Material submitted on June 1, 2007

Meditation Changes the Brain

Just as physical exercise can change the physical body, so can mental exercise change the brain. The result is a change in the way the mind functions. Normally, we experience only a portion of what passes in front of us, as our attention is somewhat like a camera that photos scenes, one at a time, milliseconds apart. What happens in between photos is lost. Our mind loses information as attention flirts from scene to scene. Show a person two numbers, quickly one after the other, and the observer often does not see the second one. Meditation, however, can strengthen the mind so that attention is able to capture more information, and more quickly.

In a recent study of individuals introduced to mindfulness meditation, conducted by University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson and published in PLoS Biology, participants attempted to locate numbers on a computer screen display that were hidden by being embedded within letters of the alphabet. They also attempted to identify numbers flashed in rapid sequential fashion. The experiment provided some participants with an intense meditation training, involving ten or more hours daily meditation for three months. Another group received training in meditation involving only one hour of practice daily for one week.

The results indicated that while one week of meditating made no difference, those who had meditated for ten hours daily for three months showed significant improvement in their performance on the computer tasks. The researchers speculated that mediation might be a viable treatment for attentional deficit disorder.

Source:

Meditation Sharpens the Mind
By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience
Three months of intense training in a form of meditation known as
"insight" in Sanskrit can sharpen a person's brain enough to help them
notice details they might otherwise miss.

These new findings add to a growing body of research showing that
millennia-old mental disciplines can help control and improve the
mind, possibly to help treat conditions such as attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

"Certain mental characteristics that were previously regarded as
relatively fixed can actually be changed by mental training,"
University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson said. "People
know physical exercise can improve the body, but our research and that
of others holds out the prospects that mental exercise can improve
minds."

Paying attention to facts requires time and effort, and since everyone
only has a limited amount of brainpower to go around, details can get
overlooked. For instance, when two pictures are flashed on a video
screen a half-second apart, people often miss the second image.

"Your attention gets stuck on the first target, then you miss the
second one," Davidson said. This is called "attentional blink," an
effect akin to how you might overlook something when you blink your
eyes.

Still, the fact that people can occasionally catch the second picture
suggests it's possible to sharpen one's attention with training, which
is just what the new meditation study found.

Brain plasticity

"Meditation is a family of methods designed to facilitate regulation
of emotion and attention," said Davidson, who headed up the study.

In recent years, scientists have found meditation affects brain
functions. For instance, research into Tibetan monks trained in
focusing their attention on a single object or thought revealed they
could concentrate on one image significantly longer than normal when
shown two different images at each eye. Another study of people who on
average meditated 40 minutes daily found that areas of their brains
linked with attention and sensory processing became thicker.

"One of the fundamental mysteries that is now becoming better
understood as we go along but which is still a breakthrough area of
research is neuroplasticity, the idea that we can literally change our
brains through mental training," Davidson told LiveScience. "Certain
kinds of mental characteristics such as attention or certain emotions
such as happiness can best be regarded as skills that can be trained."

When Davidson first met His Holiness the Dalai Lama nearly a decade
ago, the exiled leader of Tibet encouraged Davidson to conduct
scientific research into meditation, "and I recognized it was a very
appropriate time to begin such research, because the methods we have
available now to study the brain have improved dramatically and the
scientific community is significantly more receptive to such ideas."

Ten to 12 hours daily

Davidson and his colleagues investigated the impacts of Vipassana, a
roughly 2,500-year-old discipline that is the oldest form of Buddhist
meditation and focuses on reducing mental distraction and improving
sensory awareness. Davidson has practiced Vipassana and other forms of
Buddhist meditation for more than 30 years.

"This is not the only form of meditation we're interested in, but it
is a widely practiced form of instruction that can easily be
replicated elsewhere in the country," Davidson said.

The researchers investigated 17 volunteers before and after they
completed three months of rigorous training in Vipassana. T hey
meditated for 10 to 12 hours a day. The researchers also studied 23
novices who received a one-hour meditation class and then meditated
for 20 minutes daily for a week.

The scientists asked volunteers to look for numbers flashed on a video
screen amongst a series of distracting letters. Their brain activity
was monitored using electrodes placed on their scalps.

Davidson and his colleagues found the brains of volunteers who
received the intense mental training apparently needed less time to
spot details than before. The training also improved their ability to
detect the second number within the half-second attentional blink time
window. In comparison, the novices did not appear to experience such
improvements to a significant degree, findings detailed online May 8
in the journal PLoS Biology.

ADHD treatment potential

"This attentional blink finding shows a little wedge of what might be
a much larger dimension of experience that could be opened up by
meditation techniques," said neuroscientist Clifford Saron at the
University of California-Davis Center for Mind and Brain. "You can
imagine that life is a series of attentional blinks, and we might be
missing an awful lot of what's going on."

Applications of this work include treatment of attention-related
conditions, Davidson explained.

"There is an absolute explosion of prescriptions for kids who are
diagnosed with ADHD. I'm not against the judicious use of medication,
but there probably is vast over-prescription for this disorder, and
strategies like meditation could be an acceptable complement or
substitute for medication for certain kids," Davidson said. "There
still needs to be rigorous research to establish that, but our work is
provocative enough to warrant more systematic follow-up."

In the next five years, Davidson expects a dramatically increased
level of research into meditation "because it is beginning to be
recognized as something that takes advantage of the plasticity of the
brain, has relatively few if any side-effects and has potentially very
beneficial effects, the impact of which can be documented using the
most rigorous scientific methods."

Other avenues of research Davidson and his colleagues are currently
pursuing include the impacts of meditation on pain, inflammation
regulation, and emotions and the brain circuits that handle feelings.

 

Weblink:
http://www.livescience.com/health/070507_mental_training.html

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New Light Cast on Pyramids

New evidence supports a hypothesis reported in Psi Research close to twenty years ago concerning a surprising discovery concerning the construction of the Egyptian pyramids. It seems that the limestone blocks were not carved and hauled into place, but were rather cast in place using a cement formula that has important implications for the future.

Years ago, Joseph Davidovits, Director of the Geopolymer Institute in St. Quentin, France, reported his findings suggesting that the pyramid stones were a form of concrete rather than naturally occurring limestone. Most recently, Michel Barsoum, a distinguished professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University, recently subjected some pyramid samples to modern testing, including electron microscopy. He found a number of anomalies suggesting that the stones were not carved from limestone, but were a form of reconstituted limestone. Some of these anomalies included

• a high percentage of water in the rock
• the atoms were not arranged symmetrically as in naturally occurring limestone, but randomly, as in manufactured rock
• the element binding the limestone aggregate was silicate, and the composition of the rock was unlike any naturally occurring stone

The casting theory would explain why the stones fit so closely together that a single piece of paper cannot be inserted between them. Barsoum noted, however, that the discovery, although significant with regards to ancient Egyptian history, is even more significant for the future. The search for more energy efficient means of producing building materials may well focus on this very unusual, but simple approach to making building blocks from materials readily at hand.

Source:

The Surprising Truth Behind the Construction of the Great Pyramids
By Sheila Berninger, and Dorilona Rose


This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in
partnership with the National Science Foundation.

"This is not my day job." So begins Michel Barsoum as he recounts his
foray into the mysteries of the Great Pyramids of Egypt. As a well
respected researcher in the field of ceramics, Barsoum never expected
his career to take him down a path of history, archaeology, and
"political" science, with materials research mixed in.

As a distinguished professor in the Department of Materials Science
and Engineering at Drexel University, his daily routine consists
mainly of teaching students about ceramics, or performing research on
a new class of materials, the so-called MAX Phases, that he and his
colleagues discovered in the 1990s. These modern ceramics are
machinable, thermal-shock resistant, and are better conductors of heat
and electricity than many metals-making them potential candidates for
use in nuclear power plants, the automotive industry, jet engines, and
a range of other high-demand systems.

Then Barsoum received an unexpected phone call from Michael Carrell, a
friend of a retired colleague of Barsoum, who called to chat with the
Egyptian-born Barsoum about how much he knew of the mysteries
surrounding the building of the Great Pyramids of Giza, the only
remaining of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

The widely accepted theory-that the pyramids were crafted of
carved-out giant limestone blocks that workers carried up ramps-had
not only not been embraced by everyone, but as important had quite a
number of holes.
Burst out laughing

According to the caller, the mysteries had actually been solved by
Joseph Davidovits, Director of the Geopolymer Institute in St.
Quentin, France, more than two decades ago. Davidovits claimed that
the stones of the pyramids were actually made of a very early form of
concrete created using a mixture of limestone, clay, lime, and water.

"It was at this point in the conversation that I burst out laughing,"
says Barsoum. If the pyramids were indeed cast, he says, someone
should have proven it beyond a doubt by now, in this day and age, with
just a few hours of electron microscopy.

It turned out that nobody had completely proven the theory...yet.

"What started as a two-hour project turned into a five-year odyssey
that I undertook with one of my graduate students, Adrish Ganguly, and
a colleague in France, Gilles Hug," Barsoum says.

A year and a half later, after extensive scanning electron microscope
(SEM) observations and other testing, Barsoum and his research group
finally began to draw some conclusions about the pyramids. They found
that the tiniest structures within the inner and outer casing stones
were indeed consistent with a reconstituted limestone. The cement
binding the limestone aggregate was either silicon dioxide (the
building block of quartz) or a calcium and magnesium-rich silicate
mineral.

The stones also had a high water content-unusual for the normally dry,
natural limestone found on the Giza plateau-and the cementing phases,
in both the inner and outer casing stones, were amorphous, in other
words, their atoms were not arranged in a regular and periodic array.
Sedimentary rocks such as limestone are seldom, if ever, amorphous.

The sample chemistries the researchers found do not exist anywhere in
nature. "Therefore," says Barsoum, "it's very improbable that the
outer and inner casing stones that we examined were chiseled from a
natural limestone block."

More startlingly, Barsoum and another of his graduate students, Aaron
Sakulich, recently discovered the presence of silicon dioxide
nanoscale spheres (with diameters only billionths of a meter across)
in one of the samples. This discovery further confirms that these
blocks are not natural limestone.
Generations misled
At the end of their most recent paper reporting these findings, the
researchers reflect that it is "ironic, sublime and truly humbling"
that this 4,500-year-old limestone is so true to the original that it
has misled generations of Egyptologists and geologists and, "because
the ancient Egyptians were the original-albeit
unknowing-nanotechnologists."

As if the scientific evidence isn't enough, Barsoum has pointed out a
number of common sense reasons why the pyramids were not likely
constructed entirely of chiseled limestone blocks.

Egyptologists are consistently confronted by unanswered questions: How
is it possible that some of the blocks are so perfectly matched that
not even a human hair can be inserted between them? Why, despite the
existence of millions of tons of stone, carved presumably with copper
chisels, has not one copper chisel ever been found on the Giza
Plateau?

Although Barsoum's research has not answered all of these questions,
his work provides insight into some of the key questions. For example,
it is now more likely than not that the tops of the pyramids are cast,
as it would have been increasingly difficult to drag the stones to the
summit.

Also, casting would explain why some of the stones fit so closely
together. Still, as with all great mysteries, not every aspect of the
pyramids can be explained. How the Egyptians hoisted 70-ton granite
slabs halfway up the great pyramid remains as mysterious as ever.

Why do the results of Barsoum's research matter most today? Two words:
earth cements.

"How energy intensive and/or complicated can a 4,500 year old
technology really be? The answer to both questions is not very,"
Barsoum explains. "The basic raw materials used for this early form of
concrete-limestone, lime, and diatomaceous earth-can be found
virtually anywhere in the world," he adds. "Replicating this method of
construction would be cost effective, long lasting, and much more
environmentally friendly than the current building material of choice:
Portland cement that alone pumps roughly 6 billion tons of CO2
annually into the atmosphere when it's manufactured."

"Ironically," says Barsoum, "this study of 4,500 year old rocks is not
about the past, but about the future."

weblink: http://www.livescience.com/history/070518_bts_barsoum_pyramids.html

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Body Building Slows Ageing

We know that exercise is good for our health, and that seniors who exercise regularly have better health. New evidence suggests that a certain kind of exercise, weight resistance training, may actually reverse ageing. It seems that pumping iron increases the body’s ability to grow that type of muscle tissue, mitochondria, which are tiny biochemical power plants in cells that convert food into energy. It is the diminution of these cells that is associated with ageing.

In the study, conducted by Mark Tarnopolsky, director of the neuromuscular and neurometabolic clinic at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and published in the online medical journal Public Library of Science, a group of seniors, with average age of 70, and a group of college students, with an average age of 26, both practiced two hours a week of pumping iron for a period of six months. Both groups increased muscle strength, with the difference in strength level between young and old declining significantly. More importantly, the mitochondria level significantly increased in the seniors, making them genetically appear more like their younger counterparts.

Source:

Muscle mass linked to aging
ANDRÉ PICARD

 

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

May 23, 2007 at 9:52 AM EDT
If you want a taste of the Fountain of Youth, try pumping iron. That's
the message that emerges from a new Canadian study that shows that
resistance training actually reverses aging - at least in muscle
tissue.
"With a little weight training we managed, to a certain extent, to
turn back the hands of time," Mark Tarnopolsky, director of the
neuromuscular and neurometabolic clinic at McMaster University in
Hamilton and co-author of the study, said in an interview.
"Resistance training reversed the effects of aging in skeletal
muscles," he said.
Participants in the research project, who lifted light weights for a
mere two hours a week, were able to improve their muscle strength by
50 per cent during the six-month study period.
Researchers, however, did not merely measure muscle strength in the
traditional sense of the term.
Rather, they measured the gene expression of muscles - more
specifically how many mitochondria they produce.
Mitochondria are tiny biochemical power plants in cells that convert
food into energy, and tiny changes in mitochondrial DNA have been
pegged as the key component of aging.
"The reason we get weaker, thinner and have less endurance as we age
is that there are fewer genes making mitochondria," Dr. Tarnopolsky
said.
Loss of muscle mass is a major problem among seniors, leaving many
frail; about one in four people over 80 have lost so much muscle mass
that they cannot carry out many activities of daily living.
But the new research suggests that process can be slowed, or even
reversed, by stimulating muscles with weight training. (A future study
will examine if endurance training, such as running or cycling, has
similar effects.)
To conduct the study, which is published in today's edition of the
online medical journal Public Library of Science, researchers
recruited 25 healthy seniors (average age 70) and an equal number of
university students (average age 26.) They all had muscle biopsies and
24,000 genes were compared in each participant; 600 genes were
markedly different between the older and younger participants.
At the outset, both groups had similar activity levels but the young
people were, not surprisingly, much stronger.
Initially, the seniors were 59 per cent weaker than the young adults.
But after six months of twice-weekly weight training, they were 38 per
cent weaker.
More important, the gene expression profile (or genetic fingerprint)
of the seniors had changed noticeably, looking a lot more like that of
the younger folk.
"We were surprised by the results," said Simon Melov, director of
genomics at the Buck Institute for Age Research in Novato, Calif., and
co-author of the study.
"We expected to see gene expressions that stayed fairly steady in
older adults. The fact that their genetic fingerprints so dramatically
reversed course gives credence to the value of exercise not only as a
means of improving health, but of reversing the aging process itself,"
he said.
Barbara Ford, a 72-year-old retiree and study participant, said that
she is not conversant with the science but that there's no question
she feels healthier and younger as a result of the weight training.
"I don't know exactly what they were after with the muscle biopsy and
their tests, but I can tell you I don't feel 72. I don't feel a day
over 60."
Mrs. Ford said she recognizes that being active, physically and
mentally, is essential to good health, but having an established
program in the gym made it a lot easier to do so, and weight training
was a lot more fun that she would ever have imagined.
"It was a great experience. I felt stronger and had more stamina. My
grandchildren said I had Popeye muscles," she said with a laugh.

weblink:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070523.wxlmuscle23/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/home

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Which Side of the Brain Wags Your Dog’s Tail?

We are all familiar with the differences between the left brain and the right brain. There are many and they extend to many species beyond the human. The two sides of the brain are geared toward different sets of emotions, with the left brain specializing in approach emotions (happiness) and the right brain specializing in avoidance emotions (unhappiness). When a dog’s tail wags, it may be either the right or left brain that is controlling it, and thus the tail wagging doesn’t necessarily mean the dog is happy, according to research conducted by Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trieste in Italy, and published in Current Biology.

Using special equipment that could display photographic images for the dogs to view and cameras that could measure precisely the angle of the dog’s tail wagging, the researchers explored whether there’s more than one way to wag a tail. As hypothesized, when the dogs saw their owners, their tails wagged predominantly to the right, as governed by the positive emotion loving left brain. When the dogs saw an older, aggressive dog, the tails wagged to the left, expressing the unease sensed by the right brain.

Previously it had been assumed that only humans have brain asymmetry (meaning different functions for left and right brain hemispheres). However, research has determined that asymmetry exists in many species. It has survival value, such as being able to do two things at once, enjoy grazing in the pasture while keeping one eye out for predators.

Source:

If You Want to Know if Spot Loves You So, It's in His Tail

Publication Date:  April 24, 2007
Author:  SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Source:  The New York Times

Every dog lover knows how a pooch expresses its feelings.

Ears close to the head, tense posture, and tail straight out from the
body means 'don't mess with me.' Ears perked up, wriggly body and
vigorously wagging tail means 'I am sooo happy to see you!'

But there is another, newly discovered, feature of dog body language
that may surprise attentive pet owners and experts in canine behavior.
When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone,
their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have
negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.

A study describing the phenomenon, 'Asymmetric tail-wagging responses
by dogs to different emotive stimuli,' appeared in the March 20 issue
of Current Biology. The authors are Giorgio Vallortigara, a
neuroscientist at the University of Trieste in Italy, and two
veterinarians, Angelo Quaranta and Marcello Siniscalchi, at the
University of Bari, also in Italy.

'This is an intriguing observation,' said Richard J. Davidson,
director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the
University of Wisconsin in Madison. It fits with a large body of
research showing emotional asymmetry in the brain, he said.

Research has shown that in most animals, including birds, fish and
frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the
scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means
the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a
sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also
associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate.

At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors
involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these
behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and
depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the
shutdown of the digestive system.

Because the left brain controls the right side of the body and the
right brain controls the left side of the body, such asymmetries are
usually manifest in opposite sides of the body. Thus many birds seek
food with their right eye (left brain/nourishment) and watch for
predators with their left eye (right brain/danger).

In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect
happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face
reflect unhappiness (right brain).

Dog tails are interesting, Dr. Davidson said, because they are in the
midline of the dog's body, neither left nor right. So do they show
emotional asymmetry, or not?

To find out, Dr. Vallortigara and his colleagues recruited 30 family
pets of mixed breed that were enrolled in an agility training program.
The dogs were placed in a cage equipped with cameras that precisely
tracked the angles of their tail wags. Then they were shown four
stimuli through a slat in the front of the cage: their owner; an
unfamiliar human; a cat; and an unfamiliar, dominant dog.

In each instance the test dog saw a person or animal for one minute,
rested for 90 seconds and saw another view. Testing lasted 25 days
with 10 sessions per day.

When the dogs saw their owners, their tails all wagged vigorously with
a bias to the right side of their bodies, Dr. Vallortigara said. Their
tails wagged moderately, again more to the right, when faced with an
unfamiliar human. Looking at the cat, a four-year-old male whose
owners volunteered him for the experiment, the dogs' tails again
wagged more to the right but in a lower amplitude.

When the dogs looked at an aggressive, unfamiliar dog - a large
Belgian shepherd Malinois - their tails all wagged with a bias to the
left side of their bodies.

Thus when dogs were attracted to something, including a benign,
approachable cat, their tails wagged right, and when they were
fearful, their tails went left, Dr. Vallortigara said. It suggests
that the muscles in the right side of the tail reflect positive
emotions while the muscles in the left side express negative ones.

While some researchers have argued that only humans show brain
asymmetry - based on the evolution of language in the left brain -
strong left and right biases are showing up in the brains of many
so-called simpler creatures, said Lesley Rogers, a neuroscientist who
studies brain asymmetry at the University of New England in Armidale,
Australia.

Honeybees learn better when using their right antenna, she said. Male
chameleons show more aggression, reflected as changes in body color,
when they look at another chameleon with their left eye. A toad is
more likely to jump away when a predator is introduced to its left
visual field (right brain/fear). The same toad prefers to flick its
tongue to the right side when lashing out at a cricket (left brain/
nourishment).

Chicks prefer to use their left eye to search for food and right eye
to watch for predators overhead, Dr. Rogers said. But when chicks are
raised in the dark, they do not develop normal brain asymmetry. In
trying to eat and watch for hawks overhead, such nonlateralized chicks
become confused and vulnerable to attack.

Sheep, which are good at recognizing individual faces, use the right
sides of their brains for knowing a Dolly from a Molly.

Chimpanzee brains are asymmetrical in the same ways as human brains,
said William D. Hopkins, a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate
Center and psychologist at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. When chimps
are excited, they tend to scratch themselves on the left side of their
bodies, reflecting strong negative emotions, he said. And left-handed
chimps are more fearful of novel stimuli than right-handers. Their
dominant right brains may make them more cautious.

Brain asymmetry for approach and withdrawal seems to be an ancient
trait, Dr. Rogers said. Thus it must confer some sort of survival
advantage on organisms.

Animals that can do two important things at the same time, like eat
and watch for predators, would be better off, she said. And animals
with two brain hemispheres could avoid duplication of function, making
maximal use of neural tissue.

The asymmetry may also arise from how major nerves in the body connect
up to the brain, said Arthur D. Craig, a neuroanatomist at the Barrow
Neurological Institute in Phoenix. Nerves that carry information from
the skin, heart, liver, lungs and other internal organs are inherently
asymmetrical, he said. Thus information from the body that prompts an
animal to slow down, eat, relax and restore itself is biased toward
the left brain. Information from the body that tells an animal to run,
fight, breathe faster and look out for danger is biased toward the
right brain.

In this way, Dr. Craig said, animals are naturally designed to cope
with changing environments.

Link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/science/24wag.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin

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Happiness is Playing in the Dirt

There’s a reason that some people are happier when they’re dirty. There appears to be an anti-depressive property to dirt. A bacteria found in dirt, when administered to lung cancer patients, improves their quality of life. That same bacteria has been found to increase serotonin production, according to research conducted at England’s University of Bristol and published in the journal Neuroscience.

These findings are significant because it helps provide a rationale for the link between mood and the immune system. Research suggests that serotonin activates the immune system. In depression serotonin level is low. Anti-depressants raise the level of serotonin in the system, which in turn, the research suggests, helps rebuild the immune system. Playing in the dirt could be cheaper than such medications and would be more fun.

Source:

Dirt exposure 'boosts happiness'
Exposure to dirt may be a way to lift mood as well as boost the immune
system, UK scientists say.
Lung cancer patients treated with "friendly" bacteria normally found
in the soil have anecdotally reported improvements in their quality of
life.
Mice exposed to the same bacteria made more of the brain's "happy"
chemical serotonin, the Bristol University authors told the journal
Neuroscience.
Common antidepressants work by boosting this brain chemical.
Dirty play
A lack of serotonin is linked with depression in people.
The scientists say more work is now needed to determine if the
bacterium Mycobacterium vaccae has antidepressant properties through
activation of serotonin neurons.
Lead researcher Dr Chris Lowry said: "These studies help us understand
how the body communicates with the brain and why a healthy immune
system is important for maintaining mental health.
"They also leave us wondering if we shouldn't all spend more time
playing in the dirt."
The work could also help experts' understanding of why an imbalance in
the immune system leaves some individuals vulnerable to mood disorders
like depression, he added.
Mood and immunity
Canadian researchers have also been exploring the links between
serotonin, mood and immunity.
A team at Georgetown University Medical Center recently discovered
serotonin is passed between key cells in the immune system, and that
the chemical can activate an immune response.
This suggests that serotonin may restore a healthy immune function in
people who are depressed and prone to infections.
On the flip side, it is also possible that serotonin, and
serotonin-boosting antidepressants, end up bolstering immunity to the
point that they trigger autoimmune disease where the body attacks
itself.
Gerard Ahern, lead researcher on the study, explained: "At this point
we just don't know how these drugs might affect immunity, so we really
need to clarify the normal role of serotonin in immune cell
functioning."
Story from BBC NEWS:

Weblink:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/6509781.stm

 

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Television Worsened Trauma of 911

People who watched television disaster coverage on the day of September 11, 2001, later evidenced more dreams with specific images reflective of that disaster than did people who did not watch much television that day. Conversely, people who spent more time discussing 911 with friends and family later evidenced more dreams with only general themes reflective of the disaster. According to a study published in the journal Psychological Science, these differences suggest that television may have increased the trauma value of the disaster, while social support lessened it.

At the time of the disaster, Ruth Propper, PhD, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, was conducting a college class on dreams. Students were maintaining daily diaries and dream journals. When 911 occurred, the class became a natural laboratory on how dreams process natural disaster. She looked different kinds of negative content in the dreams, from both before and after 911. Some students showed a great increase in traumatic dreams, while others did not. To investigate this difference, she studied their diaries and uncovered the television versus social support connection. Television watching encouraged the replay of traumatic imagery in the dreams. Social support encouraged the integration of the trauma into more general dream themes concerning the uncertainties in life.

Source:

Is TV Traumatic? Study Describes Impact of Post-9/11 Media Exposure to
People's Dreams

Newswise — Dream journals being kept by students in a college
psychology class have provided researchers with a unique look at how
people experienced the events of 9/11, including the influence that
television coverage of the World Trade Center attacks had on people's
levels of stress.
Reported in the April 2007 issue of the journal Psychological Science,
the study data finds that for every hour of television viewed on Sept.
11 – with some students reporting in excess of 13 hours watched –
levels of stress, as indicated by dream content, increased
significantly. In addition, the study found that time spent talking
with family and friends helped individuals to better process the day's
horrific events.
"We had not set out to conduct a scientific study of TV viewing and
trauma," says lead author Ruth Propper, PhD, an Associate Professor of
Psychology at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass. "But it so
happened that students enrolled in one of my courses during the fall
2001 semester were already in the process of keeping dream journals on
a nightly basis. As the events of 9/11 were unfolding, I realized
there was a valuable opportunity to find out what impact both media
coverage and social interactions were having on individuals throughout
the course of this tragedy."
So, on September 12, Propper distributed a questionnaire to her
students asking them to report on their activities of the day before,
including the amount of TV they had watched, the amount of radio they
had listened to, and the amount of time they had spent talking about
the experience with family and friends.
"What distinguishes these findings is that they occurred in
'real-time,'" adds coauthor Robert Stickgold, PhD, a sleep researcher
in the Division of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
"Because we have the students' pre-9/11 dreams with which to compare,
we can draw more reliable conclusions about our post-9/11 findings."
Dreams are a reflection of the way the mind is processing and sorting
the day's events, and depending on a person's state of mind, will
contain different images. For the purposes of this study, the authors
separated dream content into four categories: dreams containing
specific references to 9/11 (smoke, explosions, police, box cutters,
etc.); dreams with generalized threatening content (which made people
fearful even though they didn't contain specific references to 9/11);
dreams containing broadly related themes related to 9/11 (for example,
disasters in general, rather than the 9/11 disaster specifically);
and, dreams with strong negative emotional content (which elicited
general feelings of anger, fear, or sadness).
"People's dreams can function as a measure of how much distress they
are feeling and how well or poorly they are coping," says Stickgold.
"If, in your dreams, you are still seeing specific traumatic images –
buildings collapsing, fire burning, people jumping – then it means
that these stressful events are not being adequately processed. But,
if you're seeing tangential events in your dreams – for example, a
hurricane rather than the specific 9/11 images – it indicates that
your brain is trying to make sense of the trauma and that you are
coping successfully."
Not surprisingly, the researchers found that in the days and weeks
following the attacks the students' dreams were twice as likely to
contain at least one of the four "content features" as they had prior
to 9/11. But, says Propper, "Our next question was, 'Is there an
explanation for why some individuals' dreams contained specific images
of 9/11 and others didn't?'"
So, the authors turned to the questionnaires.
The questionnaire responses showed that throughout the day of Sept.
11, students spent between 0 and 2.5 hours listening to the radio.
They spent between one and 12 hours – an average of 5.9 hours –
talking about the events with family and friends. And they spent
between 1.5 and 13 hours watching television news coverage of the
attacks, an average of 6.5 hours.
"When we compared these responses with the dream journal entries, we
discovered that for each hour of TV viewing a subject reported, there
was a statistically significant six percent increase in the proportion
of the dreams containing a specific reference to the attacks," says
Propper. Among the individuals who watched less than three hours of
television there were no specific references at all.
At the same time, the authors found that the greater the amount of
time students spent talking about the 9/11 events with family and
friends, the greater the likelihood their dreams contained "thematic"
images, rather than specific images. "This suggests that by talking
through traumatic events, perhaps you are better able to get past the
trauma and to integrate it into the broader framework of your life,"
explains Propper.
"Repeated viewing of horrific images may result in increased levels of
stress and trauma in the general population," the authors write in
their conclusion. "[And] insofar as watching television replaces
talking with others about such events, these undesired consequences
may be amplified. In light of these findings, news broadcasters might
consider whether repetitious broadcasting of traumatic images is
actually in keeping with their goal of serving the public. The public,
in turn, might consider the benefits of talking about traumatic events
with friends and family."
In addition to Propper and Stickgold, coauthors include Merrimack
College student Raeann Keeley, and Stephen D. Christman, PhD, of the
University of Toledo in Ohio.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a patient care, research and
teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School and ranks third in
National Institutes of Health funding among independent hospitals
nationwide. BIDMC is clinically affiliated with the Joslin Diabetes
Center and is a research partner of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer
Center. BIDMC is the official hospital of the Boston Red Sox. For more
information, visit http://www.bidmc.harvard.edu.
Merrimack College is a selective, independent four-year Catholic
college offering liberal arts, business, science, and engineering
programs within a residential setting. Merrimack's distinguished
faculty members teach a talented student body in a learning
environment vigorously committed to the transforming values and
benefits of the liberal arts. In the Augustinian tradition,
Merrimack's community embraces scholarship, service to others, and
provides students with opportunities to develop intellectually,
spiritually, socially, and ethically. http://www.merrimack.edu.

Weblink:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/529001/

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Presentiment Creates Acceptance of Precognition

A laboratory phenomenon that demonstrates precognition, or seeing into the future, is gaining scientific acceptance. Although there’s no actual seeing involved, the experiment is provocative. First demonstrated by Dean Radin, of the Institute for Noetic Sciences, it has now been confirmed by Dick Bierman, of the University of Amsterdam, who predicts that it is an experiment that many scientists will find compelling.

Presentiment, as an experimental finding, refers to the fact when a subject views a screen that may display neutral or upsetting pictures, the body responds in advance to being exposed to an upsetting picture, even though the person is unaware of any reaction at all. Dean Radin found that the sweat reflex (the skin response that is the basis of the lie detector) seems to “know” in advance that an upsetting picture was about to be shown. Bierman used MRI brain imaging technology and found the same effect, that the brain seemed to “know” in advance that an upsetting, rather than a neutral, picture was about to be exposed.

Presentiment effects have been found in real life. For example, statistical analyses of train and plane crashes have indicated that those tragic trips had significantly fewer travelers than average, as if many folks had an unconscious presentiment of the disaster. This effect was found for all four planes involved in the 9/11 tragedy.

Source:

Is this REALLY proof that man can see into the future?


Do some of us avoid tragedy by foreseeing it? Some scientists
nowbelieve that the brain really CAN predict events before they happen
Professor Dick Bierman sits hunched over his computer in a darkened
room. The gentle whirring of machinery can be heard faintly in the
background.
He smiles and presses a grubby-looking red button.
In the next room, a patient slips slowly inside a hospital brain
scanner. If it wasn't for the strange smiles and grimaces that flicker
across the woman's face, you could be forgiven for thinking this was
just a normal health check.
But this scanner is engaged in one of the most profound paranormal
experiments of all time, one that may well prove whether or not it is
possible to predict the future.
For the results - released exclusively to the Daily Mail - suggest
that ordinary people really do have a sixth sense that can help them
'see' the future.
Such amazing studies - if verified - might help explain the predictive
powers of mediums and a range of other psychic phenomena such Extra
Sensory Perception, deja vu and clairvoyance. On a more mundane level,
it may account for 'gut feelings' and instinct.
The man behind the experiments is certainly convinced. "We're
satisfied that people can sense the future before it happens," says
Professor Bierman, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam.
"We'd now like to move on and see what kind of person is particularly
good at it."
And Bierman is not alone: his findings mirror the data gathered by
other scientists and paranormal researchers both here and abroad.
Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from
Cambridge University, says: "So far, the evidence seems compelling.
What seems to be happening is that information is coming from the
future.
"In fact, it's not clear in physics why you can't see the future. In
physics, you certainly cannot completely rule out this effect."
Virtually all the great scientific formulae which explain how the
world works allow information to flow backwards and forwards through
time - they can work either way, regardless.
Shortly after 9/11, strange stories began circulating about the lucky
few who had escaped the outrage.
It transpired that many of the survivors had changed their plans at
the last minute after vague feelings of unease.
It was a subtle, gnawing feeling that 'something' was not right.
Nobody vocalised it but shortly before the attacks, people started
altering their plans out of an unspoken instinct.
One woman suffered crippling stomach pain while queuing for one of the
ill-fated planes which flew into the World Trade Center.
She made her way to the lavatory only to recover spontaneously. She
missed her flight but survived the day. Amid the collective outpouring
of grief and horror it was easy to overlook such stories or write them
off as coincidences.
But in fact, these kind of stories point to an interesting and deeper
truth for those willing to look.
If, for example, fewer people decided to fly on aircraft that
subsequently crashed, then that would suggest a subconscious ability
to divine the future. Well, strange as it seems, that's just what
happens.
The aircraft which flew into the Twin Towers on 9/11 were unusually
empty. All the hijacked planes were carrying only half the usual
number of passengers. Perhaps one unusually empty plane could be
explained away, but all four?
And it wasn't just on 9/11 that people subconsciously seemed to avoid
disaster. The scientist Ed Cox found that trains 'destined' to crash
carried far fewer people than they did normally.
Dr Jessica Utts, a statistician at the University of California, found
exactly the same bizarre effect.
If it was possible to divine the future, you might expect those at the
sharp end, such as pilots, to have the most finely tuned instincts of
all. And again, that's just what you see.
When the Air France Concorde crashed in 2000, it wasn't long before
the colleagues of those killed in the crash spoke about a sense of
foreboding that had gripped the crew and flight engineers before the
accident.
Speaking anonymously to the French newspaper Le Parisien, one spoke of
a 'morbid expectation of an accident'.
"I had this sense that we were going to bump into the scenery," he said.
"The atmosphere on the Concorde team for the last few months, if one
has the guts to admit it, had been one of morbid expectation of an
accident. It was as if I was waiting for something to happen."
All of these stories suggest that we can pick up premonitions of
events that are yet to be.
Although these premonitions are not in glorious Technicolor, they are
often emotionally powerful enough for us to act upon them.
In technical parlance it is known as 'presentiment' because emotional
feelings are being received from the future, not hard facts or
information.
The military has long been fascinated by such phenomena. For many
years the US military (and latterly the CIA) funded a secretive
programme known as Stargate, which set out to investigate premonitions
and the ability of mediums to predict the future.
Dr Dean Radin worked on the Stargate programme and became fascinated
by the ability of 'lucky' soldiers to forecast the future.
These are the ones who survived battles against seemingly impossible
odds. Radin became convinced that thoughts and feelings - and
occasionally-actual glimpses of the future - could flow backwards in
time to guide soldiers.
It helped them make life-saving decisions, often on the basis of a hunch.
He devised an experiment to test these ideas. He hooked up volunteers
to a modified lie detector, which measured an electrical current
across the surface of the skin.
This current changes when a person reacts to an event such as seeing
an extremely violent picture or video. It's the electrical equivalent
of a wince.
Radin showed sexually explicit, violent or soothing images to
volunteers in a random sequence determined by computer.
And he soon discovered that people began reacting to the pictures
before they saw them. It was unmistakable. They began to 'wince' a few
seconds before they actually saw the image.
And it happened time and time again, way beyond what chance alone would allow.
So impressive were Radin's results that Dr Kary Mullis, a Nobel
Prizewinning chemist, took an interest. He was hooked up to Radin's
machine and shown the emotionally charged images.
"It's spooky," he says "I could see about three seconds into the
future. You shouldn't be able to do that."
Other researchers from around the world, from Edinburgh University to
Cornell in the US, rushed to duplicate Radin's experiment and improve
on it. And they got similar results.
It was soon discovered that gamblers began reacting subconsciously
shortly before they won or lost. The same effect was seen in those
terrified of animals, moments before they were shown the creatures.
The odds against all of these trials being wrong are literally
millions to one against.
Professor Dick Bierman decided to take this work even further. He is a
psychologist who has become convinced that time as we understand it is
an illusion. He could see no reason why people could not see into the
future just as easily as we dip into memories of our past.
He's in good company. Einstein described the distinction between the
past, present and future as 'a stubbornly persistent illusion'.
To prove Einstein's point, Bierman looked inside the brains of
volunteers using a hospital MRI scanner while he repeated Dr Radin's
experiments.
These scanners show which parts of the brain are active when we do
certain tasks or experience specific emotions.
Although extremely complex, and with each analysis taking weeks of
computing time, he has run the experiments twice involving more than
20 volunteers.
And the results suggest quite clearly that seemingly ordinary people
are capable of sensing the future on a fairly consistent basis.
Bierman emphasises that people are receiving feelings from the future
rather than specific 'visions'.
It's clear, though, that if ordinary people can receive feelings from
the future then perhaps the especially gifted may receive visions of
things yet to be.
It's also clear that many paranormal phenomena such as ESP and
clairvoyance could have their roots in presentiment.
After all, if you can see a few seconds into the future, why not a few
days or even years? And surely if you could look through time, why not
across great distances?It's a concept that ties the mind in knots,
unless you're a physicist.
"I believe that we can 'sense' the future," says the Nobel
Prizewinning physicist Brian Josephson.
"We just haven't yet established the mechanism allowing it to happen.
"People have had so called 'paranormal' or 'transcendental'
experiences along these lines. Bierman's work is another piece of the
jigsaw. The fact that we don't understand something does not mean that
it doesn't happen.'
If we are all regularly sensing the future or occasionally receiving
glimpses of it, as some mediums claim to do, then doesn't that mean we
can change the future and render the 'prediction' obsolete?
Or perhaps we were meant to receive the premonition and act upon it?
Such paradoxes could go on for ever, providing a rich seam of material
for films such as Minority Report - based on a short story of the same
name - in which a special police department is able to foresee and
prevent crimes before they have even taken place.
Could such science fiction have a grain of truth in it after all? The
emerging view, Bierman explains, is that 'the future has implications
for the past'.
"This phenomena allows you to make a decision on the basis of what
will happen in the future. Does that restrain our free will? That's up
to the philosophers. I'm far too shallow a person to worry about
that."
The problem with presentiment is that it appears so nebulous that you
can't rely on it to make reliable decisions. That may be the case, but
there are plenty of instances where people wished they had listened to
their premonitions or feelings of presentiment.
One of the saddest involves the Aberfan disaster. This occurred in
1966 when a coal tip collapsed and swept through a Welsh school
killing 144 people, including 116 children. It turned out that 24
people had received premonitions of the tragedy.
One involved a little girl who was killed. She told her mother shortly
before she was taken to school: "I dreamed I went to school and there
was no school there. Something black had come down all over it."
So should we listen to our instincts, hunches and dreams? Some experts
believe we may already be using them in our everyday lives to a
surprising degree.
Dr Jessica Utts at the University of California, who has worked for
the US military and CIA as an independent auditor of its paranormal
research, believes we are constantly sampling the future and using the
knowledge to help us make better decisions.
"I think we're doing it all the time," she says. "We've looked at the
data and it does seem to happen."
So perhaps the Queen in Through The Looking Glass was right: "It's a
poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

Weblink:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23395112-details/Is%20this%20REALLY%20proof%20that%20man%20can%20see%20into%20the%20future/article.do

To see a copy of Bierman’s published research on presentiment, go to

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/pdfs/presentiment.pdf

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God Answers Prayers, Research Indicates

Debate over the efficacy of prayers has focused on the research studies that either support or contradict this idea. A recent survey of all such studies suggests that the weight of evidence is in favor of prayer.

In this study, published in Research on Social Work Practice, the investigator,

David R. Hodge, an assistant professor of social work in the College of Human Services at Arizona State University, compiled all available studies on the use of prayer in aiding patients of either psychological or physical problems. He computed a “meta-analysis” on all studies, combining their statistics into one large body of data. The evidence was significantly in favor of the power of prayer.

He notes that an earlier meta-analysis, conducted by Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School, was not able to demonstrate the prayer effect. However, that meta-analysis concerned only studies involving patients undergoing heart surgery. The current meta-analysis includes the heart studies, but also includes all the other studies as well.

Source:

Does God answer prayer? ASU research says 'yes'
Hodge meta-analysis to appear in prestigious academic journal

Feb. 23, 2007
David R. Hodge, an assistant professor of social work in the College
of Human Services at Arizona State University's West campus, has
conducted an exhaustive meta-analysis on the effects of intercessory
prayer among people with psychological or medical problems.
In other words, does God – or some other type of transcendent entity –
answer prayer for healing?
According to Hodge's study, "A Systematic Review of the Empirical
Literature on Intercessory Prayer," the answer is "Yes."
"There have been a number of studies on intercessory prayer, or prayer
offered for the benefit of another person," said Hodge, a leading
expert on spirituality and religion. "Some have found positive results
for prayer. Others have found no effect. Conducting a meta-analysis
takes into account the entire body of empirical research on
intercessory prayer. Using this procedure, we find that prayer offered
on behalf of another yields positive results."
Hodge's work will be featured in the March, 2007, issue of Research on
Social Work Practice, a disciplinary journal devoted to the
publication of empirical research on practice outcomes. It is widely
recognized as one of the most prestigious journals in the field of
social work.
Hodge noted that his study is important because it is a compilation of
available studies and is not a single work with a single conclusion.
His "Systematic Review" takes into account the findings of 17 studies
that used intercessory prayer as a treatment in practice settings.
"Some people feel Benson and associates' study from last year, which
is the most recent and showed no positive effects for intercessory
prayer, is the final word," said Hodge, referring to a 2006 article by
Dr. Herbert Benson of the Harvard Medical School that measured the
therapeutic effect of intercessory prayer in cardiac bypass patients.
"But, this research suggests otherwise. This study enables us to look
at the big picture. When the effects of prayer are averaged across all
17 studies, controlling for differences in sample sizes, a net
positive effect for the prayer group is produced.
"This is the most thorough and all-inclusive study of its kind on this
controversial subject that I am aware of," said Hodge. "It suggests
that more research on the topic may be warranted, and that praying for
people with psychological or medical problems may help them recover."
The use of prayer as a therapeutic intervention is controversial. Yet,
Hodge notes that survey research indicates that many people use
intercessory prayer as an intervention to aid healing, which raises
questions about its effectiveness as an intervention strategy.
"Overall, the meta-analysis indicates that prayer is effective. Is it
effective enough to meet the standards of the American Psychological
Association's Division 12 for empirically validated interventions? No.
Thus, we should not be treating clients suffering with depression, for
example, only with prayer. To treat depression, standard treatments,
such as cognitive therapy, should be used as the primary method of
treatment."
In addition to his inclusion in the upcoming issue of Research on
Social Work Practice, Hodge is widely published and has appeared on
the pages of Social Work, Social Work Research, Journal of Social
Service Research, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, and Families
in Society. He has also authored the book "Spiritual assessment: A
handbook for helping professionals."

weblink:

http://www.west.asu.edu/publicaffairs/publicrelations/index.cfm?a=333

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Brain Has An Intuition Switch

Every 90 minutes or so, your intuition switches on automatically, says Dr. Laurie Nadel in her book Sixth Sense: Unlocking Your Ultimate Mind Power (ASJA Press/iUniverse). If you keep a log for several days, you can track those windows when your attention shifts from the left to your right brain as part of a mind/body overhaul known as the "ultradian window."

Symptoms include: difficulty concentrating or focusing, spaciness, and feeling sleepy. The author says, " This is the best time to meditate since your intuition is switched on."

Another way to detect this shift is to test which nostril is more open and passing more air. More air will be passing through the left nostril when the right brain is more active.

Weblink:

www.unlockyoursixthsense.com

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Interoperative Awareness Gaining Recognition

With the release of the movie Awake, starring Hayden Christensen as a man who experiences pain while undergoing a heart operation, public recognition of the phenomenon of awareness while under anaesthesia. The American Society of Anesthesiologists has named this phenomenon “intraoperative awareness,” and the profession is making an attempt to educate the public about this phenomenon as well as do research on how to prevent it.

According to their news release, this phenomena occurs in only one in 42,000 low risk operations and only once in 14,000 high risk operations, such as cardiac surgery, where deep anaesthesia could be troublesome. The society has prepared a public service information website at http://www.asahq.org/patientEducation/Awarenessbrochure.pdf

Source:\

Anesthesia Awareness

By Rich Maloof for MSN Health & Fitness

It is possible for patients to be mentally alert while under general anesthesia.

That’s the essence of anesthesia awareness, known as “intraoperative awareness” to medical professionals. In this rare phenomenon, waking patients may recall events or sensations, including pain, from surgery when they were supposed to be completely unconscious.

Statistics can be misleading.

A report published in the February 2007 issue of Anesthesiology culled three years of data and found the rate to be as low as 1 in 14,000 surgeries. For patients not at high risk, the rate drops to 1 in 42,000. But it would be a mistake to derive either comfort or concern from these stats because they represent the full scope of patient recall, from vague recollection of a conversation in the operating room to actual pain from surgery.

“We don’t want ‘one in’ anything,” emphasizes Dr. Mark Lema, president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists. “We want zero, and we’re working towards zero. Statistics mean nothing to someone who’s had an intraoperative awareness experience.”

Specific procedures increase risk for an occurrence.

The risk of experiencing anesthesia awareness is higher for surgeries in which a “deep” anesthetic could create dire complications for a patient. Cardiopulminary bypass surgery, emergency Cesarean sections and procedures where there has been a lot of blood loss, as from multiple trauma, are the surgeries most cited.

“Awareness of awareness” is on the rise.

Increased media exposure has pushed anesthesia awareness to the forefront of popular medicine in recent years. The charge for patient advocacy has been led by Carol Weihrer, who founded the nonprofit organization the Anesthesia Awareness Campaign. Weihrer became a proponent after experiencing full awareness during a 1998 surgery to remove her eyeball.

The American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) offers an online campaign for patient education, including the downloadable pamphlet, Patient Awareness Under General Anesthesia.

Cases are marked by a very broad range of experience.

Some patients may recall descending into or awaking from unconsciousness. Such experiences are rarely traumatic, though there can be discomfort or anxiety if patients are aware of an air tube being inserted or removed.

The very worst cases (and the rarest) are when surgical patients are mentally alert and fully aware of pain but the paralytic component of the anesthesia leaves them unable to move or speak. The April 2007 case of a West Virginia man was especially horrifying, and sad, since post-traumatic stress allegedly led the man to suicide.

Brain-function monitoring is an imperfect preventive measure.

Brain-wave monitors hold some promise in helping anesthesiologists gauge when a patient may be at risk for awareness, but according to Lema the technology is not there yet. “Brain function monitors are very good first attempts, and in many cases they provide trending data. But they’re not always accurate to the point you can feel comfortable using those numbers to guide patient care. The best monitor is the anesthesiologist who is vigilant in making sure the patient is properly anesthetized.”

False high readings can lead to over-anesthetizing, which can result in severe nausea, vomiting and low blood pressure during recovery. False low readings leave a patient vulnerable to an awareness episode. A qualified, informed anesthesiologist remains a patient’s best defense.

Anesthesia awareness makes for dramatic headlines.

Legit educational campaigns are ultimately in everyone’s best interest: They inform patients and play an important role in advancing research funding. Scare tactics, on the other hand, just increase anxiety and demonize doctors.

Says Lema: “Some of the sensationalistic journalism seems to say, ‘What have the anesthesiologists been hiding?’ Like it’s a dirty little secret. We’ve been addressing this for many, many years. … I think it’s important for everyone to understand that anesthesiologists are devastated when a patient experiences any kind of trauma under their care. We’re working very hard towards zero tolerance.”

Expect to see more headlines if the movie Awake is released as planned late in 2007. The movie features Hayden Christensen, who experiences even more pain as a cardiac patient than moviegoers did watching him in the last Star Wars.

“Reality Check: Anesthesia Awareness” has been reviewed for accuracy by Dr. Mark Lema, president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists and professor and chairman of anesthesiology at the University at Buffalo and the Roswell Park Cancer Institute.

Rich Maloof lives in Brooklyn, New York. He specializes in health, technology, music and children’s non-fiction. He is a regular contributor to MSN.com and has written for CNN, Yahoo!, Billboard and the “For Dummies” book series.

weblink:

http://health.msn.com/general/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100160388&GT1=9246

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Arthritis Foundation Recommends Castor Oil Remedy

A new product for the symptomatic relief from arthritis, Castiva, has as its major ingredient castor oil, something Cayce recommended for this ailment. The Arthritis Foundation (http://www.arthritis.org/) has given the product its recommendation. More information about this product can be found at http://www.castivabrands.com/

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Sleep More to Lose Weight

Previous research has established that the less sleep a person gets, the greater the body mass index (i.e. the “fatter” the person is). New research has uncovered the basis of this relationship. It turns out that sleep deprivation creates an imbalance in certain hormones that govern appetite.

In one study, conducted by Dr. Shahrad Teheri, an endocrinologist at Bristol University, found that with less sleep, there is more ghrelin in the blood, a hormone secreted by the stomach that creates hunger sensations. He also found less leptin in the blood, a hormone created by fat cells that send satiation messages to the brain.

In another study, conducted at the University of Chicago’s sleep laboratory, it was found that after a single night of insomnia, folks showed this same pattern of hungry-making hormones in the blood. When volunteers were made to sleep only four hours a night for three nights in a row, they would awaken with complaints of being hungry.

Sleep less and you’ll be hungrier, too. Sleep more, and you’ll be healthier, as well as rested and with more opportunities to dream!

Source:

Sleep the Fat Off

Lose weight while you sleep.

By PsychologyToday.com

Imagine... shedding pounds simply by spending more time in never-neverland. Sounds like something out of a late-night infomercial.

But two studies show a striking connection between amount of sleep and levels of appetite-regulating hormones in the body. The findings suggest that chronic sleep deprivation could be making you fat.

American adults have cut their average nightly sleep time by nearly two hours in the last 40 years. And while we've lost sleep, we've gained weight: In 1960, only one out of four adults was overweight, and one out of nine was considered obese. Now, two out of three adults are overweight, and nearly one out of three is obese.

Previous research had shown an association between shorter sleep time and higher body mass index, but no one knew why, says Dr. Shahrad Teheri, an endocrinologist at Bristol University, and lead author of one of the two studies.

He and his colleagues used data from the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort, which has tracked the sleep habits of over 1,000 volunteers for 17 years. They found that those people who slumbered (on average) five compared to eight hours each night had a higher body mass index.

And when the researchers collected blood samples from the volunteers, they discovered that the sleep-deprived had higher levels of ghrelin in their blood. Ghrelin is a hormone produced in the stomach that sends out hunger signals to the brain, which then commands you to be interested in food.

At the same time the sleep-deprived had high levels of hunger-stimulating ghrelin, they had lower levels of leptin. Leptin is another appetite-regulating hormone; it's produced by fat cells and delivers satiation signals to the brain. The particular hormonal ratio of high ghrelin/low leptin was likely encouraging the group to load up on unnecessary calories.

"Before this, people thought obesity was the result of sitting on your butt and stuffing your face," Teheri says. "But it turns out sleep has an influence. It makes sense to me personally, because when I was a sleep-deprived resident, I always had the munchies."

The second study hails from the University of Chicago's sleep laboratory. It shows that sleep loss has an immediate effect on the body's levels of ghrelin and leptin. A few nights of insomnia could thus trick your brain into thinking your body needs more food.

In the sleep lab, a small group of young men were forced to function on four hours of sleep a night for six days. The next year, they returned to the lab, but were allowed a full night's rest for six nights, so that researchers could directly compare their hormone levels and appetite.

During their sleep-deprived week, the men not only showed lower levels of leptin and higher levels of ghrelin, but they also reported stronger cravings for sweet, fatty and salty foods. Sound familiar?

"While there is a lot of attention on diet and exercise [for weight loss], these two studies underscore the importance of adequate sleep," says Terry Young, co-author of Teheri's study and professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin.

"Unfortunately, people think of sleep as an irresponsible activity. It's as if they are being macho, and want to prove how busy and important their lives are. I predict someday that attitude will be as socially unacceptable as smoking."

Weblnk:

http://health.msn.com/centers/sleep/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100108153&GT1=9145

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Women’s Mid-Life Crises Holds Spiritual Opportunities

Many women face mid-life crises, such as when the empty nest, one’s own retirement or the spouse’s retirement, creates a loss of the status quo in one’s lifestyle. For her master’s thesis, Atlantic University student Donna Denese Zampi-Colon conducted a study of women who were passing through such transitions. Her research indicates that preparing for the transition is very helpful and that those who take a proactive stance toward developing under-utilized aspects of their personality find great spiritual rewards afterwards.

The full text of her study is available at http://www.creativespirit.net/learners/AUCulminatingProjects/cp-zampi-colon.pdf

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Source:

If you thought that memory was all about making a record of the past, think again, says Jessica Marshall

IMAGINE your next vacation. You are relaxing on a beach, waves lapping at the shore, a cool breeze wafting through the trees and the sun caressing your skin. Fill in the details. What else do you see? Now, remember yesterday's commute. Again, a picture emerges. You are on the train or in your car, or maybe just wandering from your kitchen to your desk. Can you remember what you were wearing? Perhaps you have forgotten that part already.

Without breaking sweat, you can hurtle yourself backwards or forwards in time in your mind's eye -- what is known as "mental time travel". One of these visions really happened and the other was fantasy, yet the act of conjuring them up probably felt very similar. It's as if, embedded somewhere in your brain, there is a time machine that can take you forwards and backwards at will.

Neuroscientists and psychologists are starting to think so, too. After more than a century of focusing on just one aspect of mental time travel -- remembering the past --these scientists are turning their minds to a bigger question: what if we have been looking at only half the picture? What if the thing we call "memory" works both ways, helping us both recall the past and imagine the future?

The idea makes intuitive sense. When you imagine yourself on a beach, you draw on your experiences of past trips to the ocean, conjuring up a familiar scene and then filling in the details. Maybe memory provides the raw materials for these sorts of jaunts.

The idea increasingly makes scientific sense, too. Evidence is accumulating of an intimate mental connection between recalling the past and imagining the future. Neuroscientists and psychologists have found that people who have lost their memories also lose their ability to imagine the future, and that the brain regions that are used for remembering are also used for imagining. These similarities may help explain some of our memory's weaknesses, and even suggest that we are built to spend much of our lives engaged in mental time travel.

It was the ancient Greeks who first proposed that memory plays a key role in envisaging the future. In modern times, the first inkling of a link between our pasts and futures came from a celebrated patient known as K.C., who lost his memory in 1981 after suffering brain damage in an accident. Among other things, K.C. helped researchers discover that we have several different types of long-term memory, which can be broadly broken down into three categories: semantic (knowledge of facts), episodic (memories of events in our lives) and procedural (knowing how to do something like ride a bicycle).

Can't picture it

K.C. has a specific problem with his episodic memory: he knows plenty of facts but is unable to remember anything about his personal past. Researchers noticed in passing that something else was wrong. "He could not think about his personal future," says neuroscientist Endel Tulving of the University of Toronto in Canada, who studied K.C. for more than 20 years.

Other researchers soon began to stumble across links between memory and future thought. Another patient, D.B., whose episodic memory was wiped out after a heart attack starved his brain of oxygen, had similar problems to K.C. He knew where he worked and what sort of company it was, but he could not remember a single occasion of having been at work. Likewise, he could understand abstract concepts about the future -- that global warming would be a significant problem, for example -- but he could not imagine anything about his personal future.

Other studies have found that suicidally depressed people experience a reduced amount of detail in their memories of the past, and an equivalent lack of detail about their imagined future. What's more, patients with brain damage that causes them to invent wild tales about their past tend to do the same about their futures. There is also the observation that children develop the ability to speak reliably about their past and their future at the same time, around 4 years of age, a long time after they are able to articulate accurate information about the world. And, just as our memories fade with age, so does our ability to imagine our future.

Although researchers have been making these observations for more than a decade, it is only in the past couple of years that they have started to systematically probe the link between recalling the past and imagining the future. "I've always been intrigued by it, but couldn't find a way to study it," says psychologist Daniel Schacter of Harvard University, who has also worked with K.C.

That has now changed. Last year, a team led by Eleanor Maguire of University College London recruited five amnesic patients with brain damage, and asked them to imagine a future episode, such as a visit to a new museum or a meeting with a friend, and describe it in as much detail as possible. They found that although the amnesic patients could conjure up fragments of the future, their scenarios were much less detailed and concrete than those of control subjects (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 104, p 1726). "They couldn't form a strong mental picture," says team member Demis Hassabis. As one patient put it: "It's not very real. It's just not happening…I'm not picturing anything at the moment."

One obvious interpretation of this is that the brain regions that underpin episodic memory are also involved in episodic future thought. Brain-damaged patients, however, are not especially useful for confirming that idea: it is hard to rule out the possibility that the damaged region is necessary for both tasks but other, distinct brain regions are involved as well. Fortunately, there is a way to answer the question.

Researchers have recently started using techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to watch the brain activity of people with fully functioning memories as they remember the past and imagine the future. These studies show something striking and unexpected: as far as the brain is concerned, there is very little difference between the two.

In one such experiment, a team led by Kathleen McDermott of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, recorded activity as subjects either recalled or imagined a common experience, such as a birthday party, a barbecue or getting lost. McDermott's team expected to see different patterns of brain activity associated with the past and the future -- but they didn't. Both tasks produced very similar patterns of activity, with some regions of the brain more activated by future imaginings. Intriguingly, there was no region that lit up only when remembering the past. "We really thought we were going to see a region that was more active in memory than in future thought," says team member Karl Szpunar. "We didn't find that." In other words, episodic memory does not appear to have a specialised brain module dedicated to it, but is handled by part of a universal module for mental time travel (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 104, p 642).

False memories

In a similar experiment, Schacter watched brain activity unfold as subjects recalled a memory or imagined a future scenario and then elaborated on it. He suspected that separating these two stages of the process might help tease apart the similarities and differences between mental past and future.

Similar to McDermott, Schacter found that imagining the future activated the same brain regions as recalling the past, plus a few others, but these differences were restricted to the initial construction phase -- placing yourself on the beach. Elaborating on the scenes --adding the trees, the ice-cool drink, the lapping waves -- showed almost identical activity, whether for past or future. "It's almost as if you're doing the same sort of thing," Schacter says. Intriguingly, the brain regions engaged during the elaboration phase, both past and future, were already well known to memory researchers. They call it the "autobiographical memory network" (Neuropsychologia, vol 45, P 1363) -- more evidence that the brain uses memories as raw material for constructing possible futures.

All of this suggests that our personal past and future are tightly linked in the brain. Projecting the future may not be the major function of memory, but it certainly is one of its primary functions, Schacter says.

This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, Tulving points out. It is hard to imagine how personal recall alone might be evolutionarily useful, but if remembering how cold and hungry you were last winter helps you realise the benefits of putting food away for the next one, or convinces you to plant a few of your grains instead of eating them all, you stand a much better chance of surviving than someone who cannot project themselves backwards and forward in time. "I cannot imagine how civilisation could emerge from brains that cannot imagine the future," Tulving says.

The tight link between our past and future also sheds light on some long-standing mysteries about memory. If our capacity to remember evolved to help us imagine and shape our future, the way our memories work should reflect that function, Schacter says --and indeed it does. Our memories are not flawless action replays of what actually happened: chances are you do not remember what you were wearing the day before yesterday, or which cup you drank your coffee from. Yet, if you were pressed to provide details, you would almost certainly come up with something.

This seems to be how episodic memory works in general. We remember bits and pieces of our experiences and then reconstruct them to create plausible, but not necessarily accurate, accounts of what happened. Such structures makes sense, say Schacter and others, if one of the main functions of memory is to shuffle scraps of the past around in novel ways to project possible futures.

This "constructive" nature of memory helps explain some puzzling flaws in our memories, particularly the ease with which we form false memories. To illustrate this, Schacter points to the investigation into the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Detectives initially looked for two suspects because a mechanic at the body shop where bomber Timothy McVeigh rented the van used in the attack was sure McVeigh had come in with another man. In fact, the alleged accomplice had been to the shop the day before, accompanying a man who looked similar to McVeigh. Two real episodes had merged in the mechanic's mind to create an inaccurate memory -- and a false lead for the authorities.

This type of fallibility can be easily demonstrated in lab studies. People shown a list of words such as "tired", "bed" "dream", "doze" and "pillow" can be easily tricked into remembering that the word "sleep" appeared on the list too, even if it did not. They do not make the same mistake with unrelated words -- for instance, "butter" (see "Your fallible memory", page 39). This, says Schacter, is a good demonstration of the constructive nature of our memory. We recall the gist but not exhaustive detail.

Paradoxically, amnesic patients and people with Alzheimer's disease often perform better in this kind of test than people with fully functioning memories. This fact seems puzzling -- why would somebody with a damaged memory perform better on certain memory tests? But if our memories are designed to remember the outline of things and fill in the rest, this "failure" makes sense. False memories are not memory deficits at all but by-products of a normal, healthy memory, Schacter suggests.

These links have got researchers excited, and are prompting further questions. One of these is how the brain handles the time dimension of remembering and imagining. We have no problems distinguishing memories from future scenarios, and we can also form memories of our imaginings --remembering today that yesterday we were thinking about next year's vacation, for example. There is strong overlap in the brain regions involved, yet there must be something different about them. What is it?

Tulving thinks of mental time travel as having two components: the content of the event itself, and the shifting of the event in time. He is working out how to tease these apart experimentally, and hopes to find parts of the brain that are responsible for carrying our events back and forth in time.

Vivid imagination

Another key question concerns individual differences in memory and imagination. We're familiar with the idea that some people have better memories than others. Might the same be true of imagination? And might people with a richer stock of memories be more imaginitive when it comes to thinking about the future? "There might be a paradoxical answer," says psychologist Daniel Gilbert, a colleague of Schacter's at Harvard. Perhaps people with good memories have less vivid imaginations, and vice versa. He and Schacter plan to test that hypothesis.

These questions aside, the intimate link between our inner past and future now looks pretty secure. Buy do we really plan for the future in this way, by dreaming up scenarios with ourselves as the main character? "Yes, we do, though I think it's under-studied," says Schacter. "There's work that suggests a significant portion of mental life is spent thinking about the future."

Much of that work has been documented by Gilbert in his book Stumbling on Happiness. "Every time you say, 'I think I'll go have lunch', you've just thought about the future," he says. That is just one small example of a general tendency to project ourselves forwards in time. According to Gilbert, psychologists studying stream of consciousness have found that the average person reports spending about 12 per cent of their waking hours thinking about the future.

It is easy to see the benefits of spending so much time in reverie. Running through future scenarios helps us achieve outcomes we want -- and avoid ones we do not, perhaps as a direct result of learning from memories of past mistakes. We can maximise the enjoyment of future events by looking forward to them, while envisioning negative events helps us minimise their impact: volunteers' hearts beat faster and they sweat more over lesser, but unpredictable, electric shocks than over larger, predictable ones.

In fact, there is evidence that mental time travel is such an important part of our inner lives that our brain will engage in it whenever it gets the chance. For more than 50 years, neuroscientists have known that even when your brain is apparently at rest, there is something important going on inside it. This comes from experiments showing that as the brain shifts gear from a passive, undirected state to an active, directed one -- such as solving a puzzle -- overall blood flow and oxygen uptake stay the same. So the "default" brain is up to something -- but what?

A number of recent studies have tried to answer this, by scanning subjects who are doing nothing in particular. These studies always find the same surprising pattern of brain activity: the brain's default state shows remarkable overlap with the mental time-travel network discovered in recent brain scans, according to Randy Buckner, another Harvard psychologist (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 11, p 49). It seems that unless called upon to do something specific, your brain is busy recalling the past or projecting into the future. So next time you catch yourself staring into space instead of getting on with your work, or drifting into reverie as you try to read a book, don't beat yourself up about it. Your daydreams will pay off in the long run.

Your fallible memory

Read this list of words, wait a few minutes, and then turn over the page tired bed awake rest dream night blanket doze slumber snore pillow peace yawn drowsy

Your fallible memory, Part 2

Which of these words appeared in the list on the previous spread? blanket butter snooze house

DIAGRAM: YOUR INNER TIME MACHINE: The brain areas that are active when you recall your personal past or think about the future are almost identical

DIAGRAM: CATEGORIES OF REMEMBERING: Defects in the memories of patients with brain damage have helped tease apart the components of our mental time machines

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By Jessica Marshall

Jessica Marshall is a freelance science writer based in Minnesota.

Weblink:

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325961.400&feedId=brain_rss20

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Intended to Glow, The Leaf Complied

Thoughts are things and intentions can travel around the world. A recent experiment demonstrated that it was possible mentally to transmit intentions toward a houseplant confined in a laboratory thousands of miles away and see (via satellite transmission) the plant respond appropriately. Laboratory analysis indicated that the leaf in question emitted significantly more biophotons during the experiment than did the control leaf.

The experiment was held between four hundred people attending a workshop in England on “The Intention Experiment,” by the author, Lynne McTaggert, and the University of Arizona, Tucson, Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health, headed by Gary Schwartz, author of The Living Energy Universe. The laboratory fixed a camera on two leaves, one the leaf whose image was being beamed to the group in England, and the other serving as a control leaf. The laboratory team did not know which camera image was being beamed to England when they studied each leaf’s biophoton output.

Source:

THE LITTLE LEAF THAT GLOWED

Dear Friends,

I PROMISED THAT I WOULD TELL YOU about our first Intention Experiment pilot
study (using delegates from our London conference sending intention to
University of Arizona). But I'll have to give you the bare bones of the
study - for this reason. The results are so sensational that we are going
to publish them in a scientific journal, and the way these journals go,
you're not allowed to publish all the data (such as pictures) anywhere else
first.

Here is the results of the first-ever group intention long distance
double-blinded biophoton experiment - at least what I'm allowed to tell you.
Mark Boccuzzi, one of the scientific team at Laboratory for Advances in
Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona in Tucson, headed by
the noted psychologist and consciousness researcher Dr. Gary E. Schwartz,
carried out the lab work. He selected two carefully selected and prepared
leaves from the same flourishing geranium plant with similar biophoton
emissions.

Mark chose two geranium leaves, matching them for similar biophoton release,
then prepared them with 16 holes / injuries in a 4 x 4 grid - a process that
can take two or more hours. Both leaves were placed under web cams. Then
Mark stood by. Meanwhile in London, our audience of 400 -who'd come from
countries around the world - selected which leaf to send intention to. Our
intention was to make the leaf 'glow and glow' - that is, to increase its
biophoton emissions.

We chose 'glowing' because we were just looking for an effect - any effect -
and we thought this would be easiest to imagine.

One of our delegates, chosen at random, flipped a coin to determine which
leaf would be displayed to the audience and sent intention to (head -leaf 1;
tails - leaf 2). The audience member flipped heads and so instructed our
audiovisual technician to display leaf 1. Now, remember, the scientific
team did not know which leaf we chose. The one that was not displayed to
the audience was to act as the control.

We telephoned Dr. Schwartz, who told Melinda Connor (a member of his
scientific team who stood in for him at the conference) to remind the
audience that they were making scientific history.

A giant image of our leaf appeared on the screen. I then instructed the
audience to 'power up', using some of the methods noted in chapter 13 of The
Intention Experiment. Then I asked them to think to themselves an intention
for the leaf to 'glow and glow' - to produce increased biophoton light.

Their task was to keep up this intention for 10 minutes, while music played
(a Reiki chant called Choku Rei by Jonathan Goldman).

Dr. Schwartz picks up the story here: 'After the ten minute intention
period, the leaves were placed in the light-tight biophoton imaging system
(a super-cooled digital CCD camera system) and photographed for two hours.
The results of the glowing intention were so strong that they could readily
seen in the digital biophoton images; in addition, the increased biophoton
effect was highly statistically significant.

'For a first experiment of this kind,' he continues, 'the results could not
be more encouraging, and they inspire us to continue this research.'

In fact, he says, 'the results from this exploratory experiment are
currently being prepared for scientific publication. The authors are Gary
Schwartz, Mark Boccuzzi, Melinda Connor, and Lynne McTaggart.'

Weblink:
http://theintentionexperiment.com/

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