RESHARE:


Reshared text:
Nice to see someone really show and be proud of their science geekiness. :)

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
I still would have preferred virtue, but I guess this will do - for now. 
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/your-brain-is-not-a-video-camera

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
Think you're too old to go back to school or begin a new career? We'd like you to meet Willadene Zedan:

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
Review #2. :)

“Kaufman makes a convincing case that stereotyping students is not only unsupported by research, but also discriminatory… An inspiring, informative affirmation of human potential combined with an overview of historical developments in standardized tests, cognitive psychology and current research."

Public Health PSA:

Kids need to be taught early and reminded often to check their bodies regularly and report any changes immediately.

Gifted Homeschoolers Forum Online announces new courses for 2013 - 2014.  Check 'em out!

http://giftedhomeschoolers.org/ghf-online/class-schedule/

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
Cretal is one insightful alien!

Pure delight!  Way to grab the fun and run with it, Sims family!

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
The world loves Richard Feynman. Richard Feynman is dead.

Richard Feynman would have turned 95 today. My favorite Feynman story is from his time at Los Alamos. As he was working on the Manhattan Project. He would spend his free time picking locks to alleviate his boredom. After he discovers a hole in the wall of the top-security compound one day, he would walk in through the front gate, go out through the hole, then walk in again through the front gate. After a few times doing this, he almost got himself arrested by the MPs.

The world doesn't know his address, but he'll be getting plenty of these kinds of tributes today.

In June of 1945, Arline Feynman — high-school sweetheart and wife of the hugely influential physicist, Richard Feynman — passed away after succumbing to tuberculosis. She was 25-years-old. 16 months later, in October of 1946, Richard wrote his late wife the following love letter and sealed it in an envelope. It remained unopened until after his death in 1988. 

(Source: Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman; Image: Richard Feynman, via.)

October 17, 1946

D’Arline,

I adore you, sweetheart.

I know how much you like to hear that — but I don't only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.

It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you'll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.

But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.

I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together — or learn Chinese — or getting a movie projector. Can't I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the "idea-woman" and general instigator of all our wild adventures.

When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true — you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else — but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don't want to be in my way. I'll bet you are surprised that I don't even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can't help it, darling, nor can I — I don't understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don't want to remain alone — but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.

My darling wife, I do adore you.

I love my wife. My wife is dead.

Rich.

p.s., Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don't know your new address.

via: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/02/i-love-my-wife-my-wife-is-dead.html

#science   #physics   #ScienceEveryDay  

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
A new study discovers that progenitor cells (OPCs) actively communicate and cooperate to sculpt the formation of neural pathways. Glial cells really are "The Other Brain." Eerie.

"The cells seem to sense each other's presence and know how to control the number of cells in their population," says Bergles. "It looks like this process goes wrong in multiple sclerosis lesions, where there are reduced numbers of OPCs, a loss that may impair the cells' ability to sense whether demyelination has occurred. We don't yet know what molecules are involved in this process, but it's something we're actively working on."

Read more here: http://bit.ly/11oq5Ng

Original journal paper here: http://bit.ly/YJsctm

!!!  Yes, indeed. The brain is plastic and it is shaped by experience.

This is who we are when we take the time to care.  

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
My latest for SciamMind on the potential to turn trauma into creative growth and psychological healing.

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
new techniques are letting researchers look at the activity of the whole brain at once

Thanks for the invite, Laurie!  Looking forward to participating.

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
Hi all, if you're interested in watching my talk on "The Neuroscience of Creativity, Flow, and Openness to Experience" at this year's Bioethics Forum, you can watch it here! All of the talks, however, can be viewed at this link:

http://www.btci.org/bioethics/2013/videos2013/default.html

There were lots of fascinating talks on the neuroscience of creativity and the latest in psychedelic science, including those by Rex Jung, Lynda Barry, Alfonso Montuori, Erik Davis, James Fadiman, and Matthieu Ricard!

Great review of +Scott Barry Kaufman's Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined in Publisher's Weekly! Congrats, SBK!

+Scott Barry Kaufman gets right to the heart of the matter!

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
Updating existing emotional memories involves the frontopolar/orbitofrontal cortex in ways that acquiring new emotional memories does not

#biosemiotics   #memory_updating  

Michiko Sakaki,1 Kazuhisa Niki,2 and Mara Mather

In life, we must often learn new associations to people, places, or things we already know. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigated the neural mechanisms underlying emotional memory updating. Nineteen participants first viewed negative and neutral pictures and learned associations between those pictures and other neutral stimuli, such as neutral objects and encoding tasks. This initial learning phase was followed by a memory updating phase, during which participants learned picture-location associations for old pictures (i.e., pictures previously associated with other neutral stimuli) and new pictures (i.e., pictures not seen in the first phase). There was greater frontopolar/ orbitofrontal (OFC) activity when people learned picture-location associations for old negative pictures than for new negative pictures, but frontopolar OFC activity did not significantly differ during learning locations of old versus new neutral pictures. In addition, frontopolar activity was more negatively correlated with the amygdala when participants learned picture-location associations for old negative pictures than for new negative or old neutral pictures. Past studies revealed that the frontopolar OFC allows for updating the affective values of stimuli in reversal learning or extinction of conditioning (e.g., Izquierdo & Murray, 2005); our findings suggest that it plays a more general role in updating associations to emotional stimuli.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3203542/

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
Drawing on theories of motivation and self-regulation (specifically Scheier & Carver, 2009), this is a rough conceptual diagram of how optimism (expectancy of positive outcomes) exerts its influence.

This is purposefully vague to avoid suggesting overly narrow hypotheses.  For example, although the salutary psychological and even physical health benefits of dispositional optimism have been demonstrated numerous times, it is valid to question whether why this is the case and under what circumstances it would be helpful or harmful.

This diagram would suggest that having positive outcome expectancies would predict continued engagement in self-regulation to maintain goals.  Often, this leads to better outcomes than disengaging, even if one is overly optimistic about what can be accomplished.

However, from this system, we can imagine, what happens if the process of maintaining engagement is challenging and takes a toll on the system?  For example, Suzanne Segerstrom found that optimistic students had a stronger immune response to a challenge near a major test, suggesting at least short term added strain on the body from attempting to pursue and engage goals.

We can also imagine that it may be more difficult for optimists to give up or revise goals that perhaps should be changed.

In summary, taking a step back from what are often the outcomes of interest in health psychology, such as psychological health or biomarkers of physical health, and questioning how optimism works, what its pathways and mechanisms are, can help to think about when optimism may have salutary effects, and when it may be less beneficial, and even the time course.  For example, it could have deleterious short term effects, but salutary long term ones, if persistence towards goals eventually pays off.

#optimism  

Scheier, M. F., & Carver, C. S. (2009). Self-Regulatory Processes and Responses to Health Threats: Effects of Optimism on Well-Being Social Psychological Foundations of Health and Illness (pp. 395-428): Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
#onlinelearning   #studyhabits   #onlineeducation  

RESHARE:
+Scott Myers shares what he learned from Richie Havens.

Reshared text:

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
Why Don't Men Understand Women? Altered Neural Networks for Reading the Language of Male and Female Eyes

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
New research finds that memory can be boosted by playing sounds synchronized to the rhythms of our brains as we sleep.

"Dr. Born and his colleagues conducted their tests on 11 individuals on different nights, during which they were exposed to sound stimulations or to sham stimulations. When the volunteers were exposed to stimulating sounds that were in sync with the brain's slow oscillation rhythm, they were better able to remember word associations they had learned the evening before. Stimulation out of phase with the brain's slow oscillation rhythm was ineffective."

Read more here: http://bit.ly/14f8Miu

Original journal paper here: http://bit.ly/10Zi6zn

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
 The topic of this study is the interaction between intentional and externally-driven actions. The contemporary literature on motor control in primates clearly distinguishes two neural mechanisms for these two types of actions. The authors believe that this distinction is artefactual and propose that an appropriate model to account for voluntary and stimulus-driven actions should be composed of two stages, a first stage where the two types of actions are dissociated and a second stage where they are combined. Thus, the issue is not whether there are one or two systems but rather where the transition between the two stages is. The authors asked participants to anticipate their response to the delayed appearance of a target. They find strong interactions between the prepared action and the target-triggered response: perceptual decisions are quicker when the two actions are congruent. To account for behavioral results, they propose a computational model that is based on two stages, the first in which external and internal evidence accumulate separately, and the second in which internal processes are modulated by externally-driven ones. This model allows us to establish that intentional and externally-driven actions really interact only in half of the decision making process. http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1003013;jsessionid=CF58B0EDBB859C3D57643A7D09E8E83A

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
"All students have special needs that we are obligated to meet as fully as possible."

RESHARE:


Reshared text:
Oliver Sacks has just published a new journal paper on hallucinations of musical notation!

"Including... A 77 year old woman with glaucoma who wrote of her 'musical eyes.' She saw 'music, lines, spaces, notes, clefs -- in fact written music on everything [she] looked at.'

...a surgeon and pianist suffering from macular degeneration, who saw unreadable and unplayable music on a white background.

...a Sanskrit scholar who developed Parkinson's disease in his 60s and later reported hallucinating ornately-written music, occurring with a Sanskrit script. 'Despite the exotic nature of the script the result is still western music,' he said.

...a woman who reported seeing musical notation on her ceiling upon waking in the morning.

...a woman who said she wasn't a musician, but would hallucinate when she had high fevers as a child. She said that the notes were 'angry, and [she] felt unease. The lines and notes were out of control and at times in a ball.'"

Read more here: http://bit.ly/11rKmyu

Read Sacks' actual journal paper here: http://bit.ly/14AsjZX

Structural Covariance Networks of the Dorsal Anterior Insula Predict Females' Individual Differences in Empathic Responding.

Abstract
Previous functional imaging studies have shown key roles of the dorsal anterior insula (dAI) and anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC) in empathy for the suffering of others. The current study mapped structural covariance networks of these regions and assessed the relationship between networks and individual differences in empathic responding in 94 females. Individual differences in empathy were assessed through average state measures in response to a video task showing others' suffering, and through questionnaire-based trait measures of empathic concern. Overall, covariance patterns indicated that dAI and aMCC are principal hubs within prefrontal, temporolimbic, and midline structural covariance networks. Importantly, participants with high empathy state ratings showed increased covariance of dAI, but not aMCC, to prefrontal and limbic brain regions. This relationship was specific for empathy and could not be explained by individual differences in negative affect ratings. Regarding questionnaire-based empathic trait measures, we observed a similar, albeit weaker modulation of dAI covariance, confirming the robustness of our findings. Our analysis, thus, provides novel evidence for a specific contribution of frontolimbic structural covariance networks to individual differences in social emotions beyond negative affect.

Love it!

You can help save a life by reading this post and forwarding it to any South Asian contacts.

RESHARE:


Reshared text: