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The new device, equipped with extremely sensitive sensors, has been tested on patients and operates with a computer or even a mobile phone. It's an innovative tool for the early diagnosis of tumours.

The new device, equipped with extremely sensitive sensors, has been tested on patients and operates with a computer or even a mobile phone. It's an innovative tool for the early diagnosis of tumours.

This is a good article that looks at how anxiety happens- it is more or less something you are born with, but you learn to live with, if you are intelligent about it. Liked it. Good writing.

Listen up, Facebook and Twitter groupies: how easily can social pressure affect your memory? Very easily, researchers at the Weizmann Institute and University College London have proved, and they think they even know what part of the brain is responsible. The participants conformed to the group on these "planted" responses, giving incorrect answers nearly 70% of the time. Volunteers watched a documentary film in small groups. Three days later, they returned to the lab individually to take a memory test, answering questions about the film. They were also asked how confident they were in their answers. They were later invited back to the lab to retake the test. This time, the subjects were also given supposed answers of the others in their film-viewing group (along with social-media-style photos) while being scanned in a functional MRI (fMRI) that revealed their brain activity. Is most of what you know false? Planted among these were false answers to questions the volunteers had previously answered correctly and confidently. The participants conformed to the group on these "planted" responses, giving incorrect answers nearly 70% of the time. To determine if their memory of the film had actually undergone a change, the researchers invited the subjects back to the lab later to take the memory test once again, telling them that the answers they had previously been fed were not those of their fellow film watchers, but random computer generations. Some of the responses reverted back to the original, correct ones, but get this: despite finding out the scientists messed with their minds, close to half of their responses remained erroneous, implying that the subjects were relying on false memories implanted in the earlier session. An analysis of the fMRI data showed a strong co-activation and connectivity between two brain areas: the hippocampus and the amygdala. Social reinforcement could act on the amygdala to persuade our brains to replace a strong memory wi

When you know where you stand on procrastination, you know what to change. This crash course on procrastination shows how to identify procrastination patterns and it prescribes remedies. The Procrastination Test is a set of self-assessment questions that spotlight areas of changeable thinking, emotions, and behavior that link to procrastination. After you identify your procrastination hot spots, I'll point you to blog themes to find remedies.

Jon Ronson is the author of The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, an exploration of what defines a psychopath. At TED2012, he told a part of that story on stage - how he met a man named Tony who was held for years in a psychiatric prison because he faked mental illness too well, and about how Ronson himself became trained (perhaps too well also) to spot psychopaths for himself.

PEAT designed, built, operated and maintained a 150 kW pilot plasma gasification system previously located at a facility in Huntsville, Alabama since 1992. The plasma gasification system was able to process 50 to 100 KGs per hour of test materials, depending on the material characteristics.

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.

An article on "Experimental Philosophy", and the "x-phi" movement.

A modern test of an ancient bible story demonstrates the power of situations to trump personality in determining behaviour.

A modern test of an ancient bible story demonstrates the power of situations to trump personality in determining behaviour.

Intriguing article but frustratingly vague on the measurements used for intelligence testing. Apparently HARDI (High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging) can measure the diffusion of water through the brain, especially myelin. In yet another twin study (n=46 pairs) there appears to be a correlation between diffusion speed and intelligence.

The biased dope on learning styles

Ethnio is a friendly new way to recruit people from your website for research.  Once you've selected qualified participants, you can use Ethnio to schedule them, or you can contact them immediately for live-intercept testing."

It's a cool study, but who wants to sit at a computer all day, getting paid to "take a test". "In a real-life scenario, a student who stayed home to study and then learned he had missed a fun party would be less likely to study next time in a similar situation -- even if that option provides more long-term benefits." This only proves that our current education system fails. Ask any student if they like school, they'll all say no. Hell, I'd rather be working then studying or doing homework, at least I get paid for it. Ask any post-grad and most will say they aren't working in the career they went to college for. So why should I study for a test to pass a course that means nothing to my future? Our current education system fails to do many things, it's a shame it's still broken.

So this alternative theory turns the standard explanation on its head. Depressed people don't end up lying in bed because they are undercommitted to goals. They end up lying in bed because they are overcommitted to goals that are failing badly. The idea that depressed people cannot disengage efforts from failure is a relatively new theory. It has not been much tested in research studies. However, the idea is well worth exploring. It fits well clinically with the kinds of situations that often precipitate serious depression -- the battered wife who cannot bring herself to leave her troubled marriage, the seriously injured athlete who cannot bring himself to retire, the laid off employee who cannot bring herself to abandon her chosen career despite a lack of positions in her line of work. Seeing these depressions in terms of unreachable goals may be useful clinically, and may help us better understand how ordinary low moods can escalate into incapacitating bouts of depression.

If you tend to be hard on yourself, being less critical can make you more creative: Self-compassion is a multifaceted state of potential utility in alleviating the self-critical tendencies that may undermine creative expressions among certain individuals. To investigate this idea, 86 undergraduates were randomly assigned to control or self-compassion conditions, following which creative originality was assessed by a version of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT). The manipulation was hypothesized to facilitate creative originality particularly among individuals who are prone to critical self-judgment, as assessed by a trait measure. This interactive hypothesis was supported: Self-judgmental individuals displayed lower levels of creative originality in the control condition, but equal levels of creative originality in the self-compassion condition. Results are discussed in the context of theories of creative potential, self-compassion, and chronic tendencies toward self-criticism. Source: "Don't Be So Hard on Yourself: Self-Compassion Facilitates Creative Originality Among Self-Judgmental Individuals" from Creativity Research Journal, Volume 22, Issue 3, 2010

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.

Brain, bodily awareness, and the emergence of a conscious self: these entities and their relations are explored by Germanphilosopher and cognitive scientist Metzinger. Extensively working with neuroscientists he has come to the conclusion that, in fact, there is no such thing as a "self" -- that a "self" is simply the content of a model created by our brain - part of a virtual reality we create for ourselves. But if the self is not "real," he asks, why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct the self? In a series of fascinating virtual reality experiments, Metzinger and his colleagues have attempted to create so-called "out-of-body experiences" in the lab, in order to explore these questions. As a philosopher, he offers a discussion of many of the latest results in robotics, neuroscience, dream and meditation research, and argues that the brain is much more powerful than we have ever imagined. He shows us, for example, that we now have the first machines that have developed an inner image of their own body -- and actually use this model to create intelligent behavior. In addition, studies exploring the connections between phantom limbs and the brain have shown us that even people born without arms or legs sometimes experience a sensation that they do in fact have limbs that are not there. Experiments like the "rubber-hand illusion" demonstrate how we can experience a fake hand as part of our self and even feel a sensation of touch on the phantom hand form the basis and testing ground for the idea that what we have called the "self" in the past is just the content of a transparent self-model in our brains. Now, as new ways of manipulating the conscious mind-brain appear on the scene, it will soon become possible to alter our subjective reality in an unprecedented manner. The cultural consequences of this, Metzinger claims, may be immense: we will need a new approach to ethics, and we will be forced to think about ourselves in a fundamentally new way. At

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