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“Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives,” Berns says. “Our findings indicate that it’s unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people’s behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives.”
Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. “Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms,” Berns says…
“As culture changes, it affects our brains, and as our brains change, that affects our culture. You can’t separate the two,” Berns says…
Future conflicts over politics and religion will likely play out biologically, Berns says. Some cultures will choose to change their biology, and in the process, change their culture, he notes. He cites the battles over women’s reproductive rights and gay marriage as ongoing examples. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a story, scene, or poem based on a cultural shift that challenges people’s sacred values.
Journaling Prompt: Write about your personal values and how you feel if they are challenged.
Art Prompt: Brain and Societal Change
Photo Credit: mariopiperni on Flickr
In the new study of desire regulation, 205 adults wore devices that recorded a total of 7,827 reports about their daily desires. Desires for sleep and sex were the strongest, while desires for media and work proved the hardest to resist. Even though tobacco and alcohol are thought of as addictive, desires associated with them were the weakest, according to the study. Surprisingly to the researchers, sleep and leisure were the most problematic desires, suggesting “pervasive tension between natural inclinations to rest and relax and the multitude of work and other obligations,” says Hofmann, the lead author of the study forthcoming in Psychological Science.
Moreover, the study supported past research that the more frequently and recently people have resisted a desire, the less successful they will be at resisting any subsequent desire. Therefore as a day wears on, willpower becomes lower and self-control efforts are more likely to fail, says Hofmann, who co-authored the paper with Roy Baumeister of Florida State University and Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota.
Scientists who study the complex interplay between desires and self control say that passing up on temptation is made ever more difficult by the idea that there is no single or clear feeling that alerts us to when our willpower is low. “But we find that when willpower is low, everything is felt more intensely,” says Baumeister, author of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. “Low willpower seems to turn up the volume on life.” -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write your character’s internal monologue about resisting temptation.
Journaling Prompt: What strategies work for you in resisting temptation?
Art Prompt: Willpower
Photo Credit: Unfurled on Flickr
At no other time in a woman’s life does she experience such massive hormonal fluctuations as during pregnancy. Research suggests that the reproductive hormones may ready a woman’s brain for the demands of motherhood — helping her becomes less rattled by stress and more attuned to her baby’s needs. Although the hypothesis remains untested, Glynn surmises this might be why moms wake up when the baby stirs while dads snore on. Other studies confirm the truth in a common complaint of pregnant women: “Mommy Brain,” or impaired memory before and after birth. “There may be a cost” of these reproduction-related cognitive and emotional changes, says Glynn, “but the benefit is a more sensitive, effective mother.” -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a story, scene or poem about a character going through hormonal changes to the brain in pregnancy.
Journaling Prompt: Write about your personal experience with Mommy Brain. If you’ve never been pregnant, write about someone you know and their experience with Mommy Brain.
Art Prompt: Mommy Brain
Photo Credit: mahalie on Flickr
The old commercial asked, “Is it real, or is it Memorex?” Perhaps a better question would be “Is that a lie, or did you just forget?”
“The fallibility of memory is well established in the scientific literature, but mistaken intuitions about memory persist,” Chabris said. “The extent of these misbeliefs helps explain why so many people assume that politicians who may simply be remembering things wrong must be deliberately lying.”
The new findings also have important implications for proceedings in legal cases, the researchers said.
“Our memories can change even if we don’t realize they have changed,” Simons said. “That means that if a defendant can’t remember something, a jury might assume the person is lying. And misremembering one detail can impugn their credibility for other testimony, when it might just reflect the normal fallibility of memory.” -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a poem or scene where someone has to deal with being accused of lying when they really just forgot.
Journaling Prompt: How do you react when you think someone is lying to you?
Art Prompt: I Forgot
Photo Credit: batabidd on Flickr
The science of hormones and their effects on human behavior is really fascinating.
Oxytocin’s positive effects are well known. Experiments have found that, in games in which you can choose to cooperate or not, people who are given more oxytocin trust their fellow players more. Clinical trials have found that oxytocin can help people with autism, who have trouble in social situations. Studies have also found that oxytocin can increase altruism, generosity, and other behaviors that are good for social life.
But the warm fuzzy side of oxytocin isn’t the whole story… Recent studies have found that people who were given oxytocin, then played a game of chance with a fake opponent, had more envy and gloating. These are also both social emotions, but they’re negative. “It kind of rocked the research world a little bit,” Kemp says. That led some researchers to think that oxytocin promotes social emotions in general, both negative and positive.
But Kemp and Guastella think oxytocin’s role is slightly different. Rather than supporting all social emotions, they think it plays a role in promoting what psychologists call approach-related emotions. These are emotions that have to do with wanting something, as opposed to shrinking away. “If you look at the Oxford English Dictionary for envy, it says that the definition of envy is to wish oneself on a level with another, in happiness or with the possession of something desirable,” Kemp says. “It’s an approach-related emotion: I want what you have.” Gloating is also about approach, he says; people who are gloating are happy — a positive, approach-related emotion — about having more than their opponent and about that person’s misfortune.
If Kemp and Guastella are right, that could mean that oxytocin could also increase anger and other negative approach-related emotions. That could have important implications for people who are studying how to use oxytocin as a psychiatric treatment. “If you were to take a convicted criminal with a tendency towards aggression and give him oxytocin to make him more social, and if that were to enhance anger as opposed to suppressing anger, then that has very substantial implications,” Kemp says. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: What approach-related emotions does your protagonist typically experience? What changes his behavior?
Journaling Prompt: Describe a time when you felt envious. What triggered that and how did you behave?
Art Prompt: Envy
Photo Credit: pawpaw67 on Flickr
I always thought the technology in Star Trek was pretty cool, but even Captain Kirk didn’t have one of these.
“Brain cap” technology being developed at the University of Maryland allows users to turn their thoughts into motion. Associate Professor of Kinesiology José ‘Pepe’ L. Contreras-Vidal and his team have created a non-invasive, sensor-lined cap with neural interface software that soon could be used to control computers, robotic prosthetic limbs, motorized wheelchairs and even digital avatars.
“We are on track to develop, test and make available to the public- within the next few years — a safe, reliable, noninvasive brain computer interface that can bring life-changing technology to millions of people whose ability to move has been diminished due to paralysis, stroke or other injury or illness,” said Contreras-Vidal of the university’s School of Public Health. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: What would your character do with a brain cap? (Feel free to invent one that has advanced further than the one in this story.)
Journaling Prompt: Write about a piece of technology and how it has changed your life dramatically.
Art Prompt: Technology
Photo Credit: Ryan Somma on Flickr
Do you ever drive and end up at your destination without knowing how you got there? Our minds get lost in rehashing the past or rehearsing the future. As it turns out, that could be very dangerous.
“Taking a trip down memory lane while you are driving could land you in a roadside ditch, new research indicates. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that our visual perception can be contaminated by memories of what we have recently seen, impairing our ability to properly understand and act on what we are currently seeing.” -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a scene about an accident that occurs because your protagonist was focused on something that happened in the past.
Journaling Prompt: Write about your experience of losing time because your mind was lost in memories.
Art Prompt: Crash
Photo Credit: Toronto History on Flickr
You really have to click through to see this picture on Flickr at full size. It is such a great image of our subconscious. There are things we’ve left behind strewn along the road, things we’ve never noticed, and things we are purposefully ignoring. Our brains are pretty messy places.
Something was bothering me. It happened that way, sometimes. It’s like a little pebble that gets in your shoe and, after a while, you feel like you’re carrying around a boulder. My mind worked like that—something inconspicuous escaped my attention at first, but then, after a while, the significance hit me like a brick, as if parts of my brain had been silently mulling it over and suddenly reached a conclusion. -Kyle Kirkland, One Out of Many, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, July 1, 2011
Writing Prompt: Write a list of at least 10 things that are in your protagonist’s subconscious, irritating and working to bubble up into awareness.
Journaling Prompt: Write about something that you carried around in your subconscious until it got as big as a boulder.
Art Prompt: Subsconscious
Photo Credit: h.koppdelane on Flickr
What if you could navigate solely by sound? It would mean fewer stubbed toes in the middle of the night for me. As it turns out, if I would just apply myself, I could learn to echolocate.
In the early 1800s, a blind man from England named James Holman journeyed around the world — he may have been the most prolific traveler in history up to that point, Magellan and Marco Polo included — relying on the echoes from the click of his cane. Not until the 1940s, in Karl Dallenbach’s lab at Cornell University, was it irrefutably proven that humans could echolocate.-Michael Finkel, The Blind Man Who Taught Himself to See
Writing Prompt: Write a story about a character who has developed one of their senses beyond the everyday usefulness.
Journaling Prompt: Write about how you use your hearing.
Art Prompt: Sound
Photo Credit: Banjo Brown on Flickr
Every society for as far back as we can study has had a set of religious beliefs and rituals. The current research shows that this is about how our brains work. Whether they were created that way to lead us to the Divine or evolved that way in order to create community for advantage in survival we may never know as scientific certainty. And that brings us back to faith, as this study predicted it would.
“…religion is not just something for a peculiar few to do on Sundays instead of playing golf. We have gathered a body of evidence that suggests that religion is a common fact of human nature across different societies. This suggests that attempts to suppress religion are likely to be short-lived as human thought seems to be rooted to religious concepts, such as the existence of supernatural agents or gods, and the possibility of an afterlife or pre-life.’ -Roger Trigg in Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Exercise your imagination and create a world where there is no religion.
Journaling Prompt: What do you believe about the afterlife?
Art Prompt: The Religious Brain
Photo Credit: h.koppdelaney on Flickr
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