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POPSCan you trust your mind? "These findings have significant implications for the authenticity of reports of recovered memory experiences." "Overall, this study clearly demonstrates that false suggestions about childhood events can profoundly change people’s attitudes and behavior." This is an amazing (if i recall it is not the first one:)) study. Raising many questions regarding the validity of my self-experience and knowledge.
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POPSMinding Mistakes: How the Brain Monitors Errors and Learns from Goofs Where in the brain does the ERN originate? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, among other imaging methods, researchers have repeatedly found that error recognition takes place in the medial frontal cortex, a region on the surface of the brain in the middle of the frontal lobe, including the anterior cingulate. Such studies implicate this brain region as a monitor of negative feedback, action errors and decision uncertainty—and thus as an overall supervisor of human performance.
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POPSScientists Say We Can See Sound Recordings from 49 neurons responsible for the earliest stages of visual processing, researchers found activation that mirrored the behavior. That is, when the sound was played, the neurons reacted as if there had been a stronger light, at a speed that can only be explained by a direct connection between the ear and eye brain regions, said researcher Ye Wang of the University of Texas in Houston. The study presents the first evidence that a sensory cell can process an alternative sensation, said head researcher Pascal Barone of the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France, who discovered a contender for the anatomical connection in 2002.
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POPSConfidence game - The science of Trustworthiness Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors - where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin - can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone's trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so - tendencies that apply even more strongly if we've grown close.
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POPSDo subatomic particles have free will? But physicists all the way back to Einstein have been unhappy with this idea. Einstein famously grumped, “God does not play dice.” And indeed, ever since the birth of quantum mechanics, some physicists have offered alternate interpretations of its equations that aim to get rid of this indeterminism. The most famous alternative is attributed to the physicist David Bohm, who argued in the 1950s that the behavior of subatomic particles is entirely determined by “hidden variables” that cannot be observed. Conway and Kochen say this search is hopeless, and they claim to have proven that indeterminacy is inherent in the world itself, rather than just in quantum theory. And to Bohmians and other like-minded physicists, the pair says: Give up determinism, or give up free will. Even the tiniest bit of free will.
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POPSSwitching it up: How memory deals with a change in plans The answer is "both," according to researchers at The Johns Hopkins University, who have learned that two different areas of the brain are responsible for the way human beings handle complex sets of "if-then" rules. "This discovery may eventually lead to enhanced understanding of psychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention deficit disorder, all conditions in which a person's ability to remember and change such rules is impaired," "This indicates that different parts of our brains store different kinds of memories and information," Courtney said. That, she said, "provides clues about how the human brain accomplishes complex, goal-directed behaviors that require remembering and changing abstract rules, an ability that is disrupted in many mental illnesses."
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POPSMore Big Pharma, Bad Science - Non-smoking Drug Now, which is worse in your opinion... Smoking or Suicide? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out. Most would answer ...I THINK I WOULD RATHER SMOKE THAN FOR SURE KILL MYSELF BY TAKING A DRUG TO NOT SMOKE. The saddest part of this is that they (BIG PHARMA) are using our veterans as Guinea pigs in their trial and error tests. Just so they can put on the market more deadly drugs and coerce, we the public to buy into their schemes that make them rich! Video link here: http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1417423198/bctid1715728951
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POPSCuckoo's Nest Revisited Kids don't get in trouble, they're put in trouble. Adolescent sex offender treatment and registration laws become a modern witch hunt. Bad laws win elections, destroy lives.
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POPSDo You Love This Face? Evolutionary biology holds that in any given population, extreme characteristics tend to fall away in favor of average ones. Birds with unusually long or short wings die more often "in storms. Human babies who are born larger or smaller than average are less likely to survive. The ability to form an average-mate template would have conveyed a singular survival advantage."
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POPSPolitical Interference of the Surgeon General (No way!) Surely they are lying! There is no way they controlled free speech! I am astonished that they would even suggest such things! Like this: On the increasing politicization of the Surgeon General's position: -Previous Surgeon Generals agreed that: "never had they seen Washington, D.C. so partisan or a new Surgeon General so politically challenged and marginalized as during my tenure." -" he reality is that the nation's doctor has been marginalized and relegated to a position with no independent budget, and with supervisors who are political appointees with partisan agendas. Anything that doesn't fit into the political appointees' ideological, theological, or political agenda is ignored, marginalized, or simply buried." - "Politicians in the late 1960s decided that the Office of the Surgeon General should be disempowered and its authorities placed within offices of Department of Health and Human Services political appointees."
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POPSSCIENTISTS SHOW HALLUCINOGEN CREATES UNIVERSAL “MYSTICAL” EXPERIENCE in the 1950s, showed signs of therapeutic potential or value in research into the nature of consciousness and sensory perception. “Human consciousness…is a function of the ebb and flow of neural impulses in various regions of the brain-the very substrate that drugs such as psilocybin act upon,” Schuster says. “Understanding what mediates these effects is clearly within the realm of neuroscience and deserves investigation.” “A vast gap exists between what we know of these drugs-mostly from descriptive anthropology-and what we believe we can understand using modern clinical pharmacology techniques,” says study leader Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor with Hopkins’ departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry and Behavioral Biology. “That gap is large because, as a reaction to the excesses of the 1960s, human research with hallucinogens has been basically frozen in time these last forty years.”
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POPSSC Official "Kept the Money in His Safe at Home" If you want to keep the money for "helping the kids" - then keep it out of your own greedy pockets! Continued misuse by Official Offices of Oversight need to keep being exposed! "Former human resources director says checks were made out to him to keep funds from being spent".....yeah, right.... Really pathetic behavior.
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POPSOODA Loop On 911 the perps sought to disrupt the collective OODA Loop
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POPSSpontaneous brain activity shapes our perceptions The researchers used functional MRI to track activity in an area of the brain called the Fusiform face area, which is involved in face recognition. Activity in the FFA was tracked for several seconds, until the test subject announced what they saw.
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POPSThe profit from obesity Nevertheless, there are enormous profits to be had from obesity. The foods that maximise profit just happen to be those high in sugar or fat. They are cheap to produce, easy to brand and market, and easy to stock in supermarket aisles. And there are numerous ways to encourage people who are pre-obese to buy these foods. Sedentary behaviour is also profitable, and encouraged by industry. A moped is more glamorous than a bicycle. A new computer game will re-invigorate peoples' interest, but not their bodies.
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POPSThe future of science...is art
"But before any of this can happen, our two existing cultures must modify their habits. First of all, the humanities must sincerely engage with the sciences. Henry James defined the writer as someone on whom nothing is lost; artists must heed his call, and not ignore science's inspiring descriptions of reality. At the same time, the sciences must recognize that their truths are not the only truths. No single area of knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge. As Karl Popper, an eminent defender of science wrote, "It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach." The struggle for scientific truth is long and hard and never ending. If we want to get an answer to our deepest questions—the questions of who we are and what everything is—we will need to draw from both science
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POPSSay No to Olympic Coverage.... I don't have many friends here at Clipmarks anymore, but I do still have an opinion. China is like Wal-Mart. Too big to give a damn about other people. They have not improved their human rights or pollution policies. Empty Promises to all of us and their behavior is making the spirit of the Olympics into one BIG sham
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POPSIran to hang 30 for murder, other crimes: report At least 10 people were hanged in the country in July. In September last year, 21 people were executed in one day, in two different locations. Murder, adultery, rape, armed robbery, apostasy and drug trafficking are all punishable by death under Iran's Sharia law, enforced since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution. Amnesty International in April listed Iran as the world's second most prolific executioner last year, with at least 317 people put to death, trailing only China which carried out 470 death sentences.
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POPSGetting To Know You "My guess is that most voters don’t see John McCain as an angry candidate, despite several very public lapses. The mythical John McCain is an affable, straight-talking, moderately conservative war hero who is an expert on foreign policy. Barack Obama is not the only candidate the voters need to know more about. " Back in 2007, a reporter asked McCain if he supported U.S. funded distribution of condoms in Africa to fight HIV transmission. McCain had a long series of awkward pauses and glances and later his press secretary said that the senator has a record of voting against using government money to finance the distribution of condoms. My question is this: What kind of a moderate, what kind of a mind, what kind of a human being, opposes the provision of condoms to save lives--in a region where 1 million died of AIDS in 2005 alone, leaving 12 million orphans and where some (cont)
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POPSDARPA's Amazing Robot Pack Mule Keeps its Balance On Ice Impressive! ...yet, while "human may not be quite ready to accept such lifelike behavior coming from a machine" - I wonder on the "human like behavior" that needs DARPA and military justification to support such technology. maybe this is the tantalizing reflection of this project...
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POPSEmotional robots in the spotlight The work is still well shy of an I Robot scenario with emotionally complex machines taking matters into their own hands, but the empathy empowering software being developed by Feelix Growing is a big step forward for robotics. See a short video on the website
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POPSHow a simple mathematic formula is starting to explain the bizarre prevalence of altruism in society This new mathematic model for society’s evolution is particularly interesting because not only it reveals a logic behind the large numbers of cooperators that we know exist in all human societies, but also it gives us a glimpse of the principles that can help “pushing” them into a better, fairer, path. Evolutionary game theory is a mathematical approach used to study (and predict) the evolution of social interactions, in which the study of conflict and decision-making is treated – like its name indicates – as a game.
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POPSThe Earth's 6th Great Mass Extinction is Occurring as You Read This With the human population expected to reach 9-10 billion by the end of the century and the planet in the middle of its sixth mass extinction — this time due to human activity — the next few years are critical in conserving Earth’s precious biodiversity. The cause of the Sixth Extinction, Homo sapiens, means we can continue on the path to our own extinction, or, preferably, we modify our behavior toward the global ecosystem of which we are still very much a part. At a casual glance, the physically caused extinction events of the past might seem to have little or nothing to tell us about the current Sixth Extinction, which is a human-caused event. For there is little doubt that humans are the direct cause of ecosystem stress and species destruction in the modern world through transformation of the landscape, overexploitation of species, pollution, and the introduction of alien species
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