medications in the treatment of psychotic depression.” Klerman later notes Chestnut Lodge’s “strange clinical logic to ignore available evidence in favor of a conjecture based on doctrine.”

Osheroff won the lawsuit and settled with Chestnut Lodge outside of court. (Chestnut Lodge,a lovely historical landmark, eventually folded, was converted to upscale condos, and subsequently burned to the ground.)

The case sparked a decades-long debate—one with “considerable spunk”—that captured the attention of the psychiatric community: “Has psychiatry reached the point where use of the psychodynamic model is viewed as malpractice when it is the exclusive treatment for serious mental disorders?” Stone asked. Another clinician questioned, “Are psychoanalysis and medical psychiatry compatible?”

Data showing one therapy was effective could evidently legally compel clinicians to change practice to avoid claims of negligence. Furthermore, if theories about the etiology of brain diseases like depression were demonstrated and generally accepted, clinicians who guide therapy with “traditional,” nonscientific theories could also be considered negligent.

Recall that since Osheroff’s 1980s case, tens of thousands of papers and scores of books have described our ever-deepening knowledge of the neuroscience of mental illness, fixing psychiatry squarely as a medical specialty, as a specialty of brains.

Yet, as Dr. Sophia Vinogradov, Chief of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School, recently wrote in Nature Human Behavior, “There's a secret that we psychiatrists do not like to talk about: the abysmally primitive state of how we assess, understand, and treat mental illness.”

But many have great hope this will change.

Last year, The Lancet Psychiatry published a joint study between The University of Texas Southwestern and Yale University used a machine-learning algorithm to see which of 164 clinical measures were most predictive of treatment success with the antidepressant citalopram.

The clinical measures included well-validated scales like the Quick Inventory of Depression Symptomatology (QIDS) and the Hamilton Depression Rating scale as well as sociodemographic features, previous diagnoses and antidepressants the patient had taken, and the first 100 items on a psychiatric diagnostic symptom questionnaire.

The three best predictors of treatment success were current employment, years of education, and loss of insight into their depressive condition. The three best predictors of treatment failure were baseline depression severity, feeling restless, and reduced energy level.

The tool predicted treatment outcome with 60 percent accuracy in an independent data sample—far better than clinicians. The research group has published an online tool to predict a patient’s likelihood of success with citalopram.

This single tool is unlikely to be the answer, but it is a harbinger of data science for psychiatry. We are beginning to approach the brain as a computational organ, one to be evaluated with measurements and calculations.

Calculators of disease risk are regularly used in medicine—if you have atrial fibrillation and go to a cardiologist, she will use multiple datapoints to calculate your risk of stroke, known as a CHAD-VASC score. Depending on your risk, she might prescribe you an anticoagulant like Coumadin.

The CHAD-VASC calculator is freely available online and does not pretend to be a perfect assessment of risk. It is sometimes wrong. But it is our medical community’s best approximation of your stroke risk if you have atrial fibrillation. The calculator is not a vote of no confidence in the cardiologist’s ability. Rather, like all empirical tests, it signifies that decisions based on more data are better than those based on less.

Psychiatry remains an outlier in the medical profession regarding the use of data; even after the rigorous Osheroff v. Chestnut Lodge debate, the importance of data in practice remains unsettled. In particular, objective data and data science remain underutilized by the psychiatric community. Has your therapist ever used a predictive algorithm to guide your treatment?

As Harvard Psychiatrists John Torous and Justin Baker recently wrote in JAMA Psychiatry, “Data science and technology can provide a nearly limitless set of decision-support and self-monitoring tools. However, without individual psychiatrists and the field at large making a concerted push to drive the technology forward…these advances will likely fail to transform our troubled system of care.”

The concern is that psychiatry lacks the will to apply what is known to what is practiced. Osheroff all over again.

“The scientific knowledge base is already
in place to radically improve the clinical practice of psychiatry,” Vinogradov asserted, “what we need next is the collective vision.”

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February 27, 2017 at 11:04PM

Best of Our Blogs: February 28, 2017

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How do you define wellness?

Would it look like an illness-free or symptom-free life? Would it mean the ability to maintain a steady job, exercise regularly, or cultivate healthy relationships?

And how will you get there?

Would wellness entail eating certain foods, taking time to rest, doing things you love or all of the above?

Just like any goal, we need to be clear about what success will look like and what steps we need to take to get there.

We’re already at the end of February, how are you doing with your resolutions?

If you need a little boost, the following posts will guide you toward the relationships and emotional wellness you’re dreaming of.

A Surprising, Hidden Cause of Depression
(Childhood Emotional Neglect) – This explains why challenges floor you and how you can pick yourself up even if you’re feeling depressed.

What’s My Attachment Style and Why Does It Matter?
(Happily Imperfect) – Still grappling with your last failed romantic relationship? Here’s what you need to understand.

Cheating Men Are from Mars; Cheating Women from Venus
(Surviving Infidelity) – Why do people cheat? Here’s why it matters if you’re a man or woman.

Symptom of the Day: Excessive Sleep
(Bipolar Laid Bare) – Sleeping too much lately? Here’s why you should be concerned if you’re experiencing excessive sleepiness.

Are You Rejection Sensitive? How to Tell. What to Do.
(Knotted) – It’s why you can’t handle rejection and what you can do about it.

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February 27, 2017 at 10:36PM

New Imaging Tool Can Gauge How Well People Communicate

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Biomedical engineers have designed a wearable brain-imaging device to see how brains sync up when humans interact. Currently, great ideas often get lost in translation — from the math teacher who can’t get through to his students, to a stand-up comedian who bombs during an open mic night.

To address this void, Drexel University biomedical engineers, in collaboration with Princeton University psychologists, developed a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (or fNIRS) system, with the wearable device as one of many applications.

The new system uses light to measure neural activity during real-life situations and can be worn like a headband. Investigators believe the new technique will improve the exchange of information between people.

Indeed, researchers explain that the fNIRS device can successfully measure brain synchronization during conversation. The technology can now be used to study everything from doctor-patient communication, to how people consume cable news.

The study appears in Scientific Reports.

“Being able to look at how multiple brains interact is an emerging context in social neuroscience,” said Hasan Ayaz, PhD, an associate research professor in Drexel’s School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, who led the research team.

“We live in a social world where everybody is interacting. And we now have a tool that can give us richer information about the brain during everyday tasks — such as natural communication — that we could not receive in artificial lab settings or from single brain studies.”

The current study is based on previous research from Uri Hasson, PhD, associate professor at Princeton University, who has used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study the brain mechanisms underlying the production and comprehension of language.

Hasson has found that a listener’s brain activity actually mirrors the speaker’s brain when he or she is telling story about a real-life experience. And higher coupling is associated with better understanding.

However, traditional brain imaging methods have certain limitations. In particular, fMRI requires subjects to lie down motionlessly in a noisy scanning environment. With this kind of set-up, it is not possible to simultaneously scan the brains of multiple individuals who are speaking face-to-face.

This is why the Drexel researchers sought to investigate whether the portable fNIRS system could be a more effective approach to probe the brain-to-brain coupling question in natural settings.

For their study, a native English speaker and two native Turkish speakers told an unrehearsed, real-life story in their native language. Their stories were recorded and their brains were scanned using fNIRS. Fifteen English speakers then listened to the recording, in addition to a story that was recorded at a live storytelling event.

The researchers targeted the prefrontal and parietal areas of the brain, which include cognitive and higher order areas that are involved in a person’s capacity to discern beliefs, desires and goals of others.

They hypothesized that a listener’s brain activity would correlate with the speaker’s only when listening to a story they understood (the English version). A second objective of the study was to compare the fNIRS results with data from a similar study that had used fMRI, in order to compare the two methods.

They found that when the fNIRS measured the oxygenation and deoxygenation of blood cells in the test subject’s brains, the listeners’ brain activity matched only with the English speakers. These results also correlated with the previous fMRI study.

This new research supports fNIRS as a viable future tool to study brain-to-brain coupling during social interaction. The system can be used to offer important information about how to better communicate in many different environments, including classrooms, business meetings, political rallies and doctors’ offices.

“This would not be feasible with fMRI. There are too many challenges,” said Banu Onaral, Ph.D., the H. H. Sun Professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems.

“Now that we know fNIRS is a feasible tool, we are moving into an exciting era when we can know so much more about how the brain works as people engage in everyday tasks.”

Source: Drexel University/EurekAlert
 
Photo: This is a cartoon image of brain ‘coupling’ during communication. Credit: Drexel University.

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February 27, 2017 at 10:36PM

There’s a psychological case for paying female managers more than male managers, or giving them more holiday

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By Alex Fradera

Women are still underrepresented in managerial positions, particularly at the top of organisations. It’s not just that women are unable to attain these positions due to discrimination or access to resources. There’s also evidence that suggests these positions may be less attractive to women, as having a senior job tends to increase life satisfaction for men but not for women; this could lead to women exiting such career paths or shying away from them even if well qualified. New research in the Journal of Happiness Studies asks a simple, but important question: why are women managers less happy than their male counterparts?

Hilke Brockmann and her colleagues drew on a large German survey conducted between 1984-2011 involving data from 27,000 non-managers and 3174 managers, a third of whom were women. The survey featured questions about life satisfaction, pay and spare time.

Overall, female managers reported slightly lower life satisfaction than their male counterparts, consistent with past research. They also seemed to find higher pay less rewarding than men. Based on correlations between life satisfaction and pay across male and female managers, on the researchers’ estimate it would take an extra €12,000 of pay to boost a woman’s life satisfaction by the same amount that a man would gain from an extra €5,000 of pay.

This is consistent with previous evidence that suggests men value money particularly highly against other benefits like more free time. Also, highly educated ambitious women are likely to settle down with romantic partners who are in similar careers and – especially if their partner is male – who may earn more than them. This means female managers can be in a situation where further gains in their own income matter less, given their net household worth.

Brockmann and her colleagues expected and found that spare time would have a stronger association with happiness for women managers than men. One reason for this is women tend to have less free time than men, as they often take on greater responsibility for caring duties within a household. As managerial promotions often involve sacrificing free time for money, this deal is going to be less attractive for many women.

In fact, Brockmann’s team found that caring less about money and more about time was at the heart of female managers’ dissatisfaction. Their analysis showed that if it were not for those factors, women would be happier in managerial roles than men, which suggests that the nature of managerial work is not a problem for women, but how it is structured and compensated.

The researchers also looked at the issue of whether female managers are more adversely affected than male managers by the decision to delay having children in pursuit of their careers. They found some evidence to support this, in that between the ages of 35 and 45 (when fertility tends to decline in women) childless female managers felt significantly less satisfied with their lives than female managers who’d had children and male managers who were childless.

Brockmann and her colleagues pointed out that the lack of gender parity at senior management levels isn’t solved by simply bringing women into the boardroom, as this may just consign them to an unhappy stay. A major problem is that in most working cultures leadership positions “require a non-stop lifelong commitment to extra-long working hours and early career path-dependencies” which may repel women who particularly value their free time.

One solution for companies who want to attract more female managers would be to build in more breathing space for their leadership positions – after all, successful entrepreneurs can build businesses on 40 hours a week – and to provide other “temporal rewards” like flexible career paths, especially to help younger women more easily juggle family and work ambitions.

—Why Managerial Women are Less Happy Than Managerial Men

Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) is Contributing Writer at BPS Research Digest

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February 27, 2017 at 09:26PM

Teach yourself everyday happiness with imagery training

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Flashbacks of scenes from traumatic events often haunt those suffering from psychiatric conditions, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

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February 27, 2017 at 08:31PM

New risk factors for anxiety disorders

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Several newly discovered variants of a gene increase the risk of developing anxiety disorders.

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February 27, 2017 at 08:31PM

Ask Roger What can hypnosis do for fibromyalgia

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hormones, brain and behaviour, a not-so-simple story

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There’s a simple story about sex differences in cognition, which traces these back to sex differences in early brain development, which are in turn due to hormone differences. Diagrammatically, it looks something like this:

Cordelia Fine’s “Delusions of Gender” (2010) accuses both scientists and popularisers of science with being too ready to believe overly simple, and biologically fixed, accounts of sex differences in cognition.

There is an undeniable sex difference in foetal testosterone in humans at around 6-8 weeks after conception. In Chapter 9 of her book, Fine introduces Simon Baron-Cohen, who seems to claim that this surge in male hormones is the reason why men are more likely to be Autistic, and why no woman had ever won the Fields Medal. So, diagrammatically:

This account may appear, at first, compelling, perhaps because of its simplicity. But Fine presents us with an antidote for this initial intuition, in the form of the neurodevelopmental story of a the spinal nucleus of the bulbocavernosus (SNB), a subcortical brain area which controls muscles at the base of the penis.

Even here, the route between hormone, brain difference and behaviour is not so simple, as shown by neat experiments with rats by Celia Moore, described by Fine (p.105 in my edition). Moore showed that male rat pups are licked more by their mothers, and that this licking is due to excess testostore in their urine. Mother’s which couldn’t smell, licked male and female pups equally, and female pups injected with testosterone were licked as much as male pups. This licking had an extra developmental effect on the SNB, which could be mimicked by manual brushing of a pup’s perineum. Separate work showed that testosterone doesn’t act directly on the neurons of the SNB, but instead prevents cell death in the SNB by preserving the muscles which it connects to (in males). So, diagrammatically:

One review, summarising what is known about the development of the SNB, writes ‘[There is] a life-long plasticity in even this simple system [and] evidence that adult androgens interact with social experience in order to affect the SNB system’. Not so simple!

What I love about this story is the complexity of developmental causes. Even in the rat, not the human! Even in the subcortex, not the cortex! Even in a brain area which direct controls a penis reflex. Fine’s implicit question for Baron-Cohen seems to be: If evolution creates this level of complexity for something as important for reproductive function, what is likely for the brain areas responsible for something as selectively-irrelevant as winning prizes at Mathematics?

Notice also the variety of interactions, not just the number : hormones -> body, body -> sensation in mother’s brain, brain -> behaviour, mother’s behaviour -> pup’s sensation, sensation -> cell growth. This is a developmental story which happens across hormones, brain, body, behaviour and individuals.

Against this example, sex differences in cognition due to early hormone differences look far from inevitable, and the simple hormone-brain-behaviour looks like a crude summary at best. Whether you take it to mean that sex differences in hormones have multiple routes to generate sex differences in cognition (a ‘small differences add up’ model) or that sex differences in hormones will cancel each other out, may depend on your other assumptions about development. At a minimum, the story of the SNB shows that those assumptions are worth checking.

Previously: gender brain blogging

Paper: Moore, C. L., Dou, H., & Juraska, J. M. (1992). Maternal stimulation affects the number of motor neurons in a sexually dimorphic nucleus of the lumbar spinal cord. Brain research, 572(1), 52-56.

Source for the 2009 claim by Baron-Cohen claim that foetal hormones explain why no woman has won the Fields medal: Autism test ‘could hit maths skills’.

In 2014 Maryam Mirzakhabi won the Fields medal.

Diagrams made with draw.io

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February 27, 2017 at 04:59PM

Matthew Cahill to Become Vice Chairman of UKCHO - Satellite PR News (press release)

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Matthew Cahill to Become Vice Chairman of UKCHO Satellite PR News (press release) The UK Confederation of Hypnotherapy Organisations was founded in 1998 in order to provide a non political arena to discuss and implement changes to the profession of hypnotherapy. The Organisation is a members Co-operative limited by a guarantee ... and more »

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February 27, 2017 at 04:38PM

Retirement and other life changes can create stumbling blocks - Bucks County Courier Times

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Bucks County Courier Times

Retirement and other life changes can create stumbling blocks Bucks County Courier Times She's noticed, though, with hypnotherapy clients are making huge leaps forward in a short amount of time. “I can do in six to eight sessions of hypnotherapy what would take a year in psychotherapy,” she said. Much like psychotherapy, Waite will have a ...

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February 27, 2017 at 04:38PM

Open Your Heart To Love - Increase Awareness To Your Relationship Patterns | Subliminal Isochronic

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The 5 Best Podcasts on Kindness

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You're reading The 5 Best Podcasts on Kindness, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you're enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

Paying it forward. The norm of reciprocity. The power of empathy. These are all concepts within the practice of kindness. There are biological responses to kindness, as it releases chemicals in the brain that are the same as those when we experience love. Interestingly, it turns out kindness was a skill that helped our ancestors survive, a key evolutionary trail. There is a certain amount of it that can be cultivated and some that is genetically hard wired within us. The power kindness holds is one of action, for which people can connect with others, and oftentimes, with our own selves in the process. Here are 5 podcasts that touch upon the influence of kindness:

1. Spreading compassion into the world, one small gesture at a time. This podcast touches on the acts of kindness either toward someone we know or a complete stranger and how it can impact and change our lives for the better.

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2. This podcast lists 5 big ideas and action items to follow through with afterward. Teaching a child morals is a way of life that starts with the parents. The best way to do this is to make kindness and caring for others a priority, show them by example or have a casual dinner conversation about how you think a decision may impact others. It is also important to make your children show and express their gratitude.

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3. In this podcast the core roots of connection are discussed, to remind us of how loving kindness is intrinsic to all of us regardless of our experience or history. It is to be in a non-judgmental and quiet space within ourselves and toward others. We must be able to drop the obstacles in the way of us being open and able to connect.

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4. Connection to human emotion, sharing stories that people can relate to is the key to helping a society increase its level of compassion and kindness. In this podcast we hear the story of a young man, who began ‘unsung heroes’ - highlighting stories of everyday people, tapping into the working class, and what their particularly history is. People who watch this project, have helped those who are featured achieve their dreams, or find some happiness. His project has now moved into a full blown non profit organization that helps people through kindness.

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5. This Ted Talk video by Stefan Klein, is different in that it highlights a study that was done that shows that people are happier when they do good things for others. He touches upon the research in science behind how kindness evolved in the brain of our ancestors up to today, and how emotions are our motivations.

https://youtu.be/lDX1CLmc1xE   Being kind to ourselves and toward others is the first step in beginning to connect with the essence of what unites us all. A bonus finding in all this kindness research is that people who care for others are happier, healthier and live longer. Do you read a great blog about kindness that’s not on the list? Leave a comment on FB! Larissa Gomes is a breast cancer survivor and single mom to her spirited baby boy! Originally from Toronto turned Angeleno, she has worked in roles from writer, actor and producer for well over a decade. In that time, she's developed concepts, film and television screenplays, short stories, along with freelance articles, blogging and editing work.

You've read The 5 Best Podcasts on Kindness, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you've enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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February 27, 2017 at 04:02PM