PsychSplash Psychology Group

A new obervational study suggests many individuals who seek cosmetic rhinoplasty (”nose jobs”) often exhibit personality abnormalities

including obsessiveness

hypochondriasis

"Negative emotionality" (NE) reflects a tendency toward depression, anxiety, and poor reaction to stress.

"Negative emotionality" (NE) is the antithesis of positive thinking.

NE refers to a propensity toward depression and anxiety, and a tendency to react to stressful situations with unpleasant emotions.

A Northwestern research group has found that people that solve anagram puzzles by sudden insight rather than by conscious search or analytic strategies have an EEG resting state that prefers the right over the left hemisphere.

How often it does seem that it's the highly creative child who is having the greatest struggles in the conventional classroom! It's nice finding research that backs up the association. From this Harvard study, a diffuse attentional style was much more common among individuals with high lifetime levels of creative achievement.

The study concludes with a final interesting finding that differences in this attentional style might account for why high IQ beyond a certain point doesn't correlate with higher levels of creative achievement (the threshold effect...e.g. that once one is beyond 120, higher numbers don't correlate with enhanced achievement). If a focused vs. diffuse attentional style is taken into account, then it becomes more evident that diffuse attentional style + high IQ are important factors that contribute to high levels of creative achievement.

Marc G. Berman and colleagues at the University of Michigan wanted to test the effect of a walk’s scenery on cognitive function (Berman, Jonides & Kaplan, 2008; PDF).

In the first of two studies participants were given a 35 minute task involving repeating loads of random numbers back to the experimenter, but in reverse order.

The results showed that people’s performance on the test improved by almost 20% after wandering amongst the trees. By comparison those subjected to a busy street did not reliably improve on the test.

Avoir l'espoir ne veut pas dire que nous pensons que les choses vont se produire bien, mais que les choses auront un sens », a écrit Vaclav Havel.

Existencialism

Now referred to as long-term potentiation (LTP), this mechanism has since become the most intensively studied in modern neuroscience,and is widely believed to be the cellular basis of learning and memory, although this is yet to be proven unequivocally.

In the new study, Santiago Canals of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen and his colleagues used the same protocol to induce LTP. But while the vast majority of researchers have investigated LTP in slices of hippocampal tissue, this study involved observing LTP in live animals.

This new research provides the first evidence that the local modifications in synaptic connections induced by LTP lead to long-lasting changes in the activity of a diffuse network of brain regions, and even to facilitated communication between the two hemispheres. The fMRI data showed that hippocampal LTP recruits higher order association areas, as well as regions involved in emotions and others subserving different sensory modalities, all of which are known to be involved in memory formation.

You can add this to the pile of other things that can possibly improve a depressed mood, but one thing I am always mindful of is how changing your mood does not address the actual issues related to experiencing depression.

Las arterias calcificadas, sin embargo, se encontraron en el 27 por ciento de aquellos que dormían menos de cinco horas diarias por noche y el porcentaje era de un 11 por ciento en quienes dormían entre cinco y siete horas diarias por noche, y de tan sólo un seis por ciento en quienes dormían más de siete horas por noche.

The researchers found that the guitarists' brain waves were aligned most during three pivotal times: when they were syncing up with a metronome, when they began playing the piece and at points during the composition that demanded the most synchrony.

The synchrony was most prominent in the frontal and central parts of the brain that regulate motor function. "Whenever synchrony of behavior was high, synchrony of brain waves were also high,"

While brain synchrony during a duet seems like a given, it's a mystery how it happens, says Lindenberger, a psychologist. "One could speculate that this may be related to mirror neurons, the capacity of primates and humans to imagine the action of the other person while performing actions yourself," he says. "The mirror neuron system could be active during synchronized guitar playing."

The major finding was that increased working memory capacity following training was associated with changes in brain biochemistry. Specifically, the researchers found changes in the density and binding potential of cortical D1 dopamine receptors in brain regions that are activated during working memory tasks.