American Buddhist Net

Makes a good point. Best to practice Buddhism. ABN
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by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.
July 6, 2008

We’ve all heard the theory — a chemical imbalance in your brain causes depression.

Although researchers have known for years this not to be the case, some drug companies continue to repeat this simplistic and misleading claim in their marketing and advertising materials. Why the FTC or some other federal agency doesn’t crack down on this intentional misleading information is beyond me. Most researchers now believe depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.

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How Prozac sent the science of depression in the wrong direction

By Jonah Lehrer
July 6, 2008

PROZAC IS ONE of the most successful drugs of all time. Since its introduction as an antidepressant more than 20 years ago, Prozac has been prescribed to more than 54 million people around the world, and prevented untold amounts of suffering.

But the success of Prozac hasn't simply transformed the treatment of depression: it has also transformed the science of depression. For decades, researchers struggled to identify the underlying cause of depression, and patients were forced to endure a series of ineffective treatments. But then came Prozac. Like many other antidepressants, Prozac increases the brain's supply of serotonin, a neurotransmitter. The drug's effectiveness inspired an elegant theory, known as the chemical hypothesis: Sadness is simply a lack of chemical happiness. The little blue pills cheer us up because they give the brain what it has been missing.

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Aaron Delwiche

Propaganda can be as blatant as a swastika or as subtle as a joke. Its persuasive techniques are regularly applied by politicians, advertisers, journalists, radio personalities, and others who are interested in influencing human behavior. Propagandistic messages can be used to accomplish positive social ends, as in campaigns to reduce drunk driving, but they are also used to win elections and to sell malt liquor.

"Every day we are bombarded with one persuasive communication after another. These appeals persuade not through the give-and-take of argument and debate, but through the manipulation of symbols and of our most basic human emotions. For better or worse, ours is an age of propaganda." (Pratkanis and Aronson, 1991).

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Survey shows that profound mental changes induced by psilocybin have lasted for more than a year

By David Biello
July 1, 2008

People who took magic mushrooms were still feeling the love more than a year later, and one might say they were on cloud nine about it, scientists report in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

"Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives," comparing it with the birth of a child or the death of a parent, says neuroscientist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who lead the research. "It's one thing to have a dramatic experience you say is impressive. It's another thing to say you consider it as meaningful 14 months later. There's something about the saliency of these experiences that's stunning."

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28 June 2008 - 5:27pm. Applied Science

Homosexual behavior is largely shaped by genetics and random environmental factors, according to findings from the world's largest study of twins.

Researchers from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences and Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm report in the Archives of Sexual Behavior that genetics and environmental factors (which are specific to an individual, and may include biological processes such as different hormone exposure in the womb), are important determinants of homosexual behavior.

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The Five Skandhas (Five Aggregates) taught by the Buddha are: form, feeling, perception, activity, consciousness. They go in order. First is "form," which is anything that arouses "feeling"; it can be a memory, a thought, or a sensory stimulus. "Feeling" indicates attraction, aversion, or a neutral response to "form." "Perception" indicates our first coherent sense of what the form "is"; note that this is still not a conscious state. "Activity" indicates our first mental or physical activities following "perception." These include both mental and physical activities; flinching is a clear example of a pre-conscious physical "activity." Lastly, there is "consciousness." Consciousness is described as being like a banana tree, which has a "trunk" that is made of leaves curled together. When you peel apart these leaves (the first four skandhas), nothing else is there. There is no solid trunk and thus, consciousness itself--our conscious sense of having an intrinsic "own being"--is an illusion. This is basically what is meant when it is said that the Five Skandhas and all that is built upon them (the conscious "self") are "empty."

The article linked here is the latest confirmation of the Buddha's teachings from the field of neuroscience. We believe the Buddha's take on these "latest" findings about how the mind works is better than the one suggested in the article and recommend reading it from a Buddhist point of view. ABN
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June 27, 2008; Page A9

Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought.

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Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies.

by Atul Gawande June 30, 2008

...A new scientific understanding of perception has emerged in the past few decades, and it has overturned classical, centuries-long beliefs about how our brains work—though it has apparently not penetrated the medical world yet. The old understanding of perception is what neuroscientists call “the naïve view,” and it is the view that most people, in or out of medicine, still have. We’re inclined to think that people normally perceive things in the world directly. We believe that the hardness of a rock, the coldness of an ice cube, the itchiness of a sweater are picked up by our nerve endings, transmitted through the spinal cord like a message through a wire, and decoded by the brain.

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Has some interesting detail about hypnotism near the end. ABN
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June 25, 2008 4:05 PM, by Chris Chatham

In a fascinating review of the cognitive neuroscience of attention, authors Raz and Buhle note that most research on attention focuses on defining situations in which it is no longer required to perform a task - in other words, the automatization of thought and behavior. Yet relatively few studies focus on whether thought and behavior can be de-automatized - or, as I might call it if I were asking for trouble, deprogrammed.

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If Handler is right about Haidt's ideas, he is basically describing a false dichotomy. Buddhists worked through this false pair of opposites--complete withdrawal versus full-on engagement with the world--so long ago that their answer to it has become one of the more common definitions of the "middle way," a balanced life that wends wisely between these two poles without surrendering to either one. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the "humanistic Buddhism" of Masters Tai Xu and Xing Yun, and the "engaged Buddhism" of Thich Nhat Hanh (which is rooted in Master Tai Xu's work) are but modern incarnations of the very long Buddhist tradition of avoiding these extremes. Throughout history, Buddhists have established schools, universities, done public works, been engaged in business, art, agriculture, politics, and all manner of things on the sensory and social plane. And they have done all of this with joy. The defining features of Buddhist engagement with the world are harmlessness, compassion, wisdom, and "Dharma joy," a joy that is based on a profound deepening of our comprehension and appreciation of all of life. ABN
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June 25, 2008 | 2:42 PM ET Comments3Recommend8
By Richard Handler CBC News

The writers of happiness books — the serious writers, that is — are churning out works based on some pretty solid research. There is even a name for this group: "Positive psychologists."

They are an upbeat bunch and I love them. They turn my brooding soul away from the pangs of intellectual melancholy and maintain a place in my heart as well as on my bookshelf.

What's more, in the great sport of the media interview, they deliver. They tend to be great performers: Martin Seligman, Dan Gilbert, Sonja Lyubomirsky, to name a few. So, too, in his own way, is the wise and giggly Dalai Lama, whose The Art of Happiness was a best seller. When he is on tour, His Holiness can fill stadiums.

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The distinctions detailed in this story seem to me to be based more on linguistic conventions than intuition. When we say a corporation "wants" or "plans" or "thinks," we mean that decision-makers are going to do something directed toward a discreet, measurable, objective outcome (more sales, new product, etc.). We do not normally say that a corporation "feels" good or bad because feelings are subjective, transitory, and rarely understood to be causes of measurable, objective outcomes. We normally say, rather, that a corporation is "disorganized" or "trying to recover from" or "confident that." We do allow the stock market to be "bearish" or "bulllish," but normally it is investors who are "elated" or "timid" or "chastened." This is because it is widely recognized that markets are very much driven by collective emotions, while corporations are generally understood to be directed by a few people at the top. We do allow crowds to be moody--"angry," "restive," festive," etc. People can fairly often be heard to say that their cars are "happy" or "grateful" after an oil change, or words to that effect. There is a good deal of literature that claims that God "loves" us or that He is "lonely" or "sad" when we turn away from Him. He surely gets "angry" with us, as He well should. As for robots or computers, the distinction may be due more to the newness of the machines and the way they look. Most all of us can and will attribute emotions to insensate game avatars or evil intent to a computer virus. I treat insects as if they feel, and believe I can objectively observe at least panic and relief when one is trapped in a room and then finds the open door. As for lobsters thrown into boiling water, if you have ever witnessed that you must have felt the animal's pain and suffering as its claws strained against the side of the vessel. Years ago, I became a vegetarian after hearing crabs struggle in boiling water. ABN
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Our intuitions about consciousness in other beings and objects reveal a lot about how we think.

By Joshua Knobe
June 24, 2008

Can a lobster ever truly have any emotions? What about a beetle? Or a sophisticated computer? The only way to resolve these questions conclusively would be to engage in serious scientific inquiry—but even before studying the scientific literature, many people have pretty clear intuitions about what the answers are going to be. A person might just look at a computer and feel certain that it couldn’t possibly be feeling pleasure, pain or anything at all. That’s why we don’t mind throwing a broken computer in the trash. Likewise, most people don’t worry too much about a lobster feeling angst about its impending doom when they put one into a pot of boiling water. In the jargon of philosophy, these intuitions we have about whether a creature or thing is capable of feelings or subjective experiences—such as the experience of seeing red or tasting a peach—are called “intuitions about phenomenal consciousness.”

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Jun 24, 2008

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - People who are bicultural and speak two languages may unconsciously change their personality when they switch languages, according to a U.S. study.

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Grief is universal, and most of us will probably experience the pain grief brings at some point in our lives, usually with the death of a loved one. In time, we move on, accepting the loss.

But for a substantial minority, it's impossible to let go, and even years later, any reminder of their loss — a picture, a memory — brings on a fresh wave of grief and yearning. The question is, why? Why do some grieve and ultimately adapt, while others can't get over the loss of someone held dear?

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If they did make the pact, and since they broke no laws, maybe the good people of Gloucester should help them do just what they want to do--raise their children together. This is really unusual behavior and can and will be viewed largely as a "problem." But maybe it was a brilliant, creative act as well. Why not help them do what they want to do? The alternative will probably be counseling, drug therapy, keeping the girls apart, making an example of them, and so on. By this single act, the girls have shown their desire--indeed forced it upon the world--to live differently from the rest of society, which itself has more sins than this to contend with. There are surely many aspects of this case that I do not understand, but the general outline seems clear enough, if the reports are true. The girls want to live not as atomized individuals in a rough-and-tumble world, but as a group of loving friends and mothers in a community they conceived of themselves, in both senses of the word.

As for the fathers who broke the law, the strength of the girls' will and bond should a consideration when judging them. ABN
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By Tania deLuzuriaga
Globe Staff / June 19, 2008

Gloucester school officials have discovered at least part of the reason that their high school pregnancy rate has more than quadrupled over the past year, according to a Time magazine story that hits newsstands today.
more stories like this

"Nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together," the magazine's story said, after reporters talked with Joseph Sullivan, Gloucester High School principal.

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Wendy Leopold

EVANSTON, Ill. --- What's wrong with being shy, and just when and how did bashfulness and other ordinary human behaviors in children and adults become psychiatric disorders treatable with powerful, potentially dangerous drugs, asks a Northwestern University scholar in a new book that already is creating waves in the mental health community.

In “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness” (Yale University Press, October 2007), Northwestern's Christopher Lane chronicles the “highly unscientific and often arbitrary way” in which widespread revisions were made to “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM), a publication known as the bible of psychiatry that is consulted daily by insurance companies, courts, prisons and schools as well as by physicians and mental health workers.

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By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter
Monday, June 16, 2008; 12:00 AM

MONDAY, June 16 (HealthDay News) - MRI and PET scan studies are showing remarkable similarities between the brains of gay men and straight women, and between those of lesbians and straight men.

For example, the brains of straight men and of gay women share certain common features: both are slightly asymmetric, with the right hemisphere larger than the left, say the Swedish researchers.

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June 12, 2008

...David Bainbridge's description of consciousness (26 January, p 40), including, for example, the fact that we do not know where in the brain consciousness happens, was evocative. Scott McCloud, in his book Understanding Comics, describes a comic's story as whatever is happening in the blank spaces between the panels.

What if our minds function like a comic: they snap pictures, and our consciousness is simply the story the mind constructs around those pictures? - Saskia Latendresse, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

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The argument that IQ is a reliable indicator of intelligence is flawed. The defining, testing, and measuring of "intelligence" is messy business and higher scores on tests do not necessarily show that academics, who according to this article tend to be atheists, are "smarter" than anyone else. An excellent essay entitled None of the Above: What I.Q. doesn't tell you about race explores the phenomenon of the steady rise in IQ over the 20th century and, in summing up the conclusions of the researcher James Flynn, alleges that IQ "does not measure how smart we are, but how modern we are", i.e. to what degree we've internalized (been brainwashed by?) the types of philosophical positions and cognitive styles that are fashionable today. Nowadays, atheism is "in".

Furthermore, if academics are so smart, why aren't more of them facing the the facts about 9/11 and publicly declaring their support for a new investigation? Why aren't they spending their sabbaticals writing brilliant exposes about the fraudulence of the official story? How embarrassing for them that it's intelligent religious people, in large part, who are and standing up on this front. Robyn
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Thursday 12th June 2008
By Chris Williams

A psychology researcher has controversially claimed that stupidity is causally linked to how likely people are to believe in God.

University of Ulster professor Richard Lynn will draw the conclusion in new research due to be published in the journal Intelligence, the Times Higher Education Supplement reports.

...That professional skeptics don't believe in a creator is perhaps not all that surprising. Lynn argues, however, that it is their intelligence that directly gives rise to the boffinated classes' non-God-bothering tendencies. He said: "Why should fewer academics believe in God than the general population? I believe it is simply a matter of the IQ. Academics have higher IQs than the general population."

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By Israel Rosenfield, Edward Ziff

The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge
by Jean-Pierre Changeux, translated from the French by M.B. DeBevoise

Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 324 pp., $51.50
Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors: From Molecular Biology to Cognition
by Jean-Pierre Changeux and Stuart J. Edelstein

Odile Jacob, 284 pp., $99.00
Conversations on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics
by Jean-Pierre Changeux and Alain Connes, translated from the French by M.B. DeBevoise

Princeton University Press,260 pp., $26.95 (paper)
What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain
by Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, translated from the French by M.B. DeBevoise

Princeton University Press,335 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, with a foreword by Oliver Sacks

Quill, 328 pp., $16.00 (paper)
Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and and Emotions
by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, translated from the Italian by Frances Anderson

Oxford University Press,242 pp., $49.95
A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination
by Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi

Basic Books, 274 pp., $18.00 (paper)

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When Eleanor Longden began hearing things, she soon found herself drugged, sectioned and labelled schizophrenic. Then a psychiatrist taught her how to talk back

Tuesday, 6 March 2007
By Kate Hilpern

Eleanor Longden, 25, started hearing voices when she was a teenager. But, contrary to the usual perception of inner voices, Longden says hers weren't destructive: "It was rather mundane, simply giving me a narration of some of the day-to-day things I was doing. In many ways, the voice was companionate because it was reminding me that I was carrying on with my responsibilities despite feeling so sad inside. There was something constructive about it."

People like Longden who admit to hearing inner voices can generally expect two outcomes: a diagnosis of insanity, and potent medication. But a group of psychiatrists and psychologists believe it's time we reconsidered labels such as schizophrenia and the drugs used as treatment. In fact, they believe we should get people to listen to, and actually engage with, the voices inside their heads.

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Well known people who heard voices: Past and Present

Authors find common themes of devotion, isolation, mental illness

By Laurie Kaiser

Brenda Thiel told police that "voices" instructed her to kill her 2½-year-old son Caleb — that it was a sacrifice.

Thiel allegedly gave in to the voices on a Monday morning in early May, when she suffocated her son in her Neenah home. Afterward, according to court records, she told Caleb she was sorry, kissed him and told him that she loved him.

The 27-year-old woman relatives remembered as a "model mom" is in the Winnebago County Jail, facing a first-degree intentional homicide charge.

It may seem incomprehensible that a mother could take her child's life, but it's a far more common tragedy than you might suspect.

It's estimated that about 100 times each year in the United States, a mother murders her child, according to Cheryl Meyer, a psychology professor at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

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The real "9/11 effect" is the trauma engendered by the images of the buildings' pulverizations acting as an induction into a state of mass hypnosis such that a good many Americans are still too emotionally overwhelmed to pause and look seriously at the actual facts of the case. ABN
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We think our political stance is the product of reason, but we're easily manipulated and surprisingly malleable. Our essential political self is more a stew of childhood temperament, education, and fear of death. Call it the 9/11 effect.

By: Jay Dixit

...We tend to believe our political views have evolved by a process of rational thought, as we consider arguments, weigh evidence, and draw conclusions. But the truth is more complicated. Our political preferences are equally the result of factors we're not aware of—such as how educated we are, how scary the world seems at a given moment, and personality traits that are first apparent in early childhood. Among the most potent motivators, it turns out, is fear. How the United States should confront the threat of terrorism remains a subject of endless political debate. But Americans' response to threats of attack is now more clear-cut than ever. The fear of death alone is surprisingly effective in shaping our political decisions—more powerful, often, than thought itself.

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Daniel Pipes: If Obama Wins, Bush Will Attack Iran in November

03 June 2008

Score one for resilient types who keep things to themselves.

Contrary to popular notions about what is normal or healthy, new research has found that it is OK not to express one's thoughts and feelings after experiencing a collective trauma, such as a school shooting or terrorist attack.

In fact, people who choose not to express their feelings after such an event may be better off than those who do talk about their feelings, said University at Buffalo psychologist Mark Seery, lead author of the study detailed in the June issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

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Jun. 3, 2008

WASHINGTON - A little strategically placed makeup quickly turns the wimpiest of male barn swallows into chick magnets, amping up their testosterone and even trimming their weight, new research shows.

It's a "clothes make the man" lesson that - with some caveats - also applies to human males, researchers say.

Using a $5.99 marker, scientists darkened the rust-colored breast feathers of male New Jersey barn swallows, turning lighter birds to the level of those naturally darkest.

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02 June 2008
By Jeanna Bryner

Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist. It's nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur.

And the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions.

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By KAREN MATTHEWS
Saturday, May 31, 2008

Noted neurologist Oliver Sacks has found common ground with the pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church: Both men believe in the healing power of music.

Sacks, the best-selling author of "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," was to share the church stage Saturday with the famed gospel choir as part of the inaugural World Science Festival, a five-day celebration of science taking place in New York this week.

..."What we have been studying ... is that when you pray, there's actually a physiological change in the body," he said. "Music is very much a part of this. There are certain notes that generate in the human body a kind of peacefulness."

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