Researchers at the University of Parody today published new findings on the effects of unimaginative neuroscience article titles on anxiety, depression, and the desire to throw shoes at your computer screen. The research was inspired by the fact that every single time — EVERY SINGLE TIME — a study involving brain imaging is conducted on [ Read More ]
My belief about the nature of reality is that the only “thing” that exists is matter. That is, there is no soul, no heaven and no hell. Effects aren’t caused without an interaction with different pieces of matter, and consciousness exists within the confines of the physical head that gives rise to it. However, although [ Read More ]
Here’s a short and interesting introduction to the topic of laughter by UCL professor Sophie Scott. It’s interesting that laughter seems to have an evolutionary heritage that goes way way back, since other animals appear to do it too, but more interesting to me is what goes on in the brain when we hear laughter, [ Read More ]
Here’s an interesting thought for you. We could go into this more deeply, and maybe we will in the future, but just for the moment, ponder this. If you do anything regularly and consistently, the brain will change, actually change physically, anatomically, in structure. For example, in violinists the part of the brain …
In this post, I mentioned some interesting studies where neuroscientists put Buddhist monks into brain scanners, trying to find out what effect meditation has on the brain. They found some interesting results in terms of brain activity. If you throw neuroplasticity into the mix too, you’d expect some structural differences too. A study led …
Not long ago, many scientists had the belief that after the age of about three, the brain was pretty much fixed in function. You could imprint new memories and learn new skills, but that was about it. There was an opposing belief too, that said the brain was a ‘blank slate’ upon which the …
I had to write a piece on love as part of my positive psychology course, and as a die-hard bachelor, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. But, as I looked into the research on love, I found it to be a fascinating area of research. Maybe, deep down, I’m just an old …
Ever heard of the idea that for some illnesses and disorders to develop, you need to have an inherited risk factor plus environmental stress? It’s known commonly as the diathesis-stress model (diathesis basically means predisposition), and it’s a common explanation for a large range of phenomena, from schizophrenia to serial murder. Both diathesis …
What happens to the brain if you spend 44,000 hours in focused meditation? This is a question Richard Davidson and his neuroscience team asked. To answer it, they took experienced Tibetan monks to their lab at the University of Wisconsin, and took various scans of their brains. Is the Buddhist brain fundamentally different than …
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