Are You A Racist? Before Answering, Read This Post

I grew up in a culture of white protestantism in a suburb of Boston, MA (Lexington). I never met a person of ANY color but white in my town. Our family was Catholic and we were in the minority religiously (the Pilgrims, the Puritans, morphed into the Congregationists who were the majority).  My point? Even though I was never "taught" to be racist, as I became an adult, I did have some discomfort in the company of people of color and even the Jewish.  Have I COMPLETELY shed such deep emotions? Since I really understand how the mind can fool us, I honestly have to say that even as a 73 year old progressive, I consciously have to suppress deep feelings toward the "other."  If you think you are different than me, you do not understand how the brain works. I am humble enough to admit it and fight it, are you? Understand reality through science. Get above your "feelings."

Racism Not Always by Racists

Proper Food Will Always Trump Supplements For Health

We are inundated with advertizements for all sorts of supplements to maintain and improve health.  The truth? "Food is always a better source of nutrients than a pill"

Heads up: when any supplement is advertised, this warning is always included:

• Unlike drugs, supplements are not permitted to be marketed for the purpose of treating, diagnosing, preventing, or curing diseases. That means supplements should not make disease claims, such as “lowers high cholesterol” or “treats heart disease.” Claims like these cannot be legitimately made for dietary supplements.  (link)

Brain Stimulation

Recently there has been an increase in advertisement for brain stimulation for the treatment of depression. It is not quackery and has been approved by the FDA for this use since 2008

Research on short, non-invasive magnetic brain stimulation for depression promising

 

Children Should Not Specialize In A Sport Too Early

The latest science information on the effects of various approaches to sports experiences.

What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To

 (Wired)

Brain Myths Are Common Even In Professionals

"The good news is that teachers endorsed fewer brain myths than the general public, and those participants with neuroscience training endorsed fewer brain myths than teachers. And yet, all three groups still displayed high levels of brain myth endorsement, especially for what Macdonald and her colleagues identify as the classic brain myths, including: - - - "

Oh dear, even people with neuroscience training believe an awful lot of brain myths

Another Example Of How The Brain Can Fool Us

"For 99 percent of hominid history, social communication consisted of face-to-face interactions with someone you’ve hunted and foraged with most of your life. But then the recognition and familiarity components got pried apart by modern technology. By “modern technology,” I mean a newfangled invention that came along a few millennia ago—you could communicate with someone by putting scratches of ink on a piece of paper, and then sending that paper a great distance where they’d decode it. Wait, you know someone by their microexpressions, their pheromones, their totality—not by implicitly assessing word frequency in their letter or the scrawl of their signature. This was a first technological blow to the usual primate sense of familiarity. And the challenges have accelerated exponentially from there."

A long article, but very interesting if you are into brain science.

To Understand Facebook, Study Capgras Syndrome

A "Manhattan Project" For Understanding The Brain

"Punching through to the next level of understanding of how our brains work may just require this level of collaboration. Obviously, not every research question is this complex and will require such a model. The big questions of science, however, likely do."

A New Collaborative in Neuroscience

The Brain And The Immune System

"But over the past two decades, researchers have recognized that the entire immune system is very much a part of a functional CNS, with vital roles in cognition, injury repair, neurodegenerative disease, and sensory systems. Microglia pervade the CNS, including the white and gray matter that constitute the organ’s parenchyma. Other immune cells, including T cells, monocytes, and mast cells, reside in the brain and spinal cord’s outer membranes, known as the meninges, and circulate in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)."

Immune System Maintains Brain Health

An Analysis Of Decision-Making

"What Gladwell glosses over is that his chief examples are of experts in their fields—art critics looking at what purports to be an ancient Greek status but is actually a fake, or a tennis champion who went on to a long career as a coach and TV color commentator being able to predict with uncanny accuracy which of a player’s soft second serves would turn out to be double faults. These are people who have internalized their expertise into their subconscious minds. But I’ll be discussing normal de novo decisions by normal, non-expert people."

How We Decide: an Analysis of an Essential Process We Take for Granted

Teen Risk-Taking And Learning

"Casey likes how this study treats the teenage hunger for new, positive experiences as normal, not deviant. But it doesn't explain everything about how teenagers learn, not by a long shot."

Teens' Penchant For Risk-Taking May Help Them Learn Faster

The Soul: Science Has No Need For That Hypothesis

"'The brain is where thinking takes place, love and hatred reside, sensations become perceptions, personality is formed, memories and beliefs are held, and where decisions are made. As D.K. Johnson said: 'There is nothing left for the soul to do.'”

Why Psychology Has No Need for Souls

The Latest On Parkinson's Disease

"This book is an engaging detective story with edge-of-the-seat excitement that keeps the reader eager to learn what the scientists are going to discover in the next chapter. It’s a good way to learn about a devastating disease that may someday affect you or your family. And it’s a good way to learn how scientific research works, how it progresses by fits and starts, through serendipity and error as well as through well-designed studies. Highly recommended."

Parkinson’s Disease: A Detective Story

Taking The Mystery Out Of Consciousness

"Sensations are the building blocks of consciousness. They must first be combined into perceptions and converted into objects in the environment. Then neural systems must evolve mechanisms by which they can be remembered or recalled (neurobiologists identify the first appearances of memory in habituation, sensitization, and conditioning); and finally plasticity must develop—the capacity to shape, edit, and organize this neural content, present or remembered, into a picture, experience, or awareness of the 'world.' This, in the modern metaphysics of Democritus, is the way consciousness emerges in neural systems."

Consciousness Is Made of Atoms, Too

How The Brain Created Experience

On the most recent Brain Science Podcast, Dr. Ginger Campbell, MD interviewed Jon Mallatt, who co-authored the book,  The Ancient Origins of Consciousness.  The main focus of the interview and the book is on primary consciousness, the most base form of consciousness.

A "Breakthrough" In The Treatment Of Alzheimer's Disease?

"The first drug that can prevent Alzheimer’s disease is finally on the horizon after scientists proved they can clear the sticky plaques from the brain which cause dementia and halt mental decline."

A note of caution:  there have been many "breakthroughs" that have fizzled out in the history of medical research.

Alzheimer's: New drug that halts mental decline is 'best news for dementia in 25 years'

Aerobic Exercise And Schizophrenia

"New research further supports the benefits of exercise for mental health, after finding aerobic physical activity could help treat the symptoms of schizophrenia."

Schizophrenia symptoms eased with aerobic exercise

Free Will Is An Illusion: A Summary

"Although the existence of free will is treated as a self-evident fact by most, neuroscientific research suggests that there may be a more complex explanation to your wink and to the notion of free will than there appears at first glance."

Illusion of Choice: The Myth of Free Will

British Skeptics Lead the Charge against Contra-Causal Free Will

Sam Harris: The Illusion of Free Will

Comparing Computers To Human Brains

"Despite the pessimistic overtones in the paper, Christof Koch of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle is a fan. 'You got to love it,' Koch says. At its heart, the experiment on the 6502 'sends a good message of humility,' he adds. 'It will take a lot of hard work by a lot of very clever people for many years to understand the brain.' But he says that tenacity, especially in the face of such a formidable challenge, will eventually lead to clarity."

What Donkey Kong can tell us about how to study the brain

Findings Of Science Trump Personal Experience

"One of the biggest challenges in science writing when discussing unproven or implausible therapies and products is that people tend to trust their own personal perceptions more than any other source of information. We tend to go by what we've experienced ourselves, rather than by what other people say they've experienced. Consequently, people are rarely moved by the results of testing and experimentation if the results contradict their own experience."

Don't Try It Before You Knock It

The Cases For And Against Addiction Being A Disease

"I agree a single-factor theory is not helpful to explain addiction behaviour. Many diseases are similar in this, having a large number of risk and contributing factors. Addiction can be viewed as a treatable disease, but the person is central in managing the behaviour."

Is Addiction a Disease?