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anonymous

Men Respond To Stress With 'Fight Or Flight' While Women 'Tend And Befriend,' Say Scien... - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...friend-sry-gene_n_1345075.html

flight or fight human science brain science

shared by anonymous on 15 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • When faced with a stressful or dangerous situation, human beings have only two options, “fight” or “flight.” Right? Not if you’re a woman, says a new study.
  • men tend to respond to stressful situations more aggressively than women do
  • “The aggressive fight-or-flight reaction is more dominant in men, while women predominantly adopt a less aggressive tend-and-befriend response,”
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  • The researchers suggested that this difference might all come down to one gene that only men have, called the SRY gene
  • Though the claims laid out by Lee and Harley are by no means certain,
  • Though the claims laid out by Lee and Harley are by no means certain,
kushnerha

'Run, Hide, Fight' Is Not How Our Brains Work - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-not-how-our-brains-work.html

new york times brain science research violence

shared by kushnerha on 21 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • One suggestion, promoted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security, and now widely disseminated, is “run, hide, fight.” The idea is: Run if you can; hide if you can’t run; and fight if all else fails. This three-step program appeals to common sense, but whether it makes scientific sense is another question.
  • Underlying the idea of “run, hide, fight” is the presumption that volitional choices are readily available in situations of danger. But the fact is, when you are in danger, whether it is a bicyclist speeding at you or a shooter locked and loaded, you may well find yourself frozen, unable to act and think clearly.
  • Freezing is not a choice. It is a built-in impulse controlled by ancient circuits in the brain involving the amygdala and its neural partners, and is automatically set into motion by external threats. By contrast, the kinds of intentional actions implied by “run, hide, fight” require newer circuits in the neocortex.
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  • Contemporary science has refined the old “fight or flight” concept — the idea that those are the two hard-wired options when in mortal danger — to the updated “freeze, flee, fight.”
  • Why do we freeze? It’s part of a predatory defense system that is wired to keep the organism alive. Not only do we do it, but so do other mammals and other vertebrates. Even invertebrates — like flies — freeze. If you are freezing, you are less likely to be detected if the predator is far away, and if the predator is close by, you can postpone the attack (movement by the prey is a trigger for attack)
  • The freezing reaction is accompanied by a hormonal surge that helps mobilize your energy and focus your attention. While the hormonal and other physiological responses that accompany freezing are there for good reason, in highly stressful situations the secretions can be excessive and create impediments to making informed choices.
  • Sometimes freezing is brief and sometimes it persists. This can reflect the particular situation you are in, but also your individual predisposition. Some people naturally have the ability to think through a stressful situation, or to even be motivated by it, and will more readily run, hide or fight as required.
  • we have created a version of this predicament using rats. The animals have been trained, through trial and error, to “know” how to escape in a certain dangerous situation. But when they are actually placed in the dangerous situation, some rats simply cannot execute the response — they stay frozen. If, however, we artificially shut down a key subregion of the amygdala in these rats, they are able to overcome the built-in impulse to freeze and use their “knowledge” about what to do.
  • shown that if people cognitively reappraise a situation, it can dampen their amygdala activity. This dampening may open the way for conceptually based actions, like “run, hide, fight,” to replace freezing and other hard-wired impulses.
  • How to encourage this kind of cognitive reappraisal? Perhaps we could harness the power of social media to conduct a kind of collective cultural training in which we learn to reappraise the freezing that occurs in dangerous situations. In most of us, freezing will occur no matter what. It’s just a matter of how long it will last.
knudsenlu

Outsmarting Our Primitive Responses to Fear - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...fear-anxiety-therapy.html

fear fight or flight sense perception psychology

shared by knudsenlu on 02 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • fear drives much of human behavior. And it’s not just fear of physical harm that makes us want to hide under the covers. The twin fears of intimacy and rejection, for example, shape many of our social interactions.
  • Scientists say fear and its companion — the fight, flight or freeze response — can save us when faced with imminent physical harm.
  • It’s why you jump when you sense rustling in the bushes before realizing it’s just your neighbor’s cat. That reflex can save your life in certain circumstances such as leaping out of the way of an oncoming car. Trouble starts when you can’t tamp down your amygdala’s response, which makes you obsess and perhaps do counterproductive things when faced with concerning but not life-threatening events like the Equifax hack or a vulnerable social situation like asking someone out on a date.
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  • Consciously activating the more measured, analytical part of your brain is the key to controlling runaway fear and anxiety.
  • But it’s not so easy in an era when social media and cable news make us aware of every actual or potential disaster occurring anywhere in the world (and in a repeating loop). It’s even more difficult if you have lots of stress or instability at home or work.
  • “Our culture valorizes strength and power and showing fear is considered weakness,” said Leon Hoffman, co-director of the Pacella Research Center at the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute in Manhattan. “But you are actually stronger if you can acknowledge fear.”
  • “The more you try to suppress fear, either by ignoring it or doing something else to displace it, the more you will actually experience it,” said Kristy Dalrymple, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Alpert Medical School of Brown University.
  • Psychologists and neuroscientists are also finding that the amygdala is less apt to freak out if you are reminded that you are loved or could be loved. For example, seeing images of people with frightened expressions is usually a huge trigger for the amygdala, but that response is greatly diminished when subjects are first shown pictures of people being cared for or hugged.
charlottedonoho

Harvard neuroscientist: Meditation not only reduces stress, here's how it changes your ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...t-literally-changes-your-brain

brain cognition meditation fight or flight

shared by charlottedonoho on 28 May 15 - No Cached
  • Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was one of the first scientists to take the anecdotal claims about the benefits of meditation and mindfulness and test them in brain scans. What she found surprised her — that meditating can literally change your brain.
  • I started noticing that I was calmer. I was better able to handle more difficult situations. I was more compassionate and open hearted, and able to see things from others’ points of view. I thought, maybe it was just the placebo response. But then I did a literature search of the science, and saw evidence that meditation had been associated with decreased stress, decreased depression, anxiety, pain and insomnia, and an increased quality of life.
  • The first study looked at long term meditators vs a control group. We found long-term meditators have an increased amount of gray matter in the insula and sensory regions, the auditory and sensory cortex. Which makes sense. When you’re mindful, you’re paying attention to your breathing, to sounds, to the present moment experience, and shutting cognition down. It stands to reason your senses would be enhanced.
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  • The amygdala, the fight or flight part of the brain which is important for anxiety, fear and stress in general. That area got smaller in the group that went through the mindfulness-based stress reduction program.
  • Studies by other scientists have shown that meditation can help enhance attention and emotion regulation skills. But most were not neuroimaging studies. So now we’re hoping to bring that behavioral and neuroimaging science together.
Javier E

How Depression and Anxiety Affect Your Physical Health - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-anxiety-physical-health.html

depression anxiety health effect mental health psychology research brain science

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • It’s no surprise that when a person gets a diagnosis of heart disease, cancer or some other life-limiting or life-threatening physical ailment, they become anxious or depressed.
  • But the reverse can also be true: Undue anxiety or depression can foster the development of a serious physical disease, and even impede the ability to withstand or recover from one.
  • The human organism does not recognize the medical profession’s artificial separation of mental and physical ills. Rather, mind and body form a two-way street.
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  • What happens inside a person’s head can have damaging effects throughout the body, as well as the other way around. An untreated mental illness can significantly increase the risk of becoming physically ill, and physical disorders may result in behaviors that make mental conditions worse.
  • In studies that tracked how patients with breast cancer fared, for example, Dr. David Spiegel and his colleagues at Stanford University School of Medicine showed decades ago that women whose depression was easing lived longer than those whose depression was getting worse. His research and other studies have clearly shown that “the brain is intimately connected to the body and the body to the brain,”
  • “The body tends to react to mental stress as if it was a physical stress.”
  • Anxiety disorders affect nearly 20 percent of American adults. That means millions are beset by an overabundance of the fight-or-flight response that primes the body for action.
  • “We often talk about depression as a complication of chronic illness,” Dr. Frownfelter wrote in Medpage Today in July. “But what we don’t talk about enough is how depression can lead to chronic disease. Patients with depression may not have the motivation to exercise regularly or cook healthy meals. Many also have trouble getting adequate sleep.”
  • These protective actions stem from the neurotransmitters epinephrine and norepinephrine, which stimulate the sympathetic nervous system and put the body on high alert. But when they are invoked too often and indiscriminately, the chronic overstimulation can result in all manner of physical ills, including digestive symptoms like indigestion, cramps, diarrhea or constipation, and an increased risk of heart attack or stroke.
  • While it’s normal to feel depressed from time to time, more than 6 percent of adults have such persistent feelings of depression that it disrupts personal relationships, interferes with work and play, and impairs their ability to cope with the challenges of daily life
  • “Depression diminishes a person’s capacity to analyze and respond rationally to stress,” Dr. Spiegel said. “They end up on a vicious cycle with limited capacity to get out of a negative mental state.”
  • Although persistent anxiety and depression are highly treatable with medications, cognitive behavioral therapy and talk therapy, without treatment these conditions tend to get worse.
  • When you’re stressed, the brain responds by prompting the release of cortisol, nature’s built-in alarm system. It evolved to help animals facing physical threats by increasing respiration, raising the heart rate and redirecting blood flow from abdominal organs to muscles that assist in confronting or escaping danger.
  • Improving sleep is especially helpful, Dr. Spiegel said, because “it enhances a person’s ability to regulate the stress response system and not get stuck in a mental rut.”
runlai_jiang

A New Antidote for Noisy Airports: Slower Planes - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-for-noisy-airports-1520429994

technology airplane noise

shared by runlai_jiang on 07 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Urban airports like Boston’s Logan thought they had silenced noise issues with quieter planes. Now complaints pour in from suburbs 10 to 15 miles away because new navigation routes have created relentless noise for some homeowners. Photo: Alamy By Scott McCartney Scott McCartney The Wall Street Journal BiographyScott McCartney @MiddleSeat Scott.McCartney@wsj.com March 7, 2018 8:39 a.m. ET 146 COMMENTS saveSB107507240220
  • It turns out engines aren’t the major culprit anymore. New airplanes are much quieter. It’s the “whoosh” that big airplanes make racing through the air.
  • Computer models suggest slowing departures by 30 knots—about 35 miles an hour—would reduce noise on the ground significantly.
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  • The FAA says it’s impressed and is moving forward with recommendations Boston has made.
  • . A working group is forming to evaluate the main recommendation to slow departing jets to a speed limit of 220 knots during the climb to 10,000 feet, down from 250 knots.
  • New routes put planes over quiet communities. Complaints soared. Phoenix neighborhoods sued the FAA; Chicago neighborhoods are pushing for rotating runway use. Neighborhoods from California to Washington, D.C., are fighting the new procedures that airlines and the FAA insist are vital to future travel.
  • “It’s a concentration problem. It’s a frequency problem. It’s not really a noise problem.”
  • “The flights wake you up. We get a lot of complaints from young families with children,” says Mr. Wright, a data analyst who works from home for a major health-care company.
  • In Boston, an analysis suggested only 54% of the complaints Massport received resulted from noise louder than 45 decibels—about the level of background noise. When it’s relentless, you notice it more.
  • With a 30-knot reduction, noise directly under the flight track would decrease by between 1.5 and 5 decibels and the footprint on the ground would get a lot skinnier, sharply reducing the number of people affected, Mr. Hansman says.
  • The industry trade association Airlines for America has offered cautious support of the Boston recommendations. In a statement, the group said the changes must be safe, work with a variety of aircraft and not reduce the airport’s capacity for takeoffs and landings.
  • Air-traffic controllers will need to delay a departure a bit to put more room between a slower plane and a faster one, or modify its course slightly.
Javier E

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science | Mother Jones - 2 views

motherjones.com/...denial-science-chris-mooney

science motivated reasoning evolution emotions reasoning bias rationalization

shared by Javier E on 03 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.
  • The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.
  • reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.
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  • Consider a person who has heard about a scientific discovery that deeply challenges her belief in divine creation—a new hominid, say, that confirms our evolutionary origins. What happens next, explains political scientist Charles Taber of Stony Brook University, is a subconscious negative response to the new information—and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. "They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs," says Taber, "and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what they're hearing."
  • In other words, when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers
  • Our "reasoning" is a means to a predetermined end—winning our "case"—and is shot through with biases. They include "confirmation bias," in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and "disconfirmation bias," in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.
  • That's not to suggest that we aren't also motivated to perceive the world accurately—we are. Or that we never change our minds—we do. It's just that we have other important goals b
  • esides accuracy—including identity affirmation and protecting one's sense of self—and often those make us highly resistant to changing our beliefs when the facts say we should.
anonymous

Inside the Science of Memory | Johns Hopkins Medicine - 0 views

www.hopkinsmedicine.org/...inside-the-science-of-memory

shared by anonymous on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • “Memories are who we are,” says Huganir. “But making memories is also a biological process.”
  • This process raises many questions. How does the process affect our brain? How do experiences and learning change the connections in our brains and create memories?
  • Memory: It’s All About Connections
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  • When we learn something—even as simple as someone’s name—we form connections between neurons in the brain. These synapses create new circuits between nerve cells, essentially remapping the brain.
  • The sheer number of possible connections gives the brain unfathomable flexibility—each of the brain’s 100 billion nerve cells can have 10,000 connections to other nerve cells.
  • Huganir and his team discovered that when mice are exposed to traumatic events, the level of neuronal receptors for glutamate increases at synapses in the amygdala, the fear center of the brain, and encodes the fear associated with the memory. Removing those receptors, however, reduces the strength of these connections, essentially erasing the fear component of the trauma but leaving the memory.
  • Now Huganir and his lab are developing drugs that target those receptors. The hope is that inactivating the receptors could help people with post-traumatic stress syndrome by reducing the fear associated with a traumatic memory, while strengthening them could improve learning, particularly in people with cognitive dysfunction or Alzheimer’s disease.
  • Dementia (di-men-sha): A loss of brain function that can be caused by a variety of disorders affecting the brain. Symptoms include forgetfulness, impaired thinking and judgment, personality changes, agitation and loss of emotional control. Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease and inadequate blood flow to the brain can all cause dementia. Most types of dementia are irreversible.
  • Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): A disorder in which your “fight or flight,” or stress, response stays switched on, even when you have nothing to flee or battle. The disorder usually develops after an emotional or physical trauma, such as a mugging, physical abuse or a natural disaster. Symptoms include nightmares, insomnia, angry outbursts, emotional numbness, and physical and emotional tension.
sanderk

Council Post: How Your Emotions Influence Your Decisions - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...tions-influence-your-decisions

decisions emotions influence psychology knowledge

shared by sanderk on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • emotions influence, skew or sometimes completely determine the outcome of a large number of decisions we are confronted with in a day. Therefore, it behooves all of us who want to make the best, most objective decisions to know all we can about emotions and their effect on our decision-making.
  • First, every feeling begins with an external stimulus, whether it's what someone said or a physical event.
  • stimuli, then emotions, then hormones and, finally, feelings. In other words, your emotions impact your decision-making process by creating certain feelings.
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  •  when we feel threatened by something, the initial emotion is labeled “fear." That fear, by means of hormones, results in the production of fight-or-flight responsive feelings, allowing our body to react quickly and appropriately for its own self-preservation.
  • To continue with our fear to frightened/inferior example above, we can look at the Emotion Wheel to more clearly visualize that "fear" on the inner circle is different from "frightened" on the outer one. Or, to switch our focus to the positive, we can use the Emotion Wheel to see that the emotion of “happy” on the inner circle can result in a feeling of “joyful," “powerful” or even “proud” on the outside circle.
  • The payoff is in understanding that the six emotions are only broad categories with little specificity, while the feelings are more akin to how we actually and specifically describe what’s going on in our brains and bodies.
  • After you have identified and selected an item from the outer circle, track that feeling inward through the two rings until you have reached the basic emotion (inner circle). Using this process, you can see that while you think you are experiencing a feeling, you are really dealing with an emotion.
  • you do need to consider exactly what the problem is and the ramifications of your proposed solution.
  • Recognize and name all feelings you are experiencing in connection with the decision
  • Be aware of whether you want to make a decision from this specific emotion or if you want to adjust the course.
Javier E

Why Tech Support Is (Purposely) Unbearable - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-is-purposely-unbearable.html

tech tech support psychology

shared by Javier E on 04 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • “Don’t think companies haven’t studied how far they can take things in providing the minimal level of service,” Mr. Robbins said. “Some organizations have even monetized it by intentionally engineering it so you have to wait an hour at least to speak to someone in support, and while you are on hold, you’re hearing messages like, ‘If you’d like premium support, call this number and for a fee, we will get to you immediately.’”
  • The most egregious offenders are companies like cable and mobile service providers, which typically have little competition and whose customers are bound by contracts or would be considerably inconvenienced if they canceled their service.
  • When things don’t make sense and feel out of control, mental health experts say, humans instinctively feel threatened. Though you would like to think you can employ reason in this situation, you’re really just a mass of neural impulses and primal reactions. Think fight or flight, but you can’t do either because you are stuck on the phone, which provokes rage.
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  • Mr. Valenti, like several other tech support workers who have posted confessions online, said rudeness generally gets customers placed on hold for long periods or “accidentally” disconnected. It also may result in the agent fixing the immediate problem but not the root cause.
  • Don’t bother demanding to speak to a supervisor, either. You’re just going to get transferred to another agent who has been alerted ahead of time that you have come unhinged,
  • Customer support experts recommended using social media, like tweeting or sending a Facebook message, to contact a company instead of calling.
  • To get better service by phone, dial the prompt designated for “sales” or “to place an order,” which almost always gets you an onshore agent, while tech support is usually offshore with the associated language difficulties.
  • You can also consult websites like DialAHuman.com and GetHuman.com for phone numbers and directions on what digits to press to bypass the automated system and get a live person.
  • Failing that, apps like Lucy Phone and Fast Customer will wait on hold for you and call you when an actual person picks up. No need to stoke your rage listening to grating hold music.
Javier E

Eric Kandel's Visions - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...131095

art aesthetics brain science research consciousness psychology

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Judith, "barely clothed and fresh from the seduction and slaying of Holofernes, glows in her voluptuousness. Her hair is a dark sky between the golden branches of Assyrian trees, fertility symbols that represent her eroticism. This young, ecstatic, extravagantly made-up woman confronts the viewer through half-closed eyes in what appears to be a reverie of orgasmic rapture," writes Eric Kandel in his new book, The Age of Insight. Wait a minute. Writes who? Eric Kandel, the Nobel-winning neuroscientist who's spent most of his career fixated on the generously sized neurons of sea snails
  • Kandel goes on to speculate, in a bravura paragraph a few hundred pages later, on the exact neurochemical cognitive circuitry of the painting's viewer:
  • "At a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. The latent violence of Holofernes's decapitated head, as well as Judith's own sadistic gaze and upturned lip, could cause the release of norepinephrine, resulting in increased heart rate and blood pressure and triggering the fight-or-flight response. In contrast, the soft brushwork and repetitive, almost meditative, patterning may stimulate the release of serotonin. As the beholder takes in the image and its multifaceted emotional content, the release of acetylcholine to the hippocampus contributes to the storing of the image in the viewer's memory. What ultimately makes an image like Klimt's 'Judith' so irresistible and dynamic is its complexity, the way it activates a number of distinct and often conflicting emotional signals in the brain and combines them to produce a staggeringly complex and fascinating swirl of emotions."
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  • His key findings on the snail, for which he shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, showed that learning and memory change not the neuron's basic structure but rather the nature, strength, and number of its synaptic connections. Further, through focus on the molecular biology involved in a learned reflex like Aplysia's gill retraction, Kandel demonstrated that experience alters nerve cells' synapses by changing their pattern of gene expression. In other words, learning doesn't change what neurons are, but rather what they do.
  • In Search of Memory (Norton), Kandel offered what sounded at the time like a vague research agenda for future generations in the budding field of neuroaesthetics, saying that the science of memory storage lay "at the foothills of a great mountain range." Experts grasp the "cellular and molecular mechanisms," he wrote, but need to move to the level of neural circuits to answer the question, "How are internal representations of a face, a scene, a melody, or an experience encoded in the brain?
  • Since giving a talk on the matter in 2001, he has been piecing together his own thoughts in relation to his favorite European artists
  • The field of neuroaesthetics, says one of its founders, Semir Zeki, of University College London, is just 10 to 15 years old. Through brain imaging and other studies, scholars like Zeki have explored the cognitive responses to, say, color contrasts or ambiguities of line or perspective in works by Titian, Michelangelo, Cubists, and Abstract Expressionists. Researchers have also examined the brain's pleasure centers in response to appealing landscapes.
  • it is fundamental to an understanding of human cognition and motivation. Art isn't, as Kandel paraphrases a concept from the late philosopher of art Denis Dutton, "a byproduct of evolution, but rather an evolutionary adaptation—an instinctual trait—that helps us survive because it is crucial to our well-being." The arts encode information, stories, and perspectives that allow us to appraise courses of action and the feelings and motives of others in a palatable, low-risk way.
  • "as far as activity in the brain is concerned, there is a faculty of beauty that is not dependent on the modality through which it is conveyed but which can be activated by at least two sources—musical and visual—and probably by other sources as well." Specifically, in this "brain-based theory of beauty," the paper says, that faculty is associated with activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex.
  • It also enables Kandel—building on the work of Gombrich and the psychoanalyst and art historian Ernst Kris, among others—to compare the painters' rendering of emotion, the unconscious, and the libido with contemporaneous psychological insights from Freud about latent aggression, pleasure and death instincts, and other primal drives.
  • Kandel views the Expressionists' art through the powerful multiple lenses of turn-of-the-century Vienna's cultural mores and psychological insights. But then he refracts them further, through later discoveries in cognitive science. He seeks to reassure those who fear that the empirical and chemical will diminish the paintings' poetic power. "In art, as in science," he writes, "reductionism does not trivialize our perception—of color, light, and perspective—but allows us to see each of these components in a new way. Indeed, artists, particularly modern artists, have intentionally limited the scope and vocabulary of their expression to convey, as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt do, the most essential, even spiritual ideas of their art."
  • The author of a classic textbook on neuroscience, he seems here to have written a layman's cognition textbook wrapped within a work of art history.
  • "our initial response to the most salient features of the paintings of the Austrian Modernists, like our response to a dangerous animal, is automatic. ... The answer to James's question of how an object simply perceived turns into an object emotionally felt, then, is that the portraits are never objects simply perceived. They are more like the dangerous animal at a distance—both perceived and felt."
  • If imaging is key to gauging therapeutic practices, it will be key to neuroaesthetics as well, Kandel predicts—a broad, intense array of "imaging experiments to see what happens with exaggeration, distorted faces, in the human brain and the monkey brain," viewers' responses to "mixed eroticism and aggression," and the like.
  • while the visual-perception literature might be richer at the moment, there's no reason that neuroaesthetics should restrict its emphasis to the purely visual arts at the expense of music, dance, film, and theater.
  • although Kandel considers The Age of Insight to be more a work of intellectual history than of science, the book summarizes centuries of research on perception. And so you'll find, in those hundreds of pages between Kandel's introduction to Klimt's "Judith" and the neurochemical cadenza about the viewer's response to it, dossiers on vision as information processing; the brain's three-dimensional-space mapping and its interpretations of two-dimensional renderings; face recognition; the mirror neurons that enable us to empathize and physically reflect the affect and intentions we see in others; and many related topics. Kandel elsewhere describes the scientific evidence that creativity is nurtured by spells of relaxation, which foster a connection between conscious and unconscious cognition.
  • Zeki's message to art historians, aesthetic philosophers, and others who chafe at that idea is twofold. The more diplomatic pitch is that neuroaesthetics is different, complementary, and not oppositional to other forms of arts scholarship. But "the stick," as he puts it, is that if arts scholars "want to be taken seriously" by neurobiologists, they need to take advantage of the discoveries of the past half-century. If they don't, he says, "it's a bit like the guys who said to Galileo that we'd rather not look through your telescope."
  • Matthews, a co-author of The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging (Dana Press, 2003), seems open to the elucidations that science and the humanities can cast on each other. The neural pathways of our aesthetic responses are "good explanations," he says. But "does one [type of] explanation supersede all the others? I would argue that they don't, because there's a fundamental disconnection still between ... explanations of neural correlates of conscious experience and conscious experience" itself.
  • There are, Matthews says, "certain kinds of problems that are fundamentally interesting to us as a species: What is love? What motivates us to anger?" Writers put their observations on such matters into idiosyncratic stories, psychologists conceive their observations in a more formalized framework, and neuroscientists like Zeki monitor them at the level of functional changes in the brain. All of those approaches to human experience "intersect," Matthews says, "but no one of them is the explanation."
  • "Conscious experience," he says, "is something we cannot even interrogate in ourselves adequately. What we're always trying to do in effect is capture the conscious experience of the last moment. ... As we think about it, we have no way of capturing more than one part of it."
  • Kandel sees art and art history as "parent disciplines" and psychology and brain science as "antidisciplines," to be drawn together in an E.O. Wilson-like synthesis toward "consilience as an attempt to open a discussion between restricted areas of knowledge." Kandel approvingly cites Stephen Jay Gould's wish for "the sciences and humanities to become the greatest of pals ... but to keep their ineluctably different aims and logics separate as they ply their joint projects and learn from each other."
knudsenlu

New Neuroscience Study Reveals What Worry About Money Does To Your Brain - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...about-money-does-to-your-brain

heuristics money neuroscience worry

shared by knudsenlu on 02 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • These findings suggest more evidence for why heuristics, or rules of thumb, are both so effective and ubiquitous. Consider a few from the financial world: Pay yourself first. Sell in May and go away. Buy and hold. Only use the principal. Buy low, sell high. The list could go on and on.
  • It’s no surprise that financial stress is draining. Anyone who’s worried over a budget or fretted about making the wrong investment choice or major purchase can recognize the telltale signs of such anxiety. But what’s actually happening to your brain when you feel under such pressure?
  • New research conducted by neuroscientist Sam Barnett, co-founder of ThinkAlike Laboratories and sponsored by Northwestern Mutual, offers a rare glimpse at the brain while it is making financial decisions—and finds that anxiety actually impairs our ability to make sound decisions.
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  • Our brain was designed to make binary decisions—fight or flight—and avoid dangers,” Barnett says. But modern life with its ample choices and options doesn’t match how our brains naturally process information—explaining some ultimately self-defeating reactions such as impulsivity or inaction.
anniina03

Don't Scream: Why do we find things scary? - BBC Three - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...55-00a2-4e34-ac68-369c53567b82

science psychology brain science

shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Spiders? Clowns? Really tall buildings? There are lots of things that might make you scream — but why is it that we get so scared and what can we do to control these fears?
  • "It's evolutionary, it's biological and essentially it's about survival," says Dr Warren Mansell, a psychologist at the University of Manchester and author of a book about coping with fear."Our bodies need a way of getting ourselves prepared to either escape or defend ourselves against some kind of threat.""Being able to recognise and respond to a threat quickly and to get away is essential," adds sociologist Dr Margee Kerr, who specialises in the study of fear. "It's definitely kept us humans alive."
  • The most common way we deal with fear is the "fight-or-flight" response, when your heart rate increases and your pupils dilate.
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  • There's also the startle response — when you jump out of your skin — which is a way to get yourself away from something when you haven't got the time to even work out what it is, but it's coming at you very suddenly and very loudly.
  • First up, there's the classic jump scare, explains Andy Nyman, co-creator of the long-running London horror stage play Ghost Stories, which was also turned into a 2017 film starring Martin Freeman. "Often people think that's a bit of a cheap thing to do but the reality is that it's actually quite a sophisticated thing to pull off."If you can get it right, misdirecting an audience properly and then giving them a jump scare is a really wonderful thing because you're properly catching them off guard."
  • Then, Andy goes on, there's the type of scare that you can't shake off. "These are the scares that are attached to imagery or a moment that means when you close your eyes that's all you can see. These are much deeper-rooted."
  • If you're a very jumpy person who gets scared easily (or if you have a specific phobia, a severe form of fear that impacts on your life), there are things you can do on your own and with a therapist to help you improve
  • "The first thing is to realise that it's best to take things at your own pace and that may mean you don't need to face that fear right now but you're going to do it when you're ready."Most things that frighten people can be broken down into smaller, more manageable sections
  • And Dr Kerr has some practical tips, too, including exposure therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy and breathing exercises.
Javier E

Why facts don't matter to Trump's supporters - The Washington Post - 3 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-831d-0324760ca856_story.html

facts confirmation bias psychology bias post-factual trump

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • How did Donald Trump win the Republican nomination, despite clear evidence that he had misrepresented or falsified key issues throughout the campaign? Social scientists have some intriguing explanations for why people persist in misjudgments despite strong contrary evidence.
  • When critics challenge false assertions — say, Trump’s claim that thousands of Muslims cheered in New Jersey when the twin towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001 — their refutations can threaten people, rather than convince them. Graves noted that if people feel attacked, they resist the facts all the more
  • Graves’s article examined the puzzle of why nearly one-third of U.S. parents believe that childhood vaccines cause autism, despite overwhelming medical evidence that there’s no such link. In such cases, he noted, “arguing the facts doesn’t help — in fact, it makes the situation worse.” The reason is that people tend to accept arguments that confirm their views and discount facts that challenge what they believe.
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  • Trying to correct misperceptions can actually reinforce them, according to a 2006 paper by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, also cited by Graves. They documented what they called a “backfire effect” by showing the persistence of the belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in 2005
  • “The results show that direct factual contradictions can actually strengthen ideologically grounded factual belief,” they wrote.
  • people remember the assertion and forget whether it’s a lie. The authors wrote: “The more often older adults were told that a given claim was false, the more likely they were to accept it as true after several days have passed.”
  • studies show that attempts to refute false information often backfire and lead people to hold on to their misperceptions even more strongly.
  • The study showed two interesting things: People are more likely to accept information if it’s presented unemotionally, in graphs;
  • and they’re even more accepting if the factual presentation is accompanied by “affirmation” that asks respondents to recall an experience that made them feel good about themselves.
  • Bottom line: Vilifying Trump voters — or, alternatively, parents who don’t want to have their children vaccinated — won’t convince them they’re wrong. Probably it will have the opposite effect.
  • The final point that emerged from Graves’s survey is that people will resist abandoning a false belief unless they have a compelling alternative explanation. That point was made in an article called “The Debunking Handbook,” by Australian researchers John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky. They wrote: “Unless great care is taken, any effort to debunk misinformation can inadvertently reinforce the very myths one seeks to correct.”
  • Trump’s campaign pushes buttons that social scientists understand. When the GOP nominee paints a dark picture of a violent, frightening America, he triggers the “fight or flight” response that’s hardwired in our brains. For the body politic, it can produce a kind of panic attack.
krystalxu

The Psychology Of Daily Routine: 7 Reasons Why People Who Do The Same Things Each Day T... - 0 views

thoughtcatalog.com/...than-those-who-chase-adventure

psychology brain science adventure happiness

shared by krystalxu on 24 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • not to mention that letting yourself be jerked around by impulsiveness is a breeding ground for everything you essentially do not want.
  • 1. Your habits create your mood, and your mood is a filter through which you experience your life.
  • You must learn to let your conscious decisions dictate your day – not your fears or impulses.
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  • Happiness is not how many things you do, but how well you do them.
  • When you regulate your daily actions, you deactivate your “fight or flight” instincts because you’re no longer confronting the unknown.
  • As children, routine gives us a feeling of safety. As adults, it gives us a feeling of purpose.
  • ou feel content because routine consistently reaffirms a decision you already made.
  • As your body self-regulates, routine becomes the pathway to “flow.”
  • When we don’t settle into routine, we teach ourselves that “fear” is an indicator that we’re doing the wrong thing, rather than just being very invested in the outcome.
Javier E

How stress weathers our bodies, causing illness and premature aging - Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...stress-chronic-illness-aging

stress despair health inequality psychology

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Stress is a physiological reaction that is part of the body’s innate programming to protect against external threats.
  • When danger appears, an alarm goes off in the brain, activating the body’s sympathetic nervous system — the fight-or-flight system. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is activated. Hormones, such as epinephrine and cortisol, flood the bloodstream from the adrenal glands.
  • The heart beats faster. Breathing quickens. Blood vessels dilate. More oxygen reaches large muscles. Blood pressure and glucose levels rise. The immune system’s inflammatory response activates, promoting quick healing.
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  • Life brings an accumulation of unremitting stress, especially for those subjected to inequity — and not just from immediate and chronic threats. Even the anticipation of those menaces causes persistent damage.
  • The body produces too much cortisol and other stress hormones, straining to bring itself back to normal. Eventually, the body’s machinery malfunctions.
  • The constant strain — the chronic sources of stress — resets what is “normal,” and the body begins to change.
  • t is the repeated triggering of this process year after year — the persistence of striving to overcome barriers — that leads to poor health.
  • Blood pressure remains high. Inflammation turns chronic. In the arteries, plaque forms, causing the linings of blood vessels to thicken and stiffen. That forces the heart to work harder. It doesn’t stop there. Other organs begin to fail.
  • , that people’s varied life experiences affect their health by wearing down their bodies. And second, she said: “People are not just passive victims of these horrible exposures. They withstand them. They struggle against them. These are people who weather storms.”
  • It isn’t just living in an unequal society that makes people sick. It’s the day-in, day-out effort of trying to be equal that wears bodies down.
  • Weathering doesn’t start in middle age.
  • It begins in the womb. Cortisol released into a pregnant person’s bloodstream crosses the placenta, which helps explain why a disproportionate number of babies born to parents who live in impoverished communities or who experience the constant scorn of discrimination are preterm and too small.
  • The argument weathering is trying to make is these are things we can change, but we have to understand them in their complexity,” Geronimus said. “This has to be a societal project, not the new app on your phone that will remind you to take deep breaths when you’re feeling stress.”
Javier E

The Atheist's Belief In Medicine « The Dish - 1 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...elief-in-medicine-for-a-to-see

death illness treatment christian mortality costs

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Hitchens’s beliefs about his advanced cancer and its treatment were, for a man whose fame rested on his scepticism, uncharacteristically optimistic. I hesitate to use the word delusional, as he admitted that he would be very lucky to survive, but he clearly steadfastly hoped, right to the end, that his particular case of advanced cancer might lie on the sparsely populated right side of the bell-shaped curve of outcome statistics.
  • I wonder if all that medicine – which was, in fact, a form of poison – was worth it. David got ten more years, and two young children. But he also endured a disfiguring, disabling, brutal physical battering from the surgeries and chemo-sessions that tackling a tough brain tumor allow for. I say “allow for” because “required” is not the right word. What the chemo did to Christopher was beyond description – and what’s left of your body, even if the chemo works, can be extremely vulnerable to infections and diseases that can be worse than the cancer.
  • It seems odder to me for Christians to be as exercized by life-extension as the atheist. Put that down to the strange extremism of Ratzinger’s innovations on the question of “life”.
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  • No one should seek to die or give in to a disease they can legitimately fight. God knows how many pills I take a day to keep the virus – and all its and their side-effects at bay. But I get to live healthily and meaningfully. The way some elaborate and cutting edge treatments all but kill the patient in order to save her troubles me. It’s a loss of perspective as well as immensely expensive for the entire system.
  • our culture’s gradual alienation from the fact of our deaths – our distancing ourselves even from the old and infirm in ways previous cultures didn’t and couldn’t – is not, in my view a healthy thing.
  • these sophisticated treatments are taking healthcare money away from the young, taking up more and more of our collective healthcare resources, and extending lives only be perpetuating continuous agony and nausea and pain for the patient and devastating consequences for families and friends.
  • We will all die. We should not seek it. But we should not flee from it for ever.
  • at some point what seems to me to matter more is not the length of our lives but the content of them and the manner of our deaths.
  • At some point, medicine is a function of a social disease of modernity: the flight from our own mortality. But fleeing it does not defuse it. Only facing it does.
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