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Three experiments examined whether or not fixation effects occur in brainstorming as a function of receiving ideas from others. Exchanging ideas in a group reduced the number of domains of ideas that were explored by participants. Additionally, ideas given by brainstormers conformed to ideas suggested by other participants. Temporal analyses showed how the quantity, variety and novelty of ideas fluctuate over the course of a brainstorming session. Taking a break modulated the natural decline over time in the quantity and variety of ideas. Although fixation was observed in brainstorming in terms of conformity and restriction of the breadth of ideas, it did not influence the number of ideas generated in these experiments.

Interesting blog post considering the emotional impacts of having autism. The author questions whether some of the social difficulties considered diagnostic of autism are actually the result of discrimination. Definitely worth reading for anyone interested in autism and hearing from someone with autism.

This paper was presented at the Alfred Hitchcock conference For the Love of Fear convened by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, held from 31 March to 2 April 2000. * * * Hermia: Methinks I see these things with parted eye, When everything seems double… Demetrius: Are you sure That we are awake? It seems to me That yet we sleep, we dream. A Midsummer Night's Dream, IV, ii, 192-197. Just about everything about Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) seems double, not least the film's critical reputation. On the one hand, Andrew Britton, not a man to equivocate, declares that "one can make no claim forSpellbound as an achieved work of art," citing, among its shortcomings, "the discrepancy between surface and implication, the grotesque uncertainty of tone (especially noticeable in the wildly clashing conventions of the acting) and the frequent banality of the script" (83). Many, even among Hitchcock's admirers, would agree.Spellbound is, in fact, not spellbinding, not one of Hitchcock's masterworks, not a Rear Window (1954) nor aVertigo (1958). On the other hand, though, it is, as Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague point out, the first of Hitchcock's films in which "questions of visualization and displacement, of guilt conjured up and denied - questions which will eventually inform such films as Rear Window and Vertigo - become overt subject matter"

October 24, 2008 - Google Tech Talks June 16, 2008 ABSTRACT Explore the brain's amazing ability to change throughout a person's life. This phenomenon-called neuroplasticty-is the science behind brain fitness, and it has been called one of the most extraordinary scientific discoveries of the 20th century. PBS had recently aired this special, The Brain Fitness Program, which explains the brain's complexities in a way that both scientists and people with no scientific background can appreciate. This is opportunity to learn more about how our minds work-and to find out more about the latest in cutting-edge brain research, from the founder of Posit Science and creator of the Brain Fitness Program software, Dr. Michael Merzenich. Speaker: Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. Michael M. Merzenich, PhD: Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Merzenich leads the company's scientific team. For more than three decades, Dr. Merzenich has been a leading pioneer in brain plasticity research. He is the Francis A. Sooy Professor at the Keck Center for Integrative Neurosciences at UCSF. Dr. Merzenich is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Ipsen Prize, Zulch Prize of the Max Planck Institute, Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award and Purkinje Medal. Dr. Merzenich has published more than 200 articles, including many in leading peer-reviewed journals, such as Science and Nature. His work is also often covered in the popular press, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek. He has appeared on Sixty Minutes II, CBS Evening News and Good Morning America. In the late 1980s, Dr. Merzenich was on the team that invented the cochlear implant, now distributed by market leader Advanced Bionics. In 1996, Dr. Merzenich was the founding CEO of Scientific Learning Corporation (Nasdaq: SCIL), which markets and distributes software that applies principles of brain plasticity to assist children with language

In an illustration more typical of Pinker's cultural taste, he quotes the opening scene of Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall, when the young Alvy Singer tells a psychiatrist that he won't do his homework because the universe is expanding. If the universe is going to fall apart, he says, what is the point of human existence? "What has the universe got to do with it?" his mother wails at him. "You' re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!" That kind of reductionism is confusing two levels of analysis," Pinker says. "We have meaning and purpose here inside our heads, being the organisms that we are. We have brains that make it impossible for us to live our lives except in terms of meaning and purpose. The fact that you can look at meaning and purpose in one way, as a neuro-psychological phenomenon, doesn' t mean you can' t look at it in another way, in terms of how we live our lives." The collection of genes known as Steven Pinker made the point most forcibly in How The Mind Works, where he explained his own decision not to have children - which apparently runs counter to the demands of evolution - and says that if his genes don't like it, "they can take a running jump." http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3926387,00.html Steven Pinker

The time: the early years of the 19th century. The setting an ancient manor house in an isolated valley in the west of England. A scientist is engaged in a very elaborate series of experiments with electricity. Outside the laboratory, copper wires suspended on poles run for more than a mile into the countryside. Inside, mysterious equipment - coils of wire, weirdly shaped jars, strange crystals, saucers of murky liquid - glows and pulsates. The few local people who dare to approach the mansion tell of explosions, of bolts of lightning that strike when no storms are near, and of the reclusive, secretive nature of the scientist himself.

It is said in the 18th century the American general Israel Putnam once invited a British general to a novel test of nerves. Both were to sit on barrels of gunpowder, and the fuses were to bit lit. The last man to run away would be the winner. The unnamed British general accepted Putman's challenge. But as the fuses burned, he became increasingly fidgety while Putnam sat calmly, smoking his pipe. At the last moment the British general fled. Putnam stayed seated; he knew that both barrels were filled with onions. For several hundred years the Tower of London was home to a menagerie of wild animals, including a number of lions that later became the basis of a hoax. Dawk's News-Letter for April 2, 1698, announced: "Yesterday being the one April several persons were sent to the Tower of London to watch the annual lion-washing ceremony." This fictitious event continued to attract gullible visitors. Indeed, 158 years later, in 1856, many bought tickets to attend the ceremony. They were unaware of the significance of the date, April 1, or that the lions had been moved to the London Zoo 21 years before.

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In this work, we address an important but unexplored topic, namely the neural correlates of hate. In a block-design fMRI study, we scanned 17 normal human subjects while they viewed the face of a person they hated and also faces of acquaintances for whom they had neutral feelings. A hate score was obtained for the object of hate for each subject and this was used as a covariate in a between-subject random effects analysis. Viewing a hated face resulted in increased activity in the medial frontal gyrus, right putamen, bilaterally in premotor cortex, in the frontal pole and bilaterally in the medial insula. We also found three areas where activation correlated linearly with the declared level of hatred, the right insula, right premotor cortex and the right fronto-medial gyrus. One area of deactivation was found in the right superior frontal gyrus. The study thus shows that there is a unique pattern of activity in the brain in the context of hate. Though distinct from the pattern of activity that correlates with romantic love, this pattern nevertheless shares two areas with the latter, namely the putamen and the insula.

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In my previous post, I introduced you to the first part of Pamela Haag's provocative new book, Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses, and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules. The 21st century, she argues, is a post-romantic age of melancholy marriages. The couples are not acutely stressed nor entangled in constant conflict - they are just melancholy. They signed up for the marriage pact and lost a vital part of themselves in the process. In that first post, I reviewed some of the problems that Haag diagnosed as plaguing some contemporary marriages. Here, I will go through a few of them and tell you about some of the solutions Haag learned about in her research and interviews. Remember, her goal is not to generate alternatives to marriage but alternatives within marriage that have the potential to keep the marriages together. To longtime readers of Living Single, I bet you will anticipate the conclusion I am leading up to before you get to the end of this post.

How connected consumers feel (or don't feel) to their future selves impacts their spending and savings decisions, researchers at Columbia Business School and The University of Chicago Booth School of Business have determined. The researchers conducted a series of experiments that manipulated the degree to which subjects felt connected to their future selves. When discontinuity with the future self is anticipated, people behave more impatiently - speeding up the consumption of utility (in this case, gift cards) - more than when connectedness to the future self is expected. The researchers asked a group of college seniors - three weeks before graduation - to read a passage that described college graduation either as an event that would prompt a major change in their identities or as an event that would prompt only a relatively trivial change. Compared to students who read the passage describing graduation as a small change, those who read a description of the event as a major change were much more likely to make more impatient choices, choosing to receive a gift certificate worth $120 in the next week rather than wait a year for up to $240. Their work suggests that people can be motivated to hold onto their money, or make more prudent decisions by increasing their sense of connectedness to their future selves, the researchers said. Ref.: Daniel M. Bartels & Oleg Urminsky, On Intertemporal Selfishness: How the Perceived Instability of Identity Underlies Impatient Consumption, Journal of Consumer Research, 2011; [DOI: 10.1086/658339]

This two-day conference, supported by the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism (Birkbeck, University of London), Birkbeck College, University of London and the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies of the University of Essex, will bring together historians, social theorists and psychoanalysts to explore the impact of the Second World War and totalitarianism on psychoanalysis, and of psychoanalysis on the understanding of the war and totalitarian systems

Psychoanalysts since Freud thought they passed psychoanalysis alone, and then only in the context of the analytic cure: set of mirrors where the "shrink" was even here the "knowing" possession of knowledge and discourse the man, his mental and psychic life? OR, the analyst, in principle ... is at the heart of the cure being "psychoanalysis" as an issue of transmission. He puts this object, emphasizing this no word could contain the whole truth. "There is no metalanguage". No words can all say anything. Word and things, words and ideas are lame to conjoin. Tinker, tinker, and see: the small screws never find their right ankles ... Why prohibit psychoanalysis, often when we saw outside the inner circle of Schools, to be also affected by this impossible? There had he not, in everyday life as an object of knowledge that few could pass, but contain them all?

One must absolutely direct oneself from the author towards his work, that is to say: it is because a creator possesses a given personality that he produces a given work. But never, amongst the characteris to say: it is because a creator possesses a given personality that he produces a given work. But never, amongst the characteristic specificities of a text to outline the psychological profile of an author and to draw a series of conclusions, in a dichotomy of various preaching. It would be vain to interpret the verses of Paul Celan "The black milk of dawn is drunk at sunset" as the gruesome representation of Auschwitz, the concentration camp where they were written; as also to call Ezra Pound a fascist as a consequence of a few interviews given during the war on Radio Rome where aesthetics and politics were cleverly blended.

Music, an abstract stimulus, can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving, similar to tangible rewards that involve the striatal dopaminergic system. Using the neurochemical specificity of [11C]raclopride positron emission tomography scanning, combined with psychophysiological measures of autonomic nervous system activity, we found endogenous dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal during music listening. To examine the time course of dopamine release, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging with the same stimuli and listeners, and found a functional dissociation: the caudate was more involved during the anticipation and the nucleus accumbens was more involved during the experience of peak emotional responses to music. These results indicate that intense pleasure in response to music can lead to dopamine release in the striatal system. Notably, the anticipation of an abstract reward can result in dopamine release in an anatomical pathway distinct from that associated with the peak pleasure itself. Our results help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies.

When we've got a problem to solve, we don't just use our brains but the rest of our bodies as well, researchers at the University of Wisconsin have determined. The researchers recruited 86 American undergraduates, half of whom were prevented from moving their hands using Velcro gloves that attached to a board. The others were prevented from moving their feet, using Velcro straps attached to another board - but had their hands free. From the other side of an opaque screen, an experimenter asked questions about gears in relation to each other. For example: "If five gears are arranged in a line, and you move the first gear clockwise, what will the final gear do?" The participants solved the problems aloud and were videotaped. The videotapes were analyzed for the number of hand gestures the participants used (hand rotations or "ticking" movements, indicating counting); verbal explanations indicating the subject was visualizing those physical movements; or the use of more abstract mathematical rules, without reference to perceptual-motor processes. The researchers then repeated the experiment and analysis with 111 British adults. The researchers found that the people who were allowed to gesture usually did so, and they also commonly used perceptual-motor strategies in solving the puzzles. The people whose hands were restrained (as well as those who chose not to gesture even when allowed), used abstract, mathematical strategies much more often. Their work will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

In 1977 a study of works of art that ranged from cave drawings made in 15,000 B.C. to paintings of the 1950's found that an overwhelming majority of the people in them were also right-handed, regardless of their race, country, or culture. Yet throughout the history of the human race, some people have been left-handed. Today the proportion of left-handers is 10 to 15 percent of the population worldwide. Why are most people right-handed? And what causes some to be different?

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