Mindhacks

Editor’s Note: one sciencist has revealed that belief in reincarnation has adverse effects on a person’s memory. On the flipside, believers generally have more creative minds.

 Recent tests have shown that there are big differences in memory between people who believe in reincarnation and people who don’t. The studies revealed that people who believe are more likely to have memory errors.

This article outlines the study and believes that the tests explain how people hang on to implausible reincarnation stories of past lives. It can also be argued that believers hang on to their stories for spiritual reasons. One plus point for believers that was revealed is that they are generally more creative than non-believers.

Belief in Reincarnation Tied to Memory Errors

Melinda Wenner

People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study.

The propensity to make these mistakes could, in part, explain why people cling to  implausible reincarnation claims in the first place.

Researchers recruited people who, after undergoing hypnotic therapy, had come to believe that they had past lives.

Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of 40 non-famous names, and then, after a two-hour wait, told that they were going to see a list consisting of three types of names: non-famous names they had already seen (from the earlier list), famous names, and names of non-famous people that they had not previously seen. Their task was to identify which names were famous.

The researchers found that, compared to control subjects who dismissed the idea of reincarnation, past-life believers were almost twice as likely to misidentify names. In particular, their tendency was to wrongly identify as famous the non-famous names they had seen in the first task. This kind of error, called a source-monitoring error, indicates that a person has difficulty recognizing where a memory came from.

Power of suggestion

People who are likely to make these kinds of errors might end up convincing themselves of things that aren’t true, said lead researcher Maarten Peters of Maastricht University in The Netherlands. When people who are prone to making these mistakes undergo hypnosis and are repeatedly asked to talk about a potential idea—like a past life—they might, as they grow more familiar with it, eventually convert the idea into a full-blown false memory.

This is because they can’t distinguish between things that have really happened and things that have been suggested to them, Peters told LiveScience.

Past life memories are not the only type of implausible memories that have been studied in this manner. Richard McNally, a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, has found that self-proclaimed alien abductees are also twice as likely to commit source monitoring errors.

Creative minds

As for what might make people more prone to committing such errors to begin with, McNally says that it could be the byproduct of especially vivid imagery skills. He has found that people who commonly make source-monitoring errors respond to and imagine experiences more strongly than the average person, and they also tend to be more creative.

“It might be harder to discriminate between a vivid image that you’d generated yourself and the memory of a perception of something you actually saw,” McNally in a telephone interview.

Peters also found in his study, detailed in the March issue of Consciousness and Cognition, that people with implausible memories are also more likely to be depressed and to experience sleep problems, and this could also make them more prone to memory mistakes.

And once people make this kind of mistake, they might be inclined to stick to their guns for spiritual reasons, McNally said.

 ”It may be a variant expression of certain religious impulses. . . We suspect that this might be kind of a psychological buffering mechanism against the fear of death.”

original article >>

The debate rages on between conventional medical practices with scientific models and alternative forms of medicine. Let’s be honest it’s never going to die down. While exploring this topic a wonderful article came along my path.

This article shows how spirituality and enlightenment can be achieved alongside conventional medical practices. It has numerous stories of remarkable people who have overcome illness through alternative methods such as visualization in the case of Morris Goodman aka ‘Miracle Man’.

Delve into the article:

The Source Of All Illnesses

By Lorenzo @ RealitySeeds.com

For thousands of years humans have been trying to cure illnesses afflicting body and mind. Endless types and strands of disorders seem to be ever changing and constantly mutating into more complex forms.

Modern Day Science

We try hard to study and understand them with a scientific methodology, but we often have hard time making progress because our scientific models fail to describe much detail of how the human body works. While the science of health is making great steps forward, there is still a lot of guess work involved in applied medicine that often is more like a form of art based on the experience and gut feelings of the doctors, than a science with clear rules.

When we study illness, we notice the symptoms and we explore them; this research gives us clues on how to fix the symptoms, and often we discover possible causes and we attempt to attack these as well. This approach is similar to the approach we take when a car breaks, except that it is much more difficult given how complex the physical body is.

Treat The Symptoms But No Cure

 It often works, but often doesn’t fix the cause, and the illness comes back to hunt us again. Many times things just resolve themselves and we have no idea what the problem was, and why it is gone.

The First Of Many Real Life Alternative Thinking Cases

I remember when I was a teenager I started having troubles breathing at night. I was a young and healthy, much into all kinds of sports and always active. Nevertheless, this night breathing problem was bothering me a great deal.

 I went to my doctor. He asked me if I had that problem only at night, which I did. He also asked me if I had that problem while in vacation somewhere else, or if I had any known allergies. I answered “no” to both questions. In fact, I could sleep just fine while in vacation, and I had no known allergies.

He asked me if I spent much time in my room, which I did. That’s all he needed to hear. His prescription was “Change your room around! Move the furniture, take whatever is on the walls and change it with something new, paint the room with a different color. In short, make it feel new”. I thought it was an odd cure for my problem, but he is a very experienced doctor and I trusted him.

Well, believe it or not, that “cure” fixed my problem, which never came back again. Later he explained that I had problems breathing because I was associating my room with something bad that happened in my life, putting me in a negative state of mind and stress. Changing the room around was a way to deactivate these negative memories.

He didn’t really understand all the details of why that negative state of mind was causing the problems with the breathing; he just knew that it worked that way.

What is the real cause of illness? Most important, why is the body sometimes unable to fix itself?

Read More Here>>

What’s Your Take On This? Share Your Views

Related Articles

Miracle Man>>

The old saying ”the eyes are the window to the soul”  has now been proven by Science.

Editor’s Note: I found this article on the BBC Website- psychics throughout history have talked about the huge potential knowledge that can be gained from staring at a person’s eyes. This might be one step along the path of proving them right.

 Swedish scientists and researchers have detected patterns between people’s irises and the personality traits they possess, such as warm-heartedness and trust or neuroticism and impulsiveness. So someone just looking at the shape of your iris can tell what kind of person you are.

The team from Orebro University read pits and lines in the irises of 428 people.

Experts said the study in Biological Psychology showed that at least some aspects of personality were determined by genetics.

Close-up pictures were taken of the study participants’ irises, and they also filled out a questionnaire about their personalities.

About The Iris. . .

The Iris is the most visible part of the eye. The word comes from Greek mythology, in which Iris is the anthropomorphized form of the rainbow.

Crypts

These are a series of openings, also known as pits.

Contraction Furrows

These are the lines curving around the outer edge of the iris which are formed when pupils dilate.

Left: Iris

The iris is the green, brown and grey area that surrounds the pupil.

The Findings

It was found that those with more crypts were likely to be tender, warm and trusting, while those with more furrows were more likely to be neurotic, impulsive and give in to cravings.

Is this down to Genes?

The researchers say that PAX6, a neurodevelopmental gene, could also play a major role. It is known to help control the development of the iris in an embryo.

Do you know someone very impulsive? Or someone that lacks social skills? Previous research has shown that this is linked to a mutation of the PAX 6 gene.

Dr. Matt Larsson- team leader:

“These findings support the notion that people with different iris configurations tend to develop along different trajectories in regards to personality.

“Differences in the iris can be used as a biomarker that reflects differences between people.”

Dr George Fieldman, principal lecturer in psychology at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College:

“This is very interesting. It shows that some aspects of personality have a genetic base and to identify them in the eye in this fascinating way is significant.”

The Future

Airports are using iris scanning to identify people, who knows what the future holds? Maybe people will have their irises scanned to find out their personalities.

What can you tell from a person’s eyes? Share your Thoughts here

Click Here for the full article >>

I found the following study from University College in London amazingly interesting. I brough to mind what I learned in a Silva class 15 years ago, that we can learn to tap into our inner intuition to help us get guidance to solve major problems in life. And that this intuition is often the first thought entering our mind, and subsequent thoughts are more logical and often not as right. The study below mentions how these “first thoughts” about a given situation are often far more correct than than logical thoughts. Strong evidence for the existance of ESP in all of us.

A University College London (UCL) study has found that you are more likely to perform well if you do not think too hard and instead trust your instincts. Appearing in the journal Current Biology, the research shows that instinctive snap decisions are sometimes more reliable than decisions taken using higher-level cognitive processes.

The experiment involved subjects picking the odd symbol (a rotated version) out of over 650 identical symbols presented on a computer screen. Tracking participants’ eye movements, the researchers controlled the time allotted to each individual’s search for their target. The visual display screen was switched off at various time intervals either before or after the subjects’ eyes landed on the target (between 0 and 1.5 seconds). They then had to decide whether the odd one out was on the left or the right-hand side of the screen.

Intriguingly, the researchers found that participants scored better if they were given no scrutinizing time at all. With only a tiny fraction of a second for scrutinizing the target, subjects performed with 95 percent accuracy. With over a second to scrutinize the image, subjects were only 70 percent accurate. Accuracy was recovered if scrutinizing was allowed to run for more than 4 seconds.

“This finding seems counter-intuitive. You would expect people to make more accurate decisions when given the time to look properly. Instead they performed better when given almost no time to think. The conscious or top-level function of the brain, when active, vetoes our initial subconscious decision – even when it is correct – leaving us unaware or distrustful of our instincts and at an immediate disadvantage.

Falling back on our inbuilt, involuntary subconscious processes for certain tasks is actually more effective than using our higher-level cognitive functions,” explained Dr Li Zhaoping, of the UCL Department of Psychology.

The researchers say the instinctive decisions were more likely to be correct because the subconscious brain recognizes a rotated version of the same object as different from the original, whereas the conscious brain sees the two objects as identical. For the conscious brain, an apple is still an apple whether rotated or not.

So while the lower-level cognitive process spots the rotated image as the odd one out, the higher-level functions override that decision and dismiss the rotated object because it is the same as all the other symbols. When subjects were given the time to engage their higher-level functions, their decisions were therefore more likely to be wrong.

“If our higher-level and lower-level cognitive processes are leading us to the same conclusions, there is no issue. Often though, our instincts and higher-level functions are in conflict and in this case our instincts are often silenced by our reasoning conscious mind. Participants would have improved their performance if they had been able to switch off their higher-level cognition by, for example, acting quickly,” explained Dr Zhaoping. ”

Our eye movements are often involuntary. What seems like a random darting of the eye is often an essential subconscious scanning technique that allows us to pick out unique and distinctive features in a crowd – such as color or orientation. Soon after our eyes have fixed on a target, the conscious or top-down part of cognition engages and examines whether the candidate really is the target or not. If the target is not distinctive enough in the ‘eyes’ of the conscious, failure of identification can occur.”

Source: University College London.  Discovered via Scienceagogo.com

Scientist and author Rupert Sheldrake has announced what is perhaps, the most famous example of telepathy and scientific research.

Sheldrake, a UK scientist, claims he has evidence of what he calls “telephone telepathy” – the phenomenon by which you think about someone and, lo and behold, the phone rings…

According to Reuters, Rupert Sheldrake reported on Tuesday the results of experiments which “proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even emails”.

Sheldrake’s guinea pigs gave researchers the names and phone numers of four relatives or friends. One of these was contacted at random and asked to give the subject a bell. Forty-five per cent guessed correctly who was on the other end of the line, Sheldrake told the annual British Association for the Advancement of Science shindig – “well above the 25 per cent you would have expected.”

Sheldrake further commented:

The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one.

A similar test involving email yielded the same result, although the researchers’ limited pool of testees – 63 for the phone and 50 for the email – coupled to the fact that only nine subjects were filmed across the two tests, prompted “some scepticism”.

Sheldrake has vowed to continue his experiments, however, to prove what he believes is the “interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping”.

Next up for scrutiny is text message telepathy. Will more cases of telepathy and scientific research come to public light? We certainly hope so.

Article from The Register. Orginally found on Reuters, Sep 2006.

Can you beleive in the creation of the universe,  the Big Bang and God?

Can you beleive in spirituality AND science.

The answer is yes.

Bestsellers by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have denounced the evils of religion and proclaimed that science has proven that there is no God. Their angry accusations are partially correct.

Religions have been used to justify crimes against humanity: witness the Inquisition of centuries past or the sectarian slaughter in the Mideast today.

Religions are indeed a problem.

But the human misuse of religions and the existence of God are very different matters.

What then, is God?

Bernard Haisch, Ph.D., is an astrophysicist and author of over 130 scientific publications. In his new book, The God Theory he proposes the following:

A remarkable discovery has emerged in astrophysics: that key properties of the Universe have just the right values to make life possible. Most scientists prefer to explain away this uniqueness, insisting that a huge, perhaps infinite, number of unseen universes must therefore exist, each randomly different from the other. That way ours only appears special because we could not exist in any of the other hypothetical universes.

I propose the alternative that the special properties of our universe reflect an underlying intelligence, one that is consistent with the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution. Both views are equally logical and beyond proof. However exceptional human experiences and accounts of mystics throughout the ages do suggest that we live in a purposeful universe. In The God Theory I speculate on what that purpose might be… what that purpose means for our lives… how it might explain the riddle of evil.

View this Four minute video discussing why it is possible to believe in both science and God, a God that is compatible with the Big Bang and evolution.

Is there a plausible purpose behind the Universe consistent with modern astrophysics? And when we discover the reason – will religion become obsolete and give away to Science and Spirituality?

The God Theory

For information on the God Theory is available from TheGodTheory.com

An international online survey of paranormal experiences has met with an overwhelming response, say Australian researchers.

The survey, on phenomena that cannot be explained using the current laws of science, is by researchers at Monash University in Melbourne.
“The paranormal is covered by the media everyday. It is also in the public domain via chatrooms and websites and email lists,” says Rosemary Breen, who will use the survey results as part of a Masters degree.

“I wanted to tap into this and give a scholarly voice to these experiences.”

A recent Gallup poll revealed that 75% of Americans hold at least one paranormal belief, and a UK newspaper poll showed that 60% of Britons accept the existence of the paranormal, say the researchers.
But little is known about contemporary spontaneous experiences, and official surveys are rare, they say.

Breen says the survey is not about beliefs or whether parapsychological phenomena exist, rather it is about what people have experienced and the impact it has had on their lives.
And she says she is not aware of any equivalent study in the world.

Thousands of responses

Some 2,000 people have made contact via the internet since the survey began six weeks ago, says Dr Beverley Jane, who is supervising Breen’s research.

She says 96% of respondents claim to have had at least one brush with the paranormal, The exercise seeks to gauge the frequency, effect and age of onset of unexplained phenomena such as premonitions, out-of-body and near-death episodes, telepathy and apparitions.
Results to date showed 70% of respondents believe an unexplained event changed their lives, mostly in a positive way.

Some 70% also claim to have seen, heard or been touched by animal or person that wasn’t there, 80% report having had a premonition, and almost 50% recalled a previous life.

“The respondents are sincere and they want to report what they have experienced,” Jane says.

She is amazed by the strong response on such a sensitive subject, and put this down to the virtual nature of the study.

“People can do it in the privacy of their homes instead of in front of the researcher, so they can answer honestly,” she says.

While the survey was anonymous, some people later sent emails with their contact details, Jane says.

She says the study is not seeking to assess respondents’ mental health, but says it does offer people the chance to tell somebody about experiences they would normally keep to themselves.
Due to the overwhelming response to the survey the researchers expect to extend the closing date for responses past its initial November deadline.

Source: ABC.Net

Negative moods are highly infectious, but you can protect yourself

Story from the Kansas City Star

By ERIC ADLER, December 26, 2005

Psychologists call it “emotional contagion.” But you can think of it as Scroogeology or Grinchonomics.

Better yet, think of it as the woeful friend, the crabby boss, the depressed party guest whose moods are so melancholy that, despite your good cheer, they suck the joy from the season.

The effect is far from imaginary. In the last five years, a growing body of psychological research — much of it focused on the emotionally negative or positive boss — is bearing out the power one individual’s mood can have on others.

“It is one of the most robust phenomena I have ever seen,” said University of New Hampshire researcher Richard Saavedra. “And it’s all unconscious.”

Fortunately, he said, just as Bob Cratchit and Cindy Lou Who refused to let Scrooge or the Grinch dampen their spirits, modern and age-old strategies can combat the draw of your own Debbie Downer.

As University of Michigan psychologist Christopher Peterson said, “That’s why we have eggnog.”

Recent evidence is consistent.

In the March issue of The Journal of Applied Psychology, Saavedra and colleague Thomas Sy at California State University at Long Beach examined the effects of a leader’s mood on a group.

They took 189 volunteer undergraduates, divided them into 63 groups of three and told them they were going to take part in a team-building exercise: putting up a tent.

Before the exercise, a “leader” chosen from each team was shown one of two video clips — “Saturday Night Live” skits or a vignette on torture — designed to induce a positive or negative mood. All team members’ moods were measured before and after the task.

The Results of the Experiment? Read it Here >>

The unrelenting pace of scientific discovery makes us more knowledgeable of our own minds and bodies with every coming year.

Here’s what scientist learned in 2006.

1. U.S. life expectancy in 2005 inched up to a record high of 77.9 years.
2. The part of the brain that regulates reasoning, impulse control and judgment is still under construction during puberty and doesn’t shift into autopilot until about age 25.
3. Blue light fends off drowsiness in the middle of the night, which could be useful to people who work at night.
4. Scientists have discovered that certain brain chemicals in our tears are natural pain relievers.
5. A sex gene responsible for making embryos male and forming the testes is also produced by the brain region targeted by Parkinson’s disease, a discovery that may explain why more men than women develop the degenerative disorder.
6. A gene for a light-sensitive protein in the eye is what resets the body’s “internal clock.”
7. Red wine contains anti-inflammatory chemicals that stave off diseases affecting the gums and bone around the teeth.
8. At least once a week, 28 percent of high school students fall asleep in school, 22 percent fall sleep while doing homework and 14 percent get to school late or miss school because they overslept.
9. Women gain weight when they move in with a boyfriend because their diet deteriorates, but men begin to eat more healthy food when they set up a home with a female partner.
10. Around the world, middle-aged and elderly men tend to be more satisfied with their sex lives than women in the same age group, a new survey shows.
11. Just 30 minutes of continuous kissing can diminish the body’s allergic reaction to pollen, relaxing the body and reducing production of histamine, a chemical cell given out in response to allergens.
12. DNA analysis determined the British descended from a tribe of Spanish fishermen who crossed the Bay of Biscay almost 6,000 years ago.
13. Most of us have microscopic, wormlike mites named Demodex that live in our eyelashes and have claws and a mouth.
14. Sleeping in on Saturday and Sunday can disturb your body clock, leaving you fatigued at the start of the week.
15. During the past five years, the existence of a peanut allergy in children has doubled.
16. Red wines from southwest France and Sardinia boast the highest concentrations of chemical compounds that promote heart health.
17. One of the most effective ways for athletes to recover after exercise is to drink a glass of chocolate milk.

From Jeff Houck, The Tampa Tribune

Full Article Here >>

Mind controls body in extreme experiments

By William J. Cromie, Harvard Gazette Staff

In a monastery in northern India, thinly clad Tibetan monks sat quietly in a room where the temperature was a chilly 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Using a yoga technique known as g Tum-mo, they entered a state of deep meditation. Other monks soaked 3-by-6-foot sheets in cold water (49 degrees) and placed them over the meditators’ shoulders. For untrained people, such frigid wrappings would produce uncontrolled shivering.

 If body temperatures continue to drop under these conditions, death can result. But it was not long before steam began rising from the sheets. As a result of body heat produced by the monks during meditation, the sheets dried in about an hour.

Picture Left: A Buddhist monk has his vital signs measured as he prepares to enter an advanced state of meditation in Normandy, France. During meditation, the monk’s body produces enough heat to dry cold, wet sheets put over his shoulders in a frigid room (Photo by Herbert Benson).

Attendants removed the sheets, then covered the meditators with a second chilled, wet wrapping. Each monk was required to dry three sheets over a period of several hours.

Why would anyone do this? Herbert Benson, who has been studying g Tum-mo for 20 years, answers that “Buddhists feel the reality we live in is not the ultimate one. There’s another reality we can tap into that’s unaffected by our emotions, by our everyday world. Buddhists believe this state of mind can be achieved by doing good for others and by meditation. The heat they generate during the process is just a by-product of g Tum-mo meditation.”

Benson is an associate professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He firmly believes that studying advanced forms of meditation “can uncover capacities that will help us to better treat stress-related illnesses.”

Benson developed the “relaxation response,” which he describes as “a physiological state opposite to stress.” It is characterized by decreases in metabolism, breathing rate, heart rate, and blood pressure. He and others have amassed evidence that it can help those suffering from illnesses caused or exacerbated by stress. Benson and colleagues use it to treat anxiety, mild and moderate depression, high blood pressure, heartbeat irregularities, excessive anger, insomnia, and even infertility. His team also uses this type of simple meditation to calm those who have been traumatized by the deaths of others, or by diagnoses of cancer or other painful, life-threatening illnesses.

“More than 60 percent of visits to physicians in the United States are due to stress-related problems, most of which are poorly treated by drugs, surgery, or other medical procedures,” Benson maintains.

The Mind/Body Medical Institute is now training people to use the relaxation response to help people working at Ground Zero in New York City, where two airplanes toppled the World Trade Center Towers last Sept. 11. Facilities have been set up at nearby St. Paul’s Chapel to aid people still working on clearing wreckage and bodies. Anyone else who feels stressed by those terrible events can also obtain help at the chapel. “We are training the trainers who work there,” Benson says.

The relaxation response involves repeating a word, sound, phrase, or short prayer while disregarding intrusive thoughts. “If such an easy-to-master practice can bring about the remarkable changes we observe,” Benson notes. “I want to investigate what advanced forms of meditation can do to help the mind control physical processes once thought to be uncontrollable.”

Next: Breathtaking Results: Read More >>