Awaken Your Genius » Neuroscience

Mind-Blowing Optical Illusion: 2010 Contest Winner

Ali Binazir — Mon, 24 May 2010 01:01:12 +0000

Ever wonder how reliable your senses are? Courtesy of NewScientist, here’s an optical illusion called Impossible Motion that should have you questioning your visual interpretation of the world:

Video: Dan Siegel on Mindfulness and Feeling Good

Ali Binazir — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:59:40 +0000

Daniel Siegel, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Co-Director of the UCLA Mindfulness Research Center, author of Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation and all-around stud does a striking demonstration of how you can go from a negative state of mind to a positive one in a matter of seconds — using only one word.

Even though I’ve experienced and performed many such demonstrations myself, this one’s pretty dramatic in its impact and simplicity, so be sure to watch the first two minutes at the very least. Towards the end, he gives a practical mindfulness technique you can use at any time.

Does your body take abstract thoughts literally?

Ali Binazir — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:04:35 +0000

Here’s something that hypnotists and neurolinguistic programmers have been using for years: your body often reflects your abstract thoughts in physical form. For example, if you tell someone to imagine tilting back a picture of himself, then he tends to feel more relaxed — ‘laid back’.

Turns out that scientists have been uncovering evidence that this kind of thing is happening all the time and with great complexity. Natalie Angier of the New York Times has written a great summary of these fascinating findings which is quite eye-opening (did your eyes just open wide?):

The theory of relativity showed us that time and space are intertwined. To which our smarty-pants body might well reply: Tell me something I didn’t already know, Einstein.

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time.

As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent. Continued

This is Your Brain on Love

Ali Binazir — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:57:36 +0000

Here’s a great summary of some of the current thinking on what happens to your noggin when you’re in love (or lust). The name of one of the researchers is Timothy Loving — you can’t make that kind of thing up.

(CNN) — Poets, novelists and songwriters have described it in countless turns of phrase, but at the level of biology, love is all about chemicals.

Although the physiology of romantic love has not been extensively studied, scientists can trace the symptoms of deep attraction to their logical sources.

“Part of the whole attraction process is strongly linked to physiological arousal as a whole,” said Timothy Loving (his real name), assistant professor of human ecology at the University of Texas, Austin. “Typically, that’s going to start with things like increased heart rate, sweatiness and so on.” Continued here