Dr. Seuss & The Rhyming Brain

Posted on March 2, 2012 by marcia

Oh, the Places You’ll Go with Seuss’ Rhymes in Tow

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer

Date: 02 March 2012 Time: 10:59 AM ET

The latest of Dr. Seuss’ creations to hit the big screen, “The Lorax” was released on March 2, 2012.
CREDIT: Illumination Entertainment/Universal PicturesTrailer

“I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-am.”

Dr. Seuss, the children’s book author born Theodor Seuss Geisel 108 years ago today (March 2), knew how to craft a catchy rhyme. But these rhymes aren’t just child’s play— research suggests that rhyming is built into our brains, and is even key to helping children learn to read.

“If you hear one word, words that rhyme with that word will get activated” in the brain, said Michael Wagner, an experimental linguist at McGill University in Montreal. “It seems like this is one of the factors that explains why rhyme seems to work so well and is so pleasing to us.”

The rhyming brain

Indeed, Dr. Seuss’ playful rhymes have pleased generations of children and their parents. “The Cat in the Hat” (Random House, 1957), for example, has sold more than 11 million copies. The evidence suggests that Seuss knew his audience: Rhymes are very compelling for young children, and their brains seem to process them even better than they process the meanings of other words.

In one 2004 study, researchers read lists of words to young children and then asked them to recall and recite the words they’d heard. The words on the list were all related: A child might hear “nap,” “bed,” “rest,” “peace,” “wake,” “dream,” “doze” and “snore,” for example. When adults take this test, they often inject the word “sleep” into their recitation, despite the fact that it appears nowhere on the original list. The litany of sleep-related words has tricked their brain into assuming the word’s presence.

Young kids responded differently, however. Instead of interjecting new words based on meaning, 5-year-olds added new words that rhymed with the words on the original list. A kid who heard “nap,” for example, might throw in “gap” or “sap.” In their brains, the rhyme overrode the meaning. [11 Facts About Baby Brains]

As children grow older, they seem to grow out of this tendency. Eight-year-olds in the study added mistaken words based on rhyme at about the same rate as they did mistaken words based on meaning. Eleven-year-olds responded just like adults, adding in false words based on the meanings in the original lists.

Reading in rhyme

In fact, rhyme is crucial to learning how to read. When we speak, we think we know what a hard “C” sounds like — “Kk” — and that we represent that sound with a “C” symbol. But consonants change their sound depending on the vowels that follow them. Prepare yourself to say “cat” and compare that with the shape your mouth takes when you start to say “cot.”

What this means is that kids have to learn, to borrow a Seussian phrase, that a C is a C, no matter the vowel. The process of learning this is called “phoneme awareness,” and rhymes help kids figure it out, said Miriam Cherkes-Julkowski, an educational consultant who works in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Arizona.

“Rhyme is the first step in actually segmenting out an individual phoneme-level sound,” Cherkes-Julkowski told LiveScience. “When you say cat/fat, what you’ve done is you’ve pulled the C away from the A, you’ve pulled the F away from the A. … That’s a big accomplishment.”

In other words, rhymes are the framework that helps kids understand the pieces of a word. The part of the word that’s key is the “rime,” the syllable that starts at the vowel and goes through the end of the word.

“This rime with an ‘i’ becomes really, really critical in reading,” Cherkes-Julkowski said. “By prepping kids to pay attention to that part of the syllable, the vowel through the end, you’re also prepping them to orient through print.”

Most of the time, reading isn’t taught with a focus on the rime, Cherkes-Julkowski said. Kids might learn to read phonetically, sounding out letter by letter. That’s not always best, especially for kids with dyslexia and learning disabilities, she said.

“No human being who is a reader reads left to right,” she said. “You can’t do it.”

Take the word “rage.” If you start out with the R, you get an “Rrr” sound. Next, you have an A, but is it a long or a short A? There’s no way to know until you get the next letter — a G. “Aha,” you might think, “‘Rag!’ It’s a short A.” But now you hit that E, and it changes everything. Even the G doesn’t sound the same anymore.

In other words, even when we’re not rhyming, we’re focused on the rime. Many kids can figure this all out with a phonetic reading approach, Cherkes-Julkowski said. But for kids with dyslexia, learning to pay attention to the rime is the key to reading.

“It gives the child the information that he or she needs that, ‘Aha, there are some patterns, and the patterns lie within the rime,'” she said.

Shelley Lacey-Castelot, the director of Connecticut-based Literacy Solutions, an education consulting group, agreed.

“I have a number of students who were unable to learn to read any other way than through rime-onset,” Lacey-Castelot told LiveScience. “These students aptly label this instruction amazing, life-saving, miraculous.”

As for Dr. Seuss, he was ahead of the rime-reading curve.

“He nicely sets it up for them,” Cherkes-Julkowski said. “He introduces it to them in a fun way before they ever have to make sense out of print.”

from: http://www.livescience.com/18787-seuss-rhymes-reading.html

Deepak Chopra on The Brain & Consciousness

Posted on March 1, 2012 by marcia

Deepak Chopra

Author, ‘War of the Worldviews’; Founder, The Chopra Foundation

A New Era for the Brain — Guiding Your Own Evolution

Posted: 03/ 1/2012 8:20 am

One of the great abilities of the human brain is to boost itself into a higher function. No one can explain how this happens. By the time early humans discovered fire and simple tools like the wheel and lever, our brains were already the most complex structure in the universe. We then proceeded to use this structure in unprecedented ways. Somewhere in our DNA was the potential for higher mathematics, for example, even though Homo sapiens existed for 200,000 years without tapping that capacity.

The reason that we are able to accomplish huge, never-ending leaps needs to be solved. If it can, then a new era will open up for the brain. The key is not materialistic, to my mind. One needs to begin, in fact, by turning away from the brain, whose intricate workings have mesmerized researchers for three decades, ever since the development of feasible brain scans. Such advances are fascinating, but we run the risk of sitting around a radio as it plays Mozart, staring at how the transistors work while imagining that we are uncovering the secrets of music.

Once you stop staring at the brain and start exploring the music it plays — i.e., the richness of human thoughts, feelings, images and sensations — a simple truth emerges. There is something more complex in the cosmos than the human brain: the process that makes the brain work. This process involves consciousness. It is our mind that is using the brain, not the other way around. (I would argue that the brain is a creation of the mind, a physical projection of consciousness. But that argument can be set aside for another day.) If we could understand the process that underlies the entire brain, instead of focusing in reductionist fashion on bits and pieces of brain function, doors would suddenly be flung open.

Let me suggest a beginning.

What we already know are a few fundamentals that apply to everything happening in the brain. Some functions are already confirmed by brain scans; others arise from deduction, working form observed facts to larger principles.

1. The process always involves feedback loops.

2. These feedback loops are intelligent.

3. The dynamics of the brain go in and out of balance but always favor overall balance, known as homeostasis.

4. We use our brains to evolve and develop, guided by our intentions.

5. Self-reflection pushes us forward into unknown territory.

6. Many diverse areas of the brain are coordinated simultaneously.

7. We have the capacity to monitor many levels of awareness, even though our focus is generally confined to one level (i.e., waking, sleeping, and dreaming).

8. All the qualities of the known world, such as sight, sounds, textures, and tastes, are created mysteriously by the interaction of mind and brain.

9. Mind is the origin of consciousness, not the brain.

10. Only consciousness can understand consciousness. There is no mechanical explanation that suffices, working from facts about the brain.

This list bridges two worlds, biology and philosophy. Biology is great at explaining physical processes but totally inadequate to tell us about the meaning and purpose of our subjective experience. Philosophy delves deeply into meaning but has made only tentative forays into the brain. Both worlds are needed to understand ourselves. Otherwise, we fall into the biological fallacy, which holds that humans are controlled by their brains, or the philosophical fallacy, which treats experience devoid of its physiological connection. Leaving aside countless arguments between various theories of mind and brain, the goal is clear: We want to use our brains, not have them use us.

I’d like to expand on the practical uses of the 10 principles listed above — they would be merely intriguing if they remained abstractions but incredibly practical if they lead to the next phase of human evolution. That phase involves using the brain better, something that human beings excel at. We are driven to greater creativity, complexity, imaginative leaps and unknown horizons. “Better” doesn’t mean more efficiently, the way technology improves a computer. In fact, by giving technicalities over to machines, we left more room for using our brains outside technology. In a world where every sort of calculation is done automatically, at the push of a button or the stroke of a keypad, assigning the brain a more evolved role poses the hugest challenge.

In the following posts I’ll suggest a new synthesis that takes the most basic aspects of brain function — feedback, self-reflection, homeostasis and multi-dimensional consciousness — to show that the era of higher brain function has arrived, awaiting only how you and I choose to participate.

from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/brain-mind_b_1304000.html?ref=mindful-living&ir=Mindful%20Living

Ervin Lazlo on Quantum Consciousness

Posted on January 8, 2012 by marcia

Cosmic Symphony — A Deeper Look at Quantum Consciousness

by Ervin Laszlo on April 9, 2010

The rise of quantum consciousness could be the biggest step our species has taken since it came down from the trees. It would bring us to a new stage of species maturity — and could also enable us to surmount the problems that threaten our life and our future.

But just what is quantum consciousness — QC? I have spoken about QC in my previous posts, but the question merits a further, deeper look.

First of all, what is consciousness? The commonsense assumption is that consciousness is a stream of experience produced by the brain. As long as the brain functions, there is consciousness; when the brain shuts down, consciousness vanishes. This, however, is not necessarily the case. It could be that our brain no more produces consciousness than the radio produces the symphony that comes through its speakers. The symphony, too, disappears when the radio is shut down, yet we know that it’s not produced by the radio. Both the radio and the brain pick up signals, transform them, and display the result in our stream of conscious experience.

According to received wisdom, the things and events that make up our experience of the world originate in the world. People and things around us reflect light and make sound; for the most part they can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. The corresponding signals reach our eye and ear in the form of waves in the electromagnetic field, in the air, and in the physical, chemical, and biological fields in and around our body. Our exteroceptive senses transform this information into nerve signals, and the signals are analyzed, sharpened, and interpreted by our brain. The result is the experience that appears in our consciousness.

This is the gist of the standard scientific explanation of our perception of the world, but it’s not complete. It’s incomplete not only because it fails to solve the age-old philosophers’ puzzle, how physical signals can transmute into intimately felt conscious experience (is this transmutation the work of the brain, or does the brain also transmit forms of consciousness from the external world?), but also because it doesn’t account for all the things that appear in our consciousness. Some of the things that appear in our consciousness convey information about the world even though we cannot see how they could be based on sense-perceivable events. Happily, unlike the philosophers’ “hard problem,” this is no longer an unsolved puzzle. We now realize that our brain is not limited to capturing sense-organ conveyed information, for it’s not just a classical biochemical system. It’s also a “macroscopic quantum system,” and such a system can “resonate” with the world. On the quantum level it can capture and process signals that far exceed the range of the signals available to the bodily senses.

The quantum-perception of the world is just as real as its sensory perception. Here, in brief, is why.

All things in space and time emit waves, and these waves interact with the waves produced by other things. They create wave interference patterns. Pressure waves in the air, and electric and magnetic waves in the EM field diminish with distance and the patterns they produce are limited to our immediate vicinity. Quantum waves, however (waves that propagate in the nearly infinite virtual-energy domain that fills cosmic space), move instantly over any distance. The kinds of interference patterns they create constitute quantum holograms, and quantum holograms are “entangled” with each other — they are instantly connected. As a result the information carried by one quantum hologram can be transferred to any other quantum hologram. Thus a system that can “read” the information in one hologram has access to the information carried by all. Our quantum-resonance-decoding brain could in principle capture information on anything and everything that creates quantum-interference waves in the universe.

Evidently, to capture this kind of information our brain must have the corresponding receptivity. Scientists are now beginning to understand how quantum-hologram receptivity might be built into the brain.

It appears that quantum-level signals are picked up by microstructures in our brain’s cytoskeleton (the cytoskeleton is a protein-based structure that maintains the integrity of living cells, including neurons). The neurons in the brain are organized into a network of microtubules of microscopic size but astronomical number. There are about 10**18 microtubules in the human brain, and “merely” 10**11 neurons (though this number is still larger than the number of stars in the galaxy). With filaments just 5 to 6 nanometers in diameter, our network of microtubules — the so-called “microtrabecular lattice” — is believed to capture, process, and convey information.

Physicist Roger Penrose and neurophysiologist Stuart Hameroff claim that consciousness emerges from these quantum-level elements of the brain’s cytoskeleton. The microtrabecular lattice could be responsible for the quantum-receptivity of our brain, picking up, transforming, and interpreting information based on phase-conjugate resonance.

If this is the case, there is not just one mode of perceiving the world available to us, but two. We have what neuroscientist Ede Frecska and anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna call the classical “perceptual-cognitive-symbolic” mode, based on information conveyed by our bodily senses, and we also have the “direct-intuitive-nonlocal” mode, enabled by the quantum receptivity of our brain’s microstructures.

In today’s world we tend to perceive the world in the classical mode, yet we could, and sometimes do, perceive aspects of it in the direct mode as well. However, our left-hemisphere dominated perceptual mode represses information that doesn’t accord with our established ways of thinking. Only in spiritual, religious, or mystical experience does such information penetrate to our everyday awareness — and then, just fleetingly.

Yet our brain could operate in a more balanced way: the cerebral functions underlying our everyday awareness could be more embracing than those in the classical perceptual mode. Operating in this way is possible, and has already been achieved by a few people. This was the finding of British psychophysiologist Maxwell Cade, who in the 1970s examined the EEG patterns of more than 3,000 individuals. He had found four typical patterns, made up of specific combinations of alpha, beta, and theta waves. (He did not consider dreamless deep sleep, where delta waves predominate.) Each combination turned out to be associated with a particular state of consciousness. The consciousness accompanying dreamful sleep, the state between waking and sleeping, and deep meditation each exhibits a typical combination of EEG waves. Dreamful sleep, the transitory state between waking and sleeping, and meditation all show pronounced alpha and theta waves. Our state of ordinary awareness is dominated by beta waves.

But Cade also found a “fifth state.” This is the remarkable state that comes to light in the EEG-portrait of accomplished healers. Cade called the consciousness associated with this state “awakened mind.” Here alpha and theta waves are strong, much as in the meditative state, but there are also beta waves. In some healers this state has become the norm, maintained not only during active healing, but also in everyday life.

Just as remarkably, in the fifth state the EEG waves are balanced across the left and the right hemispheres. This is important. The brain-state underlying ordinary consciousness is left-hemisphere dominated, and we know that the left hemisphere filters out experiences that do not mesh with our established beliefs and expectations. We also know that deep prayer and meditation activate the right hemisphere, and tend to synchronize the two hemispheres. A hemisphere-synchronized brain can operate in the direct quantum-resonance mode: as experiments I have witnessed myself demonstrate, expert meditators synchronize not only their own left and right hemispheres, but can also synchronize their left and right hemispheres with the synchronized hemispheres of others who meditate with them. And this synchronization occurs in the entire absence of sensory contact among the meditators. They can be in different rooms, different cities, even on different continents. (I reported on these experiments in my book, Science and the Akashic Field, and in other books.)

Unfortunately, a state of deep prayer and meditation is not functional in the everyday context: in most cases we need to sit with closed eyes, detached from the world around us.

A truly evolved consciousness would have the quantum-receptivity of deep prayer and meditation, but it would operate also in the everyday context. It would display a broad EEG wave-spectrum, embracing alpha and theta as well as beta waves. And it would show that the two brain hemispheres are highly coordinated, so that the information processed by the quantum-mode receiving right hemisphere is readily communicated to the sensory-information processing left. An evolved consciousness is wider and deeper than the everyday consciousness of people today, and more functional than the consciousness of those engaged in deep prayer and meditation.

In the past this kind of consciousness has been limited to exceptionally sensitive and creative people: to healers and poets, prophets and spiritual masters. In the future it could spread to a wider segment of the population. Humanity could be evolving its consciousness.

In closing, let us return to the example of the radio. Tuned to the right station, our radio can pick up and bring to us a great symphony. Imagine what our quantum brain could bring to us when, in the expanded and balanced mode, it would be tuned to the information encoded at the heart of the cosmos. This would be veritably a cosmic symphony. Of course, we could never capture all of it — only God could do that — but we could capture far more than we do today. This would make us more empathetic as individuals, and more cooperative as citizens in our interactive and interdependent global community. The rise of these attributes in a critical mass could be the key to our continued survival. QC may be not only the next step in our species evolution; it could also be our collective salvation.

Published at Huffington Post

from: http://ervinlaszlo.com/notebook/2010/04/09/cosmic-symphony-a-deeper-look-at-quantum-consciousness-2/

Mobile Phones and Tumors—You Decide

Posted on October 23, 2011 by marcia

Biggest Ever Study Shows No Link Between Mobile Phone Use and Tumors

ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) — There is no link between long-term use of mobile phones and tumours of the brain or central nervous system, finds new research published online in the British Medical Journal

In what is described as the largest study on the subject to date, Danish researchers found no evidence that the risk of brain tumours was raised among 358,403 mobile phone subscribers over an 18-year period.

The number of people using mobile phones is constantly rising with more than five billion subscriptions worldwide in 2010. This has led to concerns about potential adverse health effects, particularly tumours of the central nervous system.

Previous studies on a possible link between phone use and tumours have been inconclusive particularly on long-term use of mobile phones. Some of this earlier work took the form of case control studies involving small numbers of long-term users and were shown to be prone to error and bias. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) recently classified radio frequency electromagnetic fields, as emitted by mobile phones, as possibly carcinogenic to humans.

The only cohort study investigating mobile phone use and cancer to date is a Danish nationwide study comparing cancer risk of all 420,095 Danish mobile phone subscribers from 1982 until 1995, with the corresponding risk in the rest of the adult population with follow-up to 1996 and then 2002. This study found no evidence of any increased risk of brain or nervous system tumours or any cancer among mobile phone subscribers.

So researchers, led by the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Copenhagen, continued this study up to 2007.

They studied data on the whole Danish population aged 30 and over and born in Denmark after 1925, subdivided into subscribers and non-subscribers of mobile phones before 1995. Information was gathered from the Danish phone network operators and from the Danish Cancer Register.

Overall, 10,729 central nervous system tumours occurred in the study period 1990-2007.

When the figures were restricted to people with the longest mobile phone use — 13 years or more — cancer rates were almost the same in both long-term users and non-subscribers of mobile phones.

The researchers say they observed no overall increased risk for tumours of the central nervous system or for all cancers combined in mobile phone users.

They conclude: “The extended follow-up allowed us to investigate effects in people who had used mobile phones for 10 years or more, and this long-term use was not associated with higher risks of cancer.

“However, as a small to moderate increase in risk for subgroups of heavy users or after even longer induction periods than 10-15 years cannot be ruled out, further studies with large study populations, where the potential for misclassification of exposure and selection bias is minimised, are warranted.”

Another Human-Animal Connection

Posted on September 14, 2011 by marcia

Article:

Humans Hardwired to Respond to Animals

Wynne Parry, Senior LiveScience Writer

Date: 09 September 2011 Time: 08:46 PM ET

A specific part of your brain, your right amygdala, responds more to this animal face than that of another person, a study has found.
CREDIT: Caroline Kjall/stock.xchng

A part of your brain is hardwired to respond to animals, whether cute and fluffy or ugly and threatening, a new study has found.

A research team showed pictures of people, landmarks, animals or objects to epilepsy patients, who were already wired up so doctors could watch brain activity related to seizures. The researchers monitored the activity in the patients’ amygdalae, two roughly almond-shaped structures in the brain associated with emotions, fear and the sense of smell.

“Our study shows that neurons in the human amygdala respond preferentially to pictures of animals, meaning that we saw the most amount of activity in cells when the patients looked at cats or snakes versus buildings or people,” said Florian Mormann, lead study researcher and a former postdoctoral scholar at Caltech.

This preference extends to cute as well as ugly or dangerous animals and appears to be independent of the emotional contents of the pictures. Remarkably, we find this response behavior only in the right and not in the left amygdala,” Mormann said.

They found the activity in the right amygdala was not only greater, but neural responses were also faster for the animal pictures. The researchers then found the same response among people not suffering from epilepsy.

Past amygdala research has usually focused on human faces and fear, so it was a surprise to see that neurons in the right amygdala respond more to animals of all kinds than to human faces, according to Ralph Adolphus, a team member and professor at Caltech.

http://www.livescience.com/15996-brain-amygdala-animal-preference.html

Brain-Belly-Beauty Connection

Posted on August 27, 2011 by marcia

How Gut Health Impacts Your Brain And Beauty

First Posted: 8/26/11 08:02 AM ET Updated: 8/26/11 10:32 AM ET

By Ashley Neglia for YouBeauty.com

Research has already shown a connection between the belly and the brain (there’s a reason it’s called “gut instinct”), but new studies suggest that the food we eat and the bacteria residing within our gut may be powerful enough to alter our cognitive behavior.

These links between mind and body are helping researchers delve even deeper into viewing health and beauty more holistically.

According to researchers, changes in naturally occurring bacteria within the stomach may pack enough punch to otherwise affect brain chemistry. The new findings may not only help explain why certain gastrointestinal disorders, including irritable bowel syndrome, often occur concurrently withanxiety or depression, but also why some psychiatric illnesses, such as late onset autism, are associated with abnormal bacteria content.

Tanning Is a Drug?

Posted on August 14, 2011 by marcia

How Tanning Changes the Brain

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe brains of frequent tanners may be similar to those of addicts.

People who frequently use tanning beds experience changes in brain activity during their tanning sessions that mimic the patterns of drug addiction, new research shows.

Scientists have suspected for some time that frequent exposure to ultraviolet radiation has the potential to become addictive, but the new research is the first to actually peer inside the brains of people as they lay in tanning beds.

What the researchers found was that several parts of the brain that play a role in addiction were activated when the subjects were exposed to UV rays. The findings, which appear in the coming issue of the journal Addiction Biology, may help explain why some people continue to tan often despite awareness about risks such as skin cancer, premature aging and wrinkles.

“What this shows is that the brain is in fact responding to UV light, and it responds in areas that are associated with reward,” said Dr. Bryon Adinoff, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and an author of the study. “These are areas, particularly the striatum, that we see activated when someone is administered a drug or a high-value food like sugar.”

Facts About Meditation

Posted on August 10, 2011 by marcia

7 Fascinating Facts About Meditation

The Huffington Post Riddhi Shah First Posted: 7/15/11 08:25 AM ET Updated: 7/28/11 08:09 PM ET

Over the last decade, interest in the science of meditation has skyrocketed. We now know more than ever before about just how meditation affects our minds and bodies. Increased research has led to a plethora of fascinating discoveries: Take, for instance, the fact that meditation can prevent heart disease. Or that it reduces stress. Or that it can significantly lessen ADHD symptoms, and in many cases, beats medication.

Still, much is left to be discovered. We know more but we definitely don’t know everything. While we wait for science to catch up with ancient wisdom, check out this slideshow on the complex effects of the simple act of focused breathing.

It Makes Your Brain Plastic

1 of 8

Quite literally, sustained meditation leads to something called neuroplasticity, which is defined as the brain’s ability to change, structurally and functionally, on the basis of environmental input.

For much of the last century, scientists believed that the brain essentially stopped changing after adulthood.

But research by University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson has shown that experienced meditators exhibit high levels of gamma wave activityand display an ability — continuing after the meditation session has attended — to not get stuck on a particular stimulus. That is, they’re automatically able to control their thoughts and reactiveness

for more on meditation, go to: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/15/7-fascinating-facts-about_n_899482.html#s309243&title=It_Makes_Your

Spirituality & Evolution

Posted on August 5, 2011 by marcia

Michael Graziano

Professor of Neuroscience and Novelist, Princeton University

Is Spirituality a Byproduct of Evolution?

Posted: 8/5/11 08:16 AM ET

Homo sapiens evolved to be socially intelligent. Over millions of years, perhaps more, the primate brain evolved special machinery to allow us to think socially, to build abstract concepts of each other’s minds and to react emotionally to each other in a way that more or less maintains the social web. In one theory that is gaining greater acceptance, the social machinery in the human brain is the direct cause of spirituality. Spirituality is the human brain doing exactly what it is exquisitely well evolved to do. It is the functioning of our social intelligence.

If spiders could ever become super intelligent, they might see the world through the metaphor of a web. They might talk about sticky strands of thought. They might envision a universe pulled out of a spinneret. They might judge beauty by radial symmetry. Looking at the moon, they might see a web-in-the-moon instead of a man-in-the-moon. The natural talent of humans is to spin metaphors of minds and intentions, and that is how we evaluate almost everything around us. We understand and react to the world through our social capability. It defines us more than any other trait. Even language is a refinement of social communication. We are truly Homo socialis.

Effect of Memory on Visual Perception

Posted on July 23, 2011 by marcia

Memories May Skew Visual Perception

ScienceDaily (July 22, 2011) — Taking a trip down memory lane while you are driving could land you in a roadside ditch, new research indicates. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that our visual perception can be contaminated by memories of what we have recently seen, impairing our ability to properly understand and act on what we are currently seeing.

“This study shows that holding the memory of a visual event in our mind for a short period of time can ‘contaminate’ visual perception during the time that we’re remembering,” Randolph Blake, study co-author and Centennial Professor of Psychology, said.

“Our study represents the first conclusive evidence for such contamination, and the results strongly suggest that remembering and perceiving engage at least some of the same brain areas.”

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