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19-01-2011 Medical evidence has shown that long-term solitary confinement is a form of torture. Dr Joost J den Otter, Medical Director at the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT), adds that while there is no doubt about the damage caused by long periods of isolation, solitary confinement for a short period may also cause psychological harm. Dr den Otter highlights the fact that many qualitative and quantitative scientific studies have documented how solitary confinement in prison has damaging health effects. He asserts that the scientific debate on solitary confinement as a method of torture has been settled for many years, but that it seems there is still confusion among policy makers, prison authorities, and the general public. A recent commentary published by the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law about solitary confinement and mental illness in U.S. Prisons, the authors, Jeffrey L. Metzner and Jamie Fellner, support Dr den Otter's judgment. "Isolation can be psychologically harmful to any prisoner, with the nature and severity of the impact depending on the individual, the duration of confinement, and particular conditions (e.g., access to natural light, books, or radio). Psychological effects can include anxiety, depression, anger, cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, obsessive thoughts, paranoia, and psychosis". In August 2010, Physicians for Human Rights published a report (Experiments in Torture) which added to the growing body of evidence that solitary confinement causes psychological harm consistent with torture. In an interview with 'Life's Little Mysteries', Dr Scott Allen, one of the authors of the paper, said that solitary confinement "can lead to anxiety, depression, certainly disorientation, [and] it can even lead to thought disorders including psychotic thoughts." He added "The consequences can be significant." This backs up researcher Peter Scharff Smith, of The Danis

Interested to discover NLP techniques that can be used to remove negative thought patterns learned from childhood? Then don't miss this important NLP demo where master hypnotist and NLP practitioner Martijn Groenendal helps a woman confront and remove her inner critic that was formed during childhood. In this video, you'll get a clear sense of how to transform negative thought patterns into something more positive using NLP. So don't miss it. Visit HypnosisTrainingAcademy.com to watch this exclusive video demo now…

IF YOU want to lose weight, convince yourself that everything you eat is highly calorific. It could lower your levels of a hunger hormone, potentially suppressing your appetite. Alia Crum at Yale University and her colleagues gave 46 healthy volunteers the same 380-calorie milkshake but were told it was either a sensible, low-calorie choice or an indulgent, high-calorie one. The team also measured levels of ghrelin - a hormone released by the stomach when we are hungry - before and after participants drank the shake. Ghrelin levels have been shown to spike half an hour before mealtimes and return to normal after eating. Volunteers who thought they had indulged showed significantly greater drops in ghrelin levels than those who thought they had consumed less. The authors suggest that merely thinking that one has eaten something unhealthy can quell hunger pangs and perhaps help curb overeating (Health Psychology, DOI: 10.1037/a0023467). The study shows that food labels can affect consumption in unexpected ways, says David Cummings, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

With its expansive range and unprecedented potential for anonymity, (the Internet gives voice to our deepest urges and most uninhibited thoughts. Inspired by the wealth of unfettered expression available online, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, who met as Ph.D. candidates at Boston University, began plumbing a few chosen search engines (including Dogpile and AOL) to create the world's largest experiment in sexuality in 2009. Quietly tapping into a billion Web searches, they explored the private activities of more than 100 million men and women around the world. The result is the first large-scale scientific examination of human sexuality in more than half a century, since biologist Alfred Kinsey famously interviewed more than 18,000 middle-class Caucasians about their sexual behavior and published the Kinsey reports in 1948 and 1953. Building on the work of Kinsey, neuroscientists have long made the case that male and female sexuality exist on different planes. But like Kinsey himself, they have been hampered by the dubious reliability of self-reports of sexual behavior and preferences as well as by small sample sizes. That is where the Internet comes in. By accessing raw data from Web searches and employing the help of Alexa-a company that measures Web traffic and publishes a list of the million most popular sites in the world-Ogas and Gaddam shine a light on hidden desire, a quirky realm of lust, fetish, and kink that, like the far side of the moon, has barely been glimpsed. Here is a sampling of their fascinating results, selected from their book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts.

Dr. Joe Dispenza is a brilliant neuroscientist and author with a knack for demystifying complicated neuroscience. His goal is to show how anyone can use the latest scientific discoveries in neuroplasticity to "rewire" the brain and recondition the body for lasting change. You see, the unconscious mind can't tell the difference between a memory of an event, and the event itself. So when you replay negative thoughts, feelings and memories, the mind reacts as if the event were really happening... ...your heart rate increases, breathing changes and your body goes into a "fight or flight" response (commonly known as stress). Not surprisingly, repeated stress leads to major health problems. But here's the good news: The human mind has an incredible capacity to observe our own thoughts and behaviors, which means you can alter your brain structure by integrating new thoughts and behaviors. Not only that - but you can even change your genetic expression. It isn't always easy... especially when it comes to deeply ingrained habits and addictions. But hypnosis can make it MUCH more likely someone will successfully replace negative thought patterns with positive, healthy new pathways! Intrigued to find out how? Head on over to the Hypnosis Training Academy to listen to Dr. Dispenza's illuminating talk today.

Researchers use functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brain of a student as he imagined each individual limb. Scientists mapped out his brain wave patterns, and translated them into commands to make the robot move. The student was then able to control the robot's movement entirely by thinking about moving.

It's better to complete a scary task than to have the sense of relief of a "near miss"

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What is psychoanalysis, I asked someone who was hostile? Not teach it not to distinguish conscious from unconscious? - Yes, I replied. So, he concludes, it is a truism as stupid as the others, such as "when one is not great is that we are small." Can we say that the thought is not equal to the reflected consciousness is equal to the unconscious? -

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?

Free Download - StanfordUniversity - January 22, 2009 - Karl Deisseroth is pioneering bold new treatments for depression and other psychiatric diseases. By sending pulses of light into the brain, Deisseroth can control neural activity with remarkable precision. In this short talk, Deisseroth gives an thoughtful and awe-inspiring overview of his Stanford University lab's groundbreaking research in "optogenetics".

Long thought to be off limits to science, morality has been considered the exclusive preserve of philosophers and theologians. Not any more. In this special report a new generation of scientists share their wide-ranging insights.

14% think pink tablets taste sweeter than red tablets; Yellow is perceived as salty; 11% thought white or blue tablets as tasting bitter; 10% said orange tablets were sour.

Steven Pinker, the well-known psychological researcher who has written a lot on language, offers up his thoughts on Sarah Palin's use of language in a NY Times OpEd piece.

Nice review of research on geographic differences in word-sorting and mental categories. Mentions the research of Richard Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why.

In an intriguing study, scientists have linked tart tastes with an unforgiving  mind. And the more conservative a person's views, the more their thoughts are  affected by their tastebuds.

By leading the Americans in his audience at TEDxPSU step by step through the thought process, sociologist Sam Richards sets an extraordinary challenge: can they understand -- not approve of, but understand -- the motivations of an Iraqi insurgent? And by extension, can anyone truly understand and empathize with another?

Why are we all so different? Here is a toolkit for finding out what people are really like IN THE 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, Aristotle's student and successor, wrote a book about personality. The project was motivated by his interest in what he considered a very puzzling question: "Why it has come about that, albeit the whole of Greece lies in the same clime, and all Greeks have a like upbringing, we have not the same constitution of character?" Not knowing how to get at the answer, Theophrastus decided to instead focus on categorising those seemingly mysterious differences in personality. The result was a book of descriptions of personality types to which he assigned names such as The Suspicious, The Fearful and The Proud. The book made such an impression that it was passed down through the ages, and is still available online today as The Characters of Theophrastus. The two big questions about personality that so interested Theophrastus are the same ones we ask ourselves about the people we know: why do we have different personalities? And what is the best way to describe them? In the past few decades, researchers have been gradually answering these questions, and in my new book, Making Sense of People: Decoding the mysteries of personality, I take a look at some of these answers. When it comes to the origins of personality, we have learned a lot. We now know that personality traits are greatly influenced by the interactions between the set of gene variants that we happen to have been born with and the social environment we happen to grow up in. The gene variants that a person inherits favour certain behavioural tendencies, such as assertiveness or cautiousness, while their environmental circumstances influence the forms these innate behavioural tendencies take. The ongoing dialogue between the person's genome and environment gradually establishes the enduring ways of thinking and feeling that are the building blocks of personality. This de