Mind and brain links for the week

Having got back from a spot of tutoring at a summer school, I found there'd been a whole load of interesting developments in brain research. So, I thought I'd flag 'em all up in a grand unified posting.

Consumer preferences for a brand can be increased over the competition by techniques used to manipulate memory. -research published in Applied Cognitive Psychology.

There is some interesting research about autism. Autism is among other things and interesting way also to try to understand what goes on in 'normal' brains and minds.

The results suggest that the connectivity among brain areas is among the central problems in autism. The researchers have also found that people with autism rely heavily on the parts of the brain that deal with imagery, even when completing tasks that would not normally call for visualization. ... The authors believe that the heavy reliance on visualization by people with autism may be an adaptation to compensate for their lower ability to call on frontal regions of the brain.

I'm interested in matters that relate to 'neurotheology' (see also).

In the study, more than 60 percent of subjects described the effects of psilocybin in ways that met criteria for a "full mystical experience" as measured by established psychological scales. One third said the experience was the single most spiritually significant of their lifetimes; and more than two-thirds rated it among their five most meaningful and spiritually significant. Griffiths says subjects liken it to the importance of the birth of their first child or the death of a parent.

I know some Christians feel threatened by this stuff, but I do have to say that if we are going to experience God or have spiritual experiences, they will have to register somewhere in the brain for us to know them and integrate them into our memory, thinking and lives. We don't have to see them as having a genesis in the brain, anymore than we have to assume an experience of a U2 concert is only in our minds. So, finding where and how these things register can, potentially, help us to understand and reflect on how we, as humans, perceive and respond to the divine.

As an information junkie and a neophiliac, I am tempted to be irritated by having to sleep because it reduces my time to learn and write and so forth. Maybe now, though, I will appreciate it more, because

sleep improves the brain's ability to remember information.

Then there is the experience of a transgendered scientist ...

Barres wondered how scientists could fail to admit that discrimination is a problem. He arrived at an answer: optimism. Most scientists want to believe that they are fair, he said, and for that reason overlook data indicating that they probably aren’t.

Which is interesting but also adds grist to the mill of cultural studies which tend to unveil the way that we hide our ideological commitments behind 'naturalised' views of things.

tags:
mind, brain, consumerism, marketting, memory, gender, science, neuropsychology, psilobycin, sleep.