See one, do one, teach one

A lesson from Medical School

Monkey see, monkey do

It may seem strange that one of the most valuable lessons I learned in Medical School was not how to save lives, but how to save the living. In my own point of view all life is sacred, but what's the use of saving a life when living has such a limited value?

Ethics has always been one of my favorite subjects, and the example of what do you do in the case of a suicidal emergency probably still feature as one of the classical questions that young medical students are required to answer to them self.   

The "rules" that govern conscious awareness haven't changed much over the last 3000 years, and then as now it is known that when you have to act in an emergency, ethical questions cloud your ability to think clearly, which compromise your ability to perform, and has a negative effect on the outcome.   

When your intention is clear, then saving the lives that has been placed in your care demand clear thought, a sharp mind, and sure action. Making judgement calls about quality of living, living standards or life choices make our actions inefficient, our decisions questionable, and our performance incompetent. 

Strong emotions makes people's brains 'tick together'

Human emotions are highly contagious. Seeing others' emotional expressions such as smiles triggers often the corresponding emotional response in the observer. Such synchronization of emotional states across individuals may support social interaction: When all group members share a common emotional state, their brains and bodies process the environment in a similar fashion.

Researchers at Aalto University and Turku PET Centre have now found that feeling strong emotions makes different individuals' brain activity literally synchronous.

Learn more at: Synchronized Brain

Rapid-fire Media May Confuse Your Moral Compass, Study Suggests

“For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection,” said first author Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of the USC Rossier School of Education. Humans can sort information very quickly and can respond in fractions of seconds to signs of physical pain in others.

Admiration and compassion - two of the social emotions that define humanity - take much longer, Damasio’s group found. Their study appeared online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more at: Science Daily

Haunted by a memory?

Thinking over and over about how unsafe the world is after you’ve been victimized might ultimately do your head more harm than good. Finding something positive to think about–for example, how you were able to think and act under stress, or how people supported you afterwards–can help you fit the memory into your life in a positive way. Post-traumatic growth, they call it.

In addition, it appears that writing about the thoughts and emotions connected to an event can help post-traumatic growth. (The “thoughts” part is important. Just writing about emotions attached to it is not as helpful.)

Find out more about it: PsychCentral

Do more by talking about it!

The power of ecstasy

Survival is a genetically coded imperative that is reflected in every part of our complex biological design. It is something that is encoded in our primitive reflexes, built in to our psychological make-up and hard wired to neurological circuits. The only thing that matches it in scope is pleasure.

It makes sense I suppose, for what would be the point if we didn't enjoy the act of procreation? It is in the moment of orgasm that we find how perfect we have been designed to ensure the survival of our kind. On the one hand it is a physical experience that triggers all the right conditions to ensure fertilization. On the other it is without argue the most pleasure that anyone can ever hope to share, so much so that people get addicted to it!

Until recently, our knowledge about sex and sexuality was scant, and limited to understanding it as an esoteric subject, most notably as tantra in the tantric texts. You'd think that such a strong instinctive drive would be worthy of abundant scientific scrutiny, but then you'd underestimate the power of social taboo.

With the world slowly coming round to the notion that sex is not a shame, there has recently been abundance of discovery, and no sooner did science jump the hurdle of infamy, than we were stopped in our tracks by the discovery that the mind of women 'tilt' when they reach orgasm.

According to a recent article in Scientific American the female brain show a muted response in the part of the brain that govern self control over basic desires, with a corresponding release of tension and inhibition. The area responsible for moral reasoning and social judgment and the area of the brain responsible for "extinction fear" and the storage of memories associated with emotional events appear to switch off during orgasm.

Women lose their moral reason, judgment and emotional ability with orgasm, and strange as it may sound, it is common sense to think that such a powerful flood of shared emotion would sweep away all obstacles to ecstasy.

All of which remind us when it comes to matters of the mind, we are still in virgin territory.

The science of discovering ourself

The medical field is probably one of the most fast paced developing technologies, and in the past few years we have discovered more about our own bodies than we have about renewable energy sources.

One of these developments that are still making headlines since it was first developed is flow magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. While it was originally developed to aid the medical fraternity in their diagnostic ability, this technology is currently providing us with discoveries that are literally the stuff of dreams. By measuring the changes in blood flow through the brain during different mental activities, this device is able to tell us more than we ever thought possible about the functioning of one of the most mysterious organs in the body, the human brain.

This three pound of mushy Grey matter that give us abilities that are so unique in the animal kingdom that we have the power to subjugate nothing less than nature itself has remained clouded in a shroud of speculation, conjugation and even plain conjecture. This is in stark contrast to other scientific discoveries of the human body, where the absolute and exact is considered to be nothing less than standard. But with the use of fMRI imaging we are starting to understand how the brain makes sense of the input from our senses to provide each of us with our own unique view of a common reality. From understanding the difference between emotional and neutral memories, to finding why people in a happy mood will almost always choose the first of any available choices given, all the way through to the role of emotions in determining self bias and the shocking discovery that morals are nothing less than conclusions and deductions to defend our actions.

Take for instance the recent discovery that the act of imagination take place in the same region of the brain that involves memory, which challenges general convention that there is a big difference between fact and fiction. From the perspective of our brain the difference does not seem to matter much, although it does seem that these two thought processes could be distinguished through subtle memory references to sensory and kinesthetic memory patterns. Sometimes these subtle references are not so subtle, which explains for instance why many men can remember their wedding vouws, but they cannot recall asking the hand of their beloved. The answer can be found in their posture. Because many men stand on their knees when they propose marriage, that memory is encoded with the act of kneeling. Most men would recall that magical moment if they just went down on their knees!

Another recent discovery that sent shockwaves through the ranks of philosophers and preachers alike is that we seem to make choices before we arrive at a conscious decision. Through the use of fMRI it was shown that brain activity indicate what a respondent would choose up to 7 seconds before the respondent indicated that he has made up his mind on a choice, which questions previously held opinions regarding concepts such as free choice and accountability.

The ultimate impact of this diagnostic tool on our understanding of how we think and feel and act is far from being reached. Scientists are currently in the process of mapping the various regions of the brain that become active during various mental tasks, and it is a matter of time that the link between these various regions and how they interact with each other become apparent. As we learn more about the brain and its mysteries we learn more about why we think the way we do, and move closer to understanding who we are.

10 things you should know about your mind

1. You cannot lose it, unlike the neurons that conduct the electrical impulses that eventually combine to become your mind. Neurons seem to whither at the slightest challenge, like the pill you popped last night, or any binge that end in a hangover. Fortunate for us our mind display a high grade of plasticity, which mean that function lost due to neural death could be taken over by others.

2. You have what you use, and what you don't gets lost as quick as last season's fashion. Which is a bit of a shame as research continue to come up with surprising new and uber cool abilities that babies have. Take for example their efficiency in cross species facial recognition, and then compare it to "I think they all look the same".

3. No challenge is too big or detail too small if you believe it matters. Our brain just love a challenge and can even construct special neural thingamabobs to handle new technologies like cellphones. When challenged to survival it remembers even the minutest of details, like the drop of blood sliding down the blade of grass you saw while crawling away from a fatal explosion.

4. Memory is but a fickle thing, and nowhere near what some people want to make of it. For a start, our brain excel in pattern recognition. Most of our memory is scattered across various neural sites, each one specializing in its own sensory pattern recognition. When we think of something our mind will trigger a harmonious event across the different sections needed to build the memory we want.

5. There is no difference between reality and imagination, at least not to your brain. You may want to argue, but it is a scientific fact that what you think become. Take for instance recent findings that power make hypocrite's of those who play its game, or the curious observation that we model morals to our situation.

6. When emotion kicks in, your ability for objective reasoning go out the window. Lame excuses such as you were angryor upset should not be tolerated in the company of choice, any choice. When we become emotionally involved our brain literally changes to a different operating system where reasoning take a distant second place to feeling.

7. Your brain retain an embryonic stem cell capability that can differentiate to any of a wide range of specialized neural cells and structures. We still don't know exactly how to use it, but at least the farming of stem cells from dead babies will not be necessary to treat the growing number of mental diseases of age like Alzheimer and Parkinson's.

8. You can tune your brain to any mental state by listening to bin-aural frequencies in the range of awareness that you require. The effect depend upon a "frequency following" response, a naturally occurring phenomenon of the the human brain. So if you need to be alert you simply listen to a bin-aural beat that entrain to somewhere in the Beta range, between 12-30 Hz.

9. Babies are born with minds that are messy, and exactly what it is that prevent it from tripping in a massive electrical short circuit is still unknown. What we do know, is that exposing babies to certain auditory stimuli, such as Baroque music before and after birth give them a significant and overall advantage above their peers. The metered beat of the music seem to provide a natural rhythm that order and accelerate the mental development of babies.

10. Most of the actions that you perform daily are not the result of your intention, but a carefully calculated flow of expected events. Our minds are constantly busy predicting the future to provide us with normal motion and fluid movement, allowing us act and play with minimal attention. Once mobile, our senses only monitor events for anything unusual or out of place, while the rest just happen without the need of thought.

Feeling good

Have you ever been in a situation where you were having a good time and found yourself asking “Why are we having a party?” According to recent scientific research we don’t need a reason! It seems as if feeling good does not need a reason.
I do not know if you remember the very popular song “Celebrate!” by Kool and the Gang, but it reminds me of “I’ve got a feeling” by Black Eyed Peas. Both of these songs illustrate that we don’t need any reason to have a party, or to feel good.

Also have a listen to “Good Time” by Brazilian Girls.

How are you feeling today?

In celebration of our global consciousness

It all started when F made the song Celebrate!, by Kool and the Gang his theme song for November 2010.

I then asked: & why is that

To which F replied: Democrats will be out of office by then

And I replied: hahaha lol, im from europe.. i dont care about the situation your corrupted government is in

To which F replied: At least you know the key word,"corrupted," nice.

Then, from the sideline C said: If the gov't is corrupted now, what was it under the previous Regime...straight evil?

And T, defending F said: hey I - you dufus - ever heard that if the "US sneezes the whole world catches a cold"?  Well, it's true. And by the way, your government, whichever one it is, is just as corrupt as ours. You're an arrogant,snobby jerk, and you should care more about your brothers across the ocean anyway. We're all in this together.

Then M, defending I said: Why exactly should he give a shit about your government? And how was he even being rude or arrogant? He was just stating his opinion. He didn't say anything negative.

It seems as if this “new” consciousness still has a long way to grow before it will be of any real use to the world, and it illustrates quite nicely how easy it is to trigger conflict.

Three faces of reality

Reality is flawed. Not only by it’s definition, but also in it’s perception. According to the AskOxford definition of perception, it is the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses.

Perception is of Latin origin from the word percipere, meaning to seize or understand. While this may seem to infer some significance, explanation or cause based on information received, we must be cautious to assume that something is present or not based on our perception.

The reason why it is so difficult to define perception is that it changes from one moment to the next, and our mind has the ability to alter any sensory stimulus based on a variety of factors. They include things such as which half of our brain has control over sensory input at the time of awareness, how we feel at the time, the simultaneous or remembered presence of any emotion, any conscious or unconscious value that we may attach to the sensation and whether it is a shared experience. All of which take care of one face of reality as we know it. The next face put our awareness in perspective with everything else we have experienced, and provide us with an understanding of what we have perceived. The third ‘face’ that complete our experience of reality is our reaction to the awareness, based on our understanding of the sensory stimulus we felt. This not only changes our input, but may also change the factors that influence our perception. Considering all that has been said it is perhaps a bit harsh to say that reality is flawed, when in truth it just has more than one face. What we need to understand is to what level our perception is influenced by both conscious, as well as unconscious factors, factors that may or may not be under our control. We need to know that we lose our ability for rational thought and logical reasoning when we are emotionally triggered, and we need to accept the fact that there will never be a reality quite like our own.

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It's CONTAGIOUS

According to researchers from the Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego, happiness spreads through their social networks like an emotional contagion. The study shows that the chances of friends living within a mile of participants who were happy were 25% higher, and that the chances of their friends and even the friends of those friends also have an increase in their chances of happiness even if they did not know the participant at all.

They found that sadness exhibit the same quality, but that it does not spread as efficiently as happiness. Apparently the famous saying that says: "Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone" is true! If you would like to read the full article you can find it here.