We are working on improving several sections of our website, especially our Resources section. It will look much better in a few days. Our first step has been to re-organize our Neuroscience Interview Series, and below you have how it looks today.
During the last 18 months I have had the fortune to interview over 15 cutting-edge neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists on their research and thoughts. Here are some of our favorite quotes (you can read the full interview notes by clicking on the links):
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Daniel Goleman requires no introduction. Personally, of all his books I have read, the one I found most stimulating was Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue With the Dalai Lama, a superb overview of what emotions are and how we can put them to good use. He is now conducting a great series of audio interviews including one with George Lucas on Educating Hearts and Minds: Rethinking Education.
We are honored to bring you a guest post by Daniel Goleman, thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine, a UC-Berkeley-based quarterly magazine that highlights ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism. Enjoy!
- Alvaro
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The Power of Mindsight
How can we free ourselves from prisons of the past?
-- By Daniel Goleman
When you were young, which of these did you feel more often?
a) No matter what I do, my parents love me;
b) I can’t seem to please my parents, no matter what I do;
c) My parents don’t really notice me.
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Dear Mr or Mrs Next US President,
We are glad to welcome you to our blog carnival. After a short hiatus, Encephalon is back
and gathering steam. We have prepared this "revival" edition just for you, so you can be well informed and impress us all during the upcoming Sciencedebate 2008.
Without further ado, let's proceed to the questions posed by 24 bloggers on neuroscience and psychology issues. We hope they provide, at the very least, good mental stimulation for you and your advisors.
Big Questions
Do I deserve to vote even if I don't have Free Will? (Marc at Neuroscientifically Challenged).
If culture sculpts our brains, what can our brains do to refine our culture first? (Stephanie at Brains On Purpose).
Is God more than a flying brain? (Jessica at bioephemera).
Is Your brain really reading This? (Pete at Brain Hammer).
A Few Intrusive Questions
Do you play any musical instrument? (Megan at SharpBrains).
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Below you have a very insightful article on stress by one of our new Expert Contributors, Gregory Kellet, a researcher at UCSF. Enjoy! (Credit for Pic of Victoria Crater in Mars: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, via Wikipedia).
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“My brain is…fried, toast, frazzled, burnt out.” How many times have you said or heard one version or another of these statements. Most of us think we are being figurative when we utter such phrases, but research shows that the biological consequences of sustained high levels of stress may have us being more accurate than we would like to think.
Crash Course on Stress
Our bodies are a complex balancing act between systems working full time to keep us alive and well. This balancing act is constantly adapting to the myriad of changes occurring every second within ourselves and our environments. When it gets dark our pupils dilate, when we get hot we sweat, when we smell food we salivate, and so forth. This constant balancing act maintains a range of stability in the body via change; and is often referred to as allostasis. Any change which threatens this balance can be referred to as allostatic load or stress.
Allostatic load/stress is part of being alive. For example just by getting up in the morning, we all experience a very important need to increase our heart rate and blood pressure in order to feed our newly elevated brain. Although usually manageable, this is a change which the body needs to adapt to and, by our definition, a stressor.
Stress is only a problem when this allostatic load becomes overload. When change is excessive or Continue Reading »
Prof. Baba Shiv, one of our advisors, just published a fascinating paper on the power of our beliefs to influence brain activation, and on how marketing can influence those beliefs:
Price Tag Can Change The Way People Experience Wine, Study Shows (Science Daily)
- According to researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology, if a person is told he or she is tasting two different wines—and that one costs $5 and the other $45 when they are, in fact, the same wine—the part of the brain that experiences pleasure will become more active when the drinker thinks he or she is enjoying the more expensive vintage.
- "What we document is that price is not just about inferences of quality, but it can actually affect real quality," said Baba Shiv, a professor of marketing who co-authored a paper titled "Marketing Actions Can Modulate Neural Representations of Experienced Pleasantness," published online Jan. 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Note: link here)
This Stanford article provides an overview of his research: click Here.
- “The belief in the academic field is that emotions are essential to decision making, otherwise you’ll end up making bad decisions,” Shiv says. “But,” he adds, explaining his huge contrarian streak, “I can show the opposite as well, that Continue Reading »
Who has not heard "Use It or Lose It". Now, what is "It"? Last week I gave a talk at the Italian Consulate in San Francisco, and one of the areas attendants seemed to enjoy the most was learning what our brains are and how they work, peaking into the "black box" of our minds. Without understanding at least the basics, how can we make good decisions about our own brain health and fitness?
Let's review at a glance:
The brain is composed of 3 "brains" or main sub-systems, each named after the evolutionary moment in which the sub-system is believed to have appeared. Continue Reading »
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Paul Ekman has conducted extensive research on identifying emotions through facial expressions. As part of that research, and as part of the power of discipline and training, he learned how to consciously manipulate 42 facial muscles, including many that in most of us are beyond our control, and even awareness. |
In the 60s and 70s when Ekman began looking into the universality of facial expressions, all the major contemporary social scientists, like Margaret Mead, believed that expressions were culturally learned, not innate. He proceeded traveled all over the world with pictures of people making distinct facial expressions and found people in cultures everywhere, from modern to stone age, agreed on the emotion behind the expression. He then turned to studying the production of these expressions and the 43 facial muscles that can create 10,000 expressions, which form the basis of his training.
He found seven universal emotions with unique facial expression. The emotions are: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, happiness, surprise, and contempt. At least five of these are shared with non-human primates as well. Interestingly, the smile is the easiest expression to recognize, and the easiest to identify from afar. These emotions have a specific Continue Reading »
