Scientific American

Do Psychedelics Expand the Mind by Reducing Brain Activity?

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:50:00 EST

What would you see if you could look inside a hallucinating brain? Despite decades of scientific investigation, we still lack a clear understanding of how hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), mescaline, and psilocybin (the main active ingredient in magic mushrooms) work in the brain. Modern science has demonstrated that hallucinogens activate receptors for serotonin, one of the brain’s key chemical messengers. Specifically, of the 15 different serotonin receptors, the 2A subtype (5-HT2A), seems to be the one that produces profound alterations of thought and perception. It is uncertain, however, why activation of the 5-HT2A receptor by hallucinogens produces psychedelic effects, but many scientists believe that the effects are linked to increases in brain activity. Although it is not known why this activation would lead to profound alterations of consciousness, one speculation is that an increase in the spontaneous firing of certain types of brain cells leads to altered sensory and perceptual processing, uncontrolled memory retrieval, and the projection of mental “noise” into the mind’s eye.

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The Scientific Flaws of Online Dating Sites

Tue, 08 May 2012 07:00:00 EST

Every day, millions of single adults, worldwide, visit an online dating site. Many are lucky, finding life-long love or at least some exciting escapades. Others are not so lucky. The industry--eHarmony, Match, OkCupid, and a thousand other online dating sites--wants singles and the general public to believe that seeking a partner through their site is not just an alternative way to traditional venues for finding a partner, but a superior way. Is it?

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How Critical Thinkers Lose Their Faith in God

Tue, 01 May 2012 10:15:00 EST

Why are some people more religious than others? Answers to this question often focus on the role of culture or upbringing. While these influences are important, new research suggests that whether we believe may also have to do with how much we rely on intuition versus analytical thinking. In 2011 Amitai Shenhav, David Rand and Joshua Greene of Harvard University published a paper showing that people who have a tendency to rely on their intuition are more likely to believe in God. They also showed that encouraging people to think intuitively increased people’s belief in God. Building on these findings, in a recent paper published in Science , Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia found that encouraging people to think analytically reduced their tendency to believe in God. Together these findings suggest that belief may at least partly stem from our thinking styles.

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How Creativity Connects with Immorality

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:30:00 EST

In the mid 1990’s, Apple Computers was a dying company. Microsoft’s Windows operating system was overwhelmingly favored by consumers, and Apple’s attempts to win back market share by improving the Macintosh operating system were unsuccessful. After several years of debilitating financial losses, the company chose to purchase a fledgling software company called NeXT. Along with purchasing the rights to NeXT’s software, this move allowed Apple to regain the services of one of the company’s founders, the late Steve Jobs. Under the guidance of Jobs, Apple returned to profitability and is now the largest technology company in the world, with the creativity of Steve Jobs receiving much of the credit.

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The Secrets of Your Brain's Zoom Lens

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 07:10:00 EST

Notice that, even as you fixate on the screen in front of you, you can still shift your attention to different regions in your peripheries . For decades, cognitive scientists have conceptualized attention as akin to a shifting spotlight that “illuminates” regions it shines upon, or as a zoom lens, focusing on things so that we see them in finer detail. These metaphors are commonplace because they capture the intuition that attention illuminates or sharpens things, and thus, enhances our perception of them.

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How Wealth Reduces Compassion

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 08:00:00 EST

Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal--the poor person or the rich one? It’s temping to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already have enough for yourself, it’s easier to think about what others may need. But research suggests the opposite is true: as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people decline.

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Decoding the Body Watcher

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 10:30:00 EST

What's the difference between noticing the rapid beat of a popular song on the radio and noticing the rapid rate of your heart when you see your crush? Between noticing the smell of fresh baked bread and noticing that you're out of breath? Both require attention. However, the direction of that attention differs: it is either turned outward, as in the case of noticing a stop sign or a tap on your shoulder, or turned inward, as in the case of feeling full or feeling love.

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How to Use Light to Control the Brain

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:00:00 EST

In the film Amèlie , the main character is a young eccentric woman who attempts to change the lives of those around her for the better. One day Amèlie finds an old rusty tin box of childhood mementos in her apartment, hidden by a boy decades earlier. After tracking down Bretodeau, the owner, she lures him to a phone booth where he discovers the box. Upon opening the box and seeing a few marbles, a sudden flash of vivid images come flooding into his mind. Next thing you know, Bretodeau is transported to a time when he was in the schoolyard scrambling to stuff his pockets with hundreds of marbles while a teacher is yelling at him to hurry up.

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A Neuroscientist's Quest to Reverse Engineer the Human Brain

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:00:00 EST

What makes us who we are? Where is our personal history recorded, or our hopes? What explains autism or schiziphrenia or remarkable genius? Sebastian Seung argues that it’s all in the connections our neurons make. In his new book, Connectome , he argues that technology has now reached a point where it is conceivable to start mapping at least portions of the connectome. It’s a daunting task, he says, but without it, neuroscience will be stuck. He answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

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Why Interacting with a Woman Can Leave Men "Cognitively Impaired"

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 08:00:00 EST

Movies and television shows are full of scenes where a man tries unsuccessfully to interact with a pretty woman. In many cases, the potential suitor ends up acting foolishly despite his best attempts to impress. It seems like his brain isn’t working quite properly and according to new findings, it may not be.

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The Inspiration Paradox: Your Best Creative Time Is Not When You Think

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:45:00 EST

A bus company in China has launched a new “safe driving” campaign by suspending bowls of water over their drivers. To avoid getting wet, drivers must drive gently. In today’s technology-obsessed world, this solution is elegantly primitive. You might imagine that this simple yet ingenious idea was conjured by someone functioning at their very best, that such “aha insights” come when innovators are at their peak.

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You Have a Hive Mind

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 11:15:00 EST

Every decision you make is essentially a committee act. Members chime in, options are weighed, and eventually a single proposal for action is approved by consensus. The committee, of course, is the densely knit society of neurons in your head. And approved by consensus is really just a delicate way of saying that the opposition was silenced.

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What Doctors Don't Understand about Anesthesia

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

Today anesthetics are considered as routine as a trip to the dentist. They have been around at least since the 18th century when a talented chemist named Humphry Davy discovered the mysterious effect of nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Davy, young and ambitious, set out to rigorously test the gas’s effect, inhaling nitrous oxide daily for several months. Under slightly less rigorous conditions, Davy shared the gas with a distinguished group of friends including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Watt, and Robert Southey--who wrote in a letter that “the atmosphere of the highest of all possible heavens must be composed of this gas.” These early trials laid the foundation for anesthesia’s emergence in medicine today. Yet in the modern era, despite tremendous advances in the quality and selectivity of anesthetics, we still have a poor understanding of how anesthetics work in the brain.

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Discovering the Secrets of Long-Term Love

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:00:00 EST

During America's most popular TV event, the Superbowl, one much-anticipated advertisement featuring supermodel Adriana Lima painted a pretty sad state of affairs with regards to love.

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How Emotions Jump from Face to Face

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:15:00 EST

Disability advocates were seeing red after two elderly women with medical conditions were allegedly strip-searched by TSA agents at New York’s JFK airport last December. You’d have to have a pretty thick skin not to empathize with an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman having her colostomy bag frisked. But the notion of one passenger being an unlikely terrorist also belies a discomfiting flipside: another passenger being a more likely candidate.

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What a Yawn Says about Your Relationship

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:00:00 EST

You can tell a lot about a person from their body. And I don’t just mean how many hours they spend at the gym, or how easy it is for them to sweet-talk their way out of speeding tickets. For the past several decades researchers have been studying the ways in which the body reveals properties of the mind. An important subset of this work has taken this idea a step further: do the ways our bodies relate to one another tell us about the ways in which our minds relate to one another? Consider behavioral mimicry. Many studies have found that we quite readily mimic the nonverbal behavior of those with whom we interact. Furthermore, the degree to which we mimic others is predicted by both our personality traits as well as our relationship to those around us. In short , the more empathetic we are, the more we mimic, and the more we like the people we’re interacting with, the more we mimic. The relationship between our bodies reveals something about the relationship between our minds.

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The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:40:00 EST

Do you enjoy having time to yourself, but always feel a little guilty about it? Then Susan Cain’s “ Quiet : The Power of Introverts ” is for you. It’s part book, part manifesto. We live in a nation that values its extroverts – the outgoing, the lovers of crowds – but not the quiet types who change the world. She recently answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook .

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In Atheists We Distrust

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 07:30:00 EST

Atheists are one of the most disliked groups in America. Only 45 percent of Americans say they would vote for a qualified atheist presidential candidate, and atheists are rated as the least desirable group for a potential son-in-law or daughter-in-law to belong to. Will Gervais at the University of British Columbia recently published a set of studies looking at why atheists are so disliked. His conclusion: It comes down to trust.

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The Neuroscience of Looking on the Bright Side

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:00:00 EST

Ask a bride before walking down the aisle “How likely are you to get divorced?” and most will respond “Not a chance!” Tell her that the average divorce rate is close to 50 percent, and ask again. Would she change her mind? Unlikely. Even law students who have learned everything about the legal aspects of divorce, including its likelihood, state that their own chances of getting divorced are basically nil. How can we explain this?

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What Hand You Favor Shapes Your Moral Space

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:35:00 EST

You’re out to dinner at a restaurant that just recently opened. Steamed mussels or steamed calamari? Three cheese ravioli or eggplant parmesan? Strawberry cheesecake or chocolate mousse? With so many good choices, how to decide?

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