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POPSOf Body and Mind, and Deep Meditation " Physiological tests also revealed significant changes. Compared with the relaxation group, IBMT subjects had lower heart rates and skin conductance responses, increased belly breathing amplitude and decreased chest respiration rates, all of which, researchers wrote, "reflected less effort exerted by participants and more relaxation of body and calm state of mind." Finally, researchers noted, IBMT subjects had more high-frequency heart-rate variability than their relaxation counterparts, indicating "successful inhibition of sympathetic tone and activation of parasympathetic tone ." Sympathetic tone becomes more active when stressed."
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POPSThe way the brain buys Scientists used to assume that emotion and rationality were opposed to each other, but Antonio Damasio, now professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has found that people who lose the ability to perceive or experience emotions as the result of a brain injury find it hard or impossible to make any decisions at all. They can’t shop. ergo we shop with our hearts..;-)
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POPSPoverty and the Brain "The point is that poverty isn't just an idea, or a state of mind: it actually warps the mind. Some brains never even have a chance." deserves a second thought
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POPSCalming your thoughts through mindfulness "We want to move into a place where the outside world will do whatever it's going to do without us going through the roller coaster of emotions," Rogers says. "We want to maintain this more alive, vigilant, present way of being that is somewhat independent of how things are going."
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POPSIn Search of Wisdom: What is the Root Cause of Inequality? When there is nothing quantifiable to possess, we would neither know what the share of each individual is nor think of equality; if there was no notion of equality, we would not care that some have more than the others. Fortunately or unfortunately, there is always something to be possessed and our mind is naturally keen on the subject of equality
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POPSThe Landscape of Possible Intelligences If we imagine the levels of intelligence as a ladder with unevenly spaced rungs, there may be jumps that some intelligences are not able to complete, or their derivatives are not able to jump. So a type 3 mind may be able to jump up four levels of bootstrapping intelligence, but not five. Since I don't believe intelligence is linear (that is I believe intelligence grows in many dimensions), a better illustration may be to view the problem of bootstrapping super intelligence as navigating across a rugged evolutionary landscape.
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POPSSearching in space and minds: New research suggests underlying link Some people might be more inclined to one search mode or the other, having a lesser ability to focus on a given task or difficulty letting go of an idea. An extreme form of the exploratory cognitive style would be someone with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. An extreme form of the exploitive cognitive style would be someone with obsessive compulsive disorder.
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POPSThe Duplicates Paradox Personal identity is perceived as continuous through time. Yet this perception cannot be instantaneous, and must be based on memory. Given the fact that memories can be forgotten, altered or even fabricated, the question arises as to whether memories are essential for personal identity. Certainly no specific memory seems necessary for identity, but a perception of a continuity of the memory process is often believed to be. Subjective experience involves not just memory, but thoughts, desires, feelings and personality. Even when subjectivity is focused on the "outside world", this focus necessarily has a point of view. Any attempt to describe personal identity impersonally will lose an essential element. A self has both sensation and will.
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POPSThe Mind-Altering Role of Incense in Religion Under the influence of a good snoot full of incense, mice in scary situations, such as being put in a swimming pool, remain calm, anxiety-free. At the alter, too, people feel the same sense of peace that comes from either the comforting words of the clergy, or from the intoxicating, brain altering, smell of incense. In an age of endless anxiety, no wonder religion works; it is both cultural and biological. Karl Marx claimed that organized religion was the "opiate of the people," meaning it dulls us into complacency, but that might not be such a bad thing.
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POPS Viagra for the brain? It’s not an amphetamine or stimulant, the article explained: it doesn’t make you high, or wired. It seems to work by restricting the parts of your brain that make you sluggish or sleepy. No significant negative effects have been discovered. Now students are using it in the run-up to exams as a “smart drug” – a steroid for the mind.
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POPSthe Next Civil Rights Battle Will Be Over the Mind "To a certain extent, memories are societal properties," says Adam Kolber, a visiting professor at Princeton. "We really need to articulate a moral code that governs all this," warns Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist.
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POPSDoes the Human Brain Possess Potential “Super Powers”? Mind expert Allan Snyder of the University of Sydney and director of Centre for the Mind, is certain that all people have these latent super abilities, but only some are able to express them through “malfunctions” of overriding brain functions.
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POPSThe Bottom is Not Enough I call myself an editor first, and author second. I think the top-down function of editors -- to select, prune, guide, solicit, shape, and guide the results from the crowd -- is essential to excellence... It's taken a while but I think we've learned that while top-down is needed, not much of it is needed. Editorship and expertise are like vitamins. You don't need much of them, just a trace even for a large body, and too much will be toxic, or just pissed away. But the proper dosage of intelligent control will vitalize the dumb hive mind.
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POPSMisreading the mind The mind is like music. While neuroscience accurately describes our brain in terms of its material facts -- we are nothing but a loom of electricity and enzymes -- this isn't how we experience the world. Our consciousness, at least when felt from the inside, feels like more than the sum of its cells. The truth of the matter is that we feel like the ghost, not like the machine.
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POPSMind Reading Is Now Possible "The more detailed the thought is, the more different these patterns get, because different people have different associations for an object or idea," says Haynes. "We're much closer to this than we were two years ago, but still far from a universal mind-reading machine." How far? The CMU group is determining the brain patterns that encode abstract ideas (honesty, democracy), words and sentences, a big step toward a mind-reading dictionary.
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POPSStretching the Mind Stretching your mind is hard. Once we've settled on a worldview that suits us, we tend to hold on. New information is bent to fit, information that doesn't fit is discounted, and new views are resisted.
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POPSWhat is Thought? (book review) "One thing that most impressed me about the book is the underlying theme that he refers to as his version of Occam's razor and summarizes as follows: mind is a complex but still compact program that captures and exploits the underlying compact structure of the world.To understand something about the world is to capture its features in a compact subroutine that allows one to effectively interact with it.
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