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You become what you believe
A week later, the participants were given a result, based not on their actual data, but rather on one of two groups into which they had been randomly placed. Some were told they had the form of a gene called CREB1 that makes a person tire easily; others were told they had the high-endurance version. Then they ran on the treadmill again.
This time, those who had been told they had the low-endurance version of CREB1 did worse on the test, even if they had the other variant. Compared with their results on the first test, on average their bodies removed toxic carbon dioxide less efficiently, their lung capacity dropped, and they stopped running 22 seconds sooner, the team reports today in Nature Human Behavior. And those who thought they had the high-endurance form of the CREB1 gene ran slightly longer on average before feeling hot and tired, regardless of what gene variant they had. “Simply giving people this information changed their physiology,” Turnwald says.
The team also tested a second group of 107 people for its version of FTO, a gene that influences how full we feel after eating. Some versions can also predispose people to obesity. Participants ate a small meal and rated their fullness. After being told, at random, that they had a version of FTO that made them hungrier than average or one that made them easily sated, participants ate the same meal. Those told they had the “hungry” version of the gene didn’t feel any different. But those who were told they had the other version felt less hungry on average after eating; they also had higher blood levels of a hormone that indicates a feeling of fullness.
The Human Brain Is a Time Traveler - The New York Times
“What best distinguishes our species,” Seligman wrote in a Times Op-Ed with John Tierney, “is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future.” He went on: “A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise.”
The Human Brain Is a Time Traveler - The New York Times
In 2001, Randy Buckner’s adviser at Washington University, Marcus Raichle, coined a new term for the phenomenon: the “default-mode network,” or just “the default network.” The phrase stuck. Today, Google Scholar lists thousands of academic studies that have investigated the default network. “It looks to me like this is the most important discovery of cognitive neuroscience,” says the University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman. The seemingly trivial activity of mind-wandering is now believed to play a central role in the brain’s “deep learning,” the mind’s sifting through past experiences, imagining future prospects and assessing them with emotional judgments: that flash of shame or pride or anxiety that each scenario elicits.
Changing Rituals: A Conversation with Nancy Jo Sales | Cody Delistraty
Social media is not some kind of natural space. It’s not like a forest or something or a beach where you go and create things. It’s more like a room in Hawkins Lab [a fictional Hawkins, Indiana-based scientific laboratory that conducts futuristic, largely unethical experiments in the Netflix TV series Stranger Things]. It’s like a room in Hawkins lab and Papa [the alias of the fictional director of the Hawkins National Laboratory] is Mark Zuckerberg. Papa is putting little girls into the rooms in Hawkins lab and exposing them to certain tests and images. But the girls who are coming out of this social media experiment are not powerful with super powers [like in the show]. I’m not saying they’re being stripped of everything, but their power, I think, is being undermined by the fact that Papa is a guy whose whole vision of the world is “hot or not.” Which is why “Facemash” [a precursor to Facebook that Zuckerberg created while an undergraduate at Harvard] wasn’t even an original concept. It’s an insidious concept. Mark Zuckerberg takes that and he bases this whole new social media site [Facebook] on that. I think that that’s the Rosetta Stone of all social media: it’s about “hot or not.” Is your body hot, or is it not? How about your face? How about your whole life? Hot or not? Is it validatable?
On the surface of subjectivity
Looking at a painting like “Lyle,” you see minute shades of detail: a gentle furrow in the brow, a wrinkle of amusement at the corner of the eye. This impression of detail, where no actual detail can be found on the canvas, is mesmerizing and confounding. What you are seeing isn’t really there. You are no longer looking at the actual surface of the painting, but some apparition hovering above it, a numinous specter that arises in part from the engagement of your own imagination. Through the painting, Close has accessed the perceptual center of your mind, exploiting the way we process human identity: the gaps of knowledge and the unknown spaces we fill with our own presumptions, the expectations and delusions we layer upon everyone we meet.
How Globalization Fuels Terrorism and Fundamentalism
In the past, Ladakhis would rarely identify themselves as Buddhists or Muslims, instead referring to their household or village of origin. But with the heightened competition brought by development, that began to change. Political power, formerly dispersed throughout the villages, became concentrated in bureaucracies controlled by the Muslim-dominated state of Kashmir, of which Ladakh was part. In most countries the group in power tends to favor its own kind, while the rest often suffer discrimination. Ladakh was no exception. Political representation and government jobs—virtually the only jobs available to formally-schooled Ladakhis—disproportionately went to Muslims. Thus ethnic and religious differences—once largely ignored—began to take on a political dimension, causing bitterness and enmity on a scale previously unknown.
The many pieces of self
Our sense of self feels to us as being one solid entity, but upon close examination, it's clear it has many facets. For instance, there is the sense we have of being anchored in a body, of occupying a volume of space that's the body, of having a sense of ownership of our own body, and a feeling of perceiving the world from within our heads, where every perception has a sense of ' mineness' to it. All these comprise the bodily self.
We also have a sense of being a narrative, a story that spans time, from our earliest memories to some imagined future. This is the narrative or autobiographical self.
The more finely you examine the sense of self, the more facets you find.
What Happens When Your Brain Says You Don't Exist : Shots - Health News : NPR
What seems to be happening is that there is a network in the brain that is responsible for internal awareness, awareness of our own body, awareness of our emotions, awareness of our self-related thoughts, and in Cotard's, it seems like that particular network is tamped down. In some sense, their own experience of their body, in all its vividness, in experience of their own emotions in all its vividness, that's compromised very severely. In some sense they're not feeling themselves vividly. It's as simple as that. But, then there's something else that's happening in the brain. It seems like parts of the brain that are responsible for rational thought are also damaged. First of all, what might be happening is a perception that arises in their brain saying that they are dead because they're not literally perceiving their own body and body states and emotions vividly and then that perception — irrational though it is — is not being shot down.
