Brain And Consciousness Research - June 2007 Archives
A scientific indicator of how easily distracted you are has been designed by a UCL (University College London) psychologist. It could be used as another assessment tool during the recruitment process and would have particular benefits in fields where employee distraction could lead to fatal errors.
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Exercise has a similar effect to antidepressants on depression. This has been shown by previous research. Now Astrid Bjørnebekk at Karolinska Institutet has explained how this can happen: exercise stimulates the production of new brain cells.
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The next time you "catch a yawn" from someone across the room, you're not copying their sleepiness, you're participating in an ancient, hardwired ritual that might have evolved to help groups stay alert as a means of detecting danger. That's the conclusion of University at Albany researchers Andrew C. Gallup and Gordon G. Gallup Jr. in a study outlined in the May 2007 issue of Evolutionary Psychology (Volume 5.1., 2007).
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Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), or dysmorphophobia, is a hidden disease that affects nearly three million Americans. It is hidden because patients with the disease often go to great lengths to hide from the world, often altering their appearance through plastic surgeries, wrongly perceiving themselves to be ugly or having a hideous physical flaw.
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Volunteers needed to Test the Link Between Blood Pressure and Brain Power
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For hundreds of years, Tibetan monks and other religious people have used meditation to calm the mind and improve concentration. This week, a new study shows exactly how one common type of meditation affects the brain.
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Strong link found to deficits in spatial skills
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Pride has perplexed philosophers and theologians for centuries, and it is an especially paradoxical emotion in American culture. We applaud rugged individualism, self-reliance and personal excellence, but too much pride can easily tip the balance toward vanity, haughtiness and self-love. Scientists have also been perplexed by this complex emotion, because it is so unlike primary emotions like fear and disgust.
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A decade or so ago, a spate of high profile legal cases arose in which people were accused, and often convicted, on the basis of "recovered memories." These memories, usually recollections of childhood abuse, arose years after the incident occurred and often during intensive psychotherapy.
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To learn a language, a child must learn a set of all-purpose rules, such as "a sentence can be formed by combining a subject, a verb and an object" that can be used in an infinite number of ways. A new study shows that by the age of seven months, human infants are on the lookout for abstract rules - and that they know the best place to look for such abstractions is in human speech.
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