Happiness, Health and Inner Calm
- University of London researchers correlated the happiness of 10,000 Britons to their income and other life factors. Then they quantified how much income-per-year would give someone an equivalent amount of happiness or grief as the life factors. Excellent health was worth the equivalent of a $600,000-a-year pay rise; marriage = $100,000 pay raise, although living together was worth a $162,000 pay raise, and being widowed bummed Britons out as much as a $400,000 pay cut.
- University of Vermont psychologists studied 154 young adults and found a correlation between their capacity for “mindfulness” and their lack of anxiety and neuroticism. Apparently anxious and neurotic people find it hard to be mindful and mindfulness helps lower anxiety. “Mindfulness skills are our ability to be in the present moment, avoid harsh judgment of ourselves and others, and act with deliberation. When a person lacks mindfulness skills, it can lead to impulsive unwanted behaviors, avoidance, and a general feeling of dissatisfaction.”
- Find Inner Calm Good for Your Longevity A Harvard team followed 516 cardiac disease patients for three years. Although initial anxiety level was not correlated with heart attack risk, those who had lower anxiety over time had a lower rate of heart attacks, and those with higher anxiety over time had higher rates.
- Yoga good for the depressed brain A team in Boston, writing in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, has found that yoga elevates brain gamma-aminobutyric (GABA) levels, the brain’s primary inhibitory neurotransmitter. Low GABA levels are associated with depression and anxiety.
- Review article on Meditation and the Brain
“Meditation and the Neuroscience of Consciousness”
Antoine Lutz, John D. Dunne, Richard J. Davidson
In press in Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness edited by Zelazo P., Moscovitch M. and Thompson E
Abstract: The overall goal of this essay is to explore the initial findings of neuroscientific research on meditation; in doing so, the essay also suggests potential avenues of further inquiry The essay consists of three sections that, while integral to the essay as a whole, may also be read independently. The first section, “Defining Meditation,” notes the need for a more precise understanding of meditation as a scientific explanandum. Arguing for the importance of distinguishing the particularities of various traditions, the section presents the theory of meditation from the paradigmatic perspective of Buddhism, and it discusses the difficulties encountered when working with such theories. The section includes an overview of three practices that have been the subject of research, and it ends with a strategy for developing a questionnaire to more precisely define a practice under examination. The second section, “the Intersection of Neuroscience and Meditation,” explores some scientific motivations for the neuroscientific examination of meditation in terms of its potential impact on the brain and body of long-term practitioners. After an overview of the mechanisms of mind-body interaction, this section addresses the use of first-person expertise, especially in relation to the potential for research on the neural counterpart of subjective experience. In general terms, the section thus points to the possible contributions of research on meditation to the neuroscience of consciousness. The final section, “Neuroelectric and Neuroimaging Correlates of Meditation,” reviews the most relevant neuroelectric and neuroimaging findings of research conducted to date, including some preliminary correlates of the previously discussed Buddhist practices.
Psychiatric Clothing, Headgear
A team at University of California, San Diego (UCSD), are using a bio-telemetry lifevest to monitor patients for characteristic movement and physiological signs of mental illness. Fascinating that this application was the one envisaged by Clynes and Kline in their original “cyborg” paper for NASA - a way to detect when astronauts were losing it in space, with telemetry from their suit/body, so ground control could give them a shot of Haldol.
Technology Review also reports on the use of a five electrode EEG device for use by patients taking anti-depressants to measure if they are having the expected effect after a week of use, which is earlier than many patients feel better. The story also discusses Neurostar, a wand that sends magnetic pulses to the cortex. After five treatments a week for four to six weeks it relieved depression for about 40% of those who it has been tested on.
Morality and Political Preference are Partly Hard-Wired
The Washington Post published a very nice review of neurological studies of moral decision-making and empathy (Damasio, Hauser, et al.) which suggest that we have inherited some basic moral intuitions and emotions. For instance it discusses fMRI scanning of people thinking about donating money to charity; when they thought about making altruistic donations their pleasure centers lit up, suggesting that we have some hard-wiring for altruism.
Psychologist John Jost, having studied more than 22,000 subjects from 12 countries, finds that personality traits, partly hard-wired at birth, predict political ideology. People who prefer order, structure and closure tend to be more conservative, while creative people open to new experiences tend to be more politically liberal. Situational factors can also influence political preference, such as social chaos and violence which drive people toward structure and conservatism. Jost, like other researchers, attributes about half of the variance in political preference to genetic predisposition.
Also check out this excellent paper from Jon Haidt and Jesse Graham:
“When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize,” Social Justice Research (in press).
Abstract: Researchers in moral psychology and social justice have agreed that morality is about matters of harm, rights, and justice. With this definition of morality, conservative opposition to social justice programs has appeared to be immoral, and has been explained as a product of various non-moral processes, such as system justification or social dominance orientation. In this article we argue that, from an anthropological perspective, the moral domain is usually much broader, encompassing many more aspects of social life and valuing institutions as much or more than individuals. We present theoretical and empirical reasons for believing that there are in fact five psychological systems that provide the foundations for the world’s many moralities. The five foundations are psychological preparations for detecting and reacting emotionally to issues related to harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Political liberals have moral intuitions primarily based upon the first two foundations, and therefore misunderstand the moral motivations of political conservatives, who generally rely upon all five foundations.
In other words, conservatives are driven by monkey-brain wiring to think that racism, nepotism, yuck factors and obedience to authority are all moral, while liberals have freed themselves from that hard-wiring to focus on justice and caring for other people. Not to put down monkeys by comparing them to conservatives…
The Really Nasty and the Really Nice Get More Sex A study at Rutgers correlated self-reported relationships with number of sexual partners.
People who are socially dominant and either very friendly or very antagonistic tend to be more sexually promiscuous, according to a new study.Friendly, warm people may enjoy sharing their warmth with others by sleeping with them, whereas antagonistic people may sleep around to avoid having a monogamous relationship. And having a dominant personality makes it easier to approach potential partners.
This suggests to me that testosterone (dominant, antagonistic) and oxytocin (friendly) levels are driving these relationships.
Speaking in Tongues
UPenn’s Andrew Newberg, scanning the brains of people speaking in tongues, has found that their language centers get quieter. Newberg admitted to ABC’s “Nightline” on March 20 that his study does not answer whether speaking in tongues is a real phenomenon.
Irrational Religious Exemptions from Drug Laws in the U.S., Reproductive Ethics in Jamaica
Jacob Sullum, writing in Reason has an excellent article on the current state of US drug regulations which allow native Americans to take peyote as a religious sacrament, but refuses to recognize the exemption claims of groups, like Rastafarians, that insist that marijuana or other drugs are their sacraments.
Speaking of Jamaica, Jamaican Muslims are OK with Designer Babies, but not the Christians and Jews
Head of Islamic education in Jamaica, Sheikh Tijani Musa argues that people have the right to utilise the technology, certainly in the Muslim community.
“In Islam, the principle is that the female and male have to be married before they do what they want to do, and it has to be through the husband’s sperm, not from anything else. If the technology wants to help them, Islam will not say anything to that,” Musa said.
“Islam allows us to use our brain or knowledge, as long as it does not contradict the principle of Islam (which is that) the male and female are to firstly be under the married act. It has to be after the marriage, and the egg from the wife,” he added.
According to Musa, God is the only one who creates the child, even where technology is used as a tool.
“If technology gives you knowledge, we need to know any benefit that comes from that. So the principle that we have is the marriage principle so that all the technology to check this or transfer that must be between the husband and wife, not any other,” he told the Sunday Observer. “God is the only one who can make the child - rich or poor, long life, short life, good or bad. As long as they don’t put any other sperm or anything to come to the mother, Islam will not have a problem with that.”
In other words Allah is OK with using the brain to improve life so long as you do it within marriage, and use your own spouse’s gametes.
Hopefully the rest of the Ummah will buy that argument, limited as it is.
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