![dailymedical:
Chilling Brain Scans Show the Impact of a Mother’s Love on a Child’s Brain Size
A shocking comparison of brain scans from two three-year-old children reveals new evidence of the remarkable impact a mother’s love has on a child’s brain development.
The chilling images reveal that the left brain, which belongs to a normal 3-year-old, is significantly larger and contains fewer spots and dark “fuzzy” areas than the right brain, which belongs to that of a 3-year-old who has suffered extreme neglect.
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Trying not to think what my brain looks like after the events of [my memoir]…](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcoa5yvjRN1rwibjgo1_1280.jpg)
Chilling Brain Scans Show the Impact of a Mother’s Love on a Child’s Brain Size
A shocking comparison of brain scans from two three-year-old children reveals new evidence of the remarkable impact a mother’s love has on a child’s brain development.
The chilling images reveal that the left brain, which belongs to a normal 3-year-old, is significantly larger and contains fewer spots and dark “fuzzy” areas than the right brain, which belongs to that of a 3-year-old who has suffered extreme neglect.
Trying not to think what my brain looks like after the events of [my memoir]…
(via ikenbot)
Source: medicaldaily.com
Brains of Buddhist monks scanned in meditation study
In a laboratory tucked away off a noisy New York City street, a soft-spoken neuroscientist has been placing Tibetan Buddhist monks into a car-sized brain scanner to better understand the ancient practice of meditation. But could this unusual research not only unravel the secrets of leading a harmonious life but also shed light on some of the world’s more mysterious diseases?
Zoran Josipovic, a research scientist and adjunct professor at New York University, says he has been peering into the brains of monks while they meditate in an attempt to understand how their brains reorganise themselves during the exercise. Since 2008, the researcher has been placing the minds and bodies of prominent Buddhist figures into a five-tonne (5,000kg) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.
Dr Josipovic, who also moonlights as a Buddhist monk, says he is hoping to find how some meditators achieve a state of “nonduality” or “oneness” with the world, a unifying consciousness between a person and their environment.
“One thing that meditation does for those who practise it a lot is that it cultivates attentional skills,” Dr Josipovic says, adding that those harnessed skills can help lead to a more tranquil and happier way of being. ”Meditation research, particularly in the last 10 years or so, has shown to be very promising because it points to an ability of the brain to change and optimise in a way we didn’t know previously was possible.”When one relaxes into a state of oneness, the neural networks in experienced practitioners change as they lower the psychological wall between themselves and their environments, Dr Josipovic says. And this reorganisation in the brain may lead to what some meditators claim to be a deep harmony between themselves and their surroundings. via BBC
[O]n Saturday the New York Times reported that there had been a drop of 34% in the number of times that police had used stop-and-frisks. It said that from April to June New York police had conducted 133,934 stops, compared to 203,500 in the preceding three months of January to February. The drop coincided with a period of media debate over the role of stop-and-frisks in fighting New York crime, which civil rights groups have repeatedly protested.
The above is an example of why activism works. People do less wrong when they know we are watching.
NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisks witnesses marked drop (via theamericanbear)
(via oldenough2burmom)
Source: Guardian
ShortFormBlog: NASA scientist: Global warming exists; these heat waves are proof
- claim The extreme temperatures felt across the U.S. and the globe in recent years are so crazy that they must be caused by man-made global warming according to James Hansen, a NASA scientist and the “godfather of global warming.”
- evidence “We are now experiencing scientific fact,” Hansen…
Happiness Comes From Respect, Not Riches
Money really can’t buy happiness, research shows. Instead, a new study suggests, those pursuing a happier life would be smart to sharpen their social skills.
(Jiri Kabele)
In a series of four experiments, researchers found that it is the level of respect and admiration we receive from peers—not overall wealth or success—that more likely predicts happiness. They refer to this level of respect and admiration as our “sociometric status,” as opposed to socioeconomic status (SES).
In one experiment, 80 college students from 14 different student groups rated how much they respected and admired the other people in their group, and how respected and admired they felt themselves; they also answered questions about their family’s income and their own level of happiness.
The results, published in the journal Psychological Science, show that people with higher sociometric status reported greater happiness, whereas their socioeconomic status was not linked to their happiness.
The findings echo past research finding that income has surprisingly little effect on happiness, says Cameron Anderson, a professor at the University of Calfiornia, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and the lead author of the study.
Instead, Anderson and his colleagues’ research suggests that what really matters is the respect, admiration, and feelings of power we get from others within our face-to-face groups.
“You don’t have to be rich to be happy, but instead be a valuable contributing member to your groups,” says Anderson. “What makes a person high in status in a group is being engaged, generous with others, and making self sacrifices for the greater good.”
Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers
Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.
A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.
“When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different,” says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.
However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.
“Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” Edelman says.
”Austerity policies have failed. They are holding back growth, and increasing inequality in the United States. Prosperity Economics calls on the federal government to step into the fray and start rebuilding the American dream by focusing on innovation-led growth grounded in job creation and public investment, security for workers and their families, and an accountable, effective democracy.” UNFORTUNATELY, the only way this is going to happen is to vote the Tea Party and obstructionist Republicans out of office in November.
Yale Professor Jacob Hacker’s new report lays out a policy platform to create prosperity for all – what policies do you think are most important for long-term growth?
Read the report here: http://bit.ly/NhQezT
Could not for the life of me verify this quote, but I so strongly believe in it that I have to post it anyway… here’s another one that is verified: “My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer.”
Police Shootings Echo Nationwide
Welcome to the abattoir—a nation where a man can walk into a store and buy an assault rifle, a shotgun, a couple of Glocks; where in the comfort of his darkened living room, windows blocked from the sunlight, he can rig a series of bombs unperturbed and buy thousands of rounds of ammo on the Internet; where a movie theater can turn into a killing floor at the midnight hour.
We know about all of this. We know because the weekend of July 20th became all-Aurora-all-the-time, a round-the-clock engorgement of TV news reports, replete with massacre theme music, an endless loop of victims, their loved ones, eyewitness accounts, cell-phone video, police briefings, informal memorials, and “healing,” all washed down with a presidential visit and hour upon hour of anchor and “expert” speculation.
We know a lot less about Anaheim and the killing of Manuel Angel Diaz, shot in the back and in the head by that city’s police just a few short hours after the awful Aurora murders.
But to the people living near La Palma Avenue and North Anna Drive, the shooting of Manuel Diaz was all too familiar: it was the sixth, seventh, or eighth police shooting in Anaheim, California, since the beginning of 2012. (No one seems quite sure of the exact count, though the Orange County District Attorney’s office claims six shootings, five fatalities.)
This is daily life in less suburban, less white America. On Sunday, when the first of growing daily protests took place, Anaheim police shot and killed another man running away, Joel Mathew Acevedo, 21. Acevedo was armed and opened fired, police maintained—yet another suspected gang member.
It is not hyperbole to say this is virtually a daily routine in America. It’s considered so humdrum, so much background noise, that it is rarely reported beyond local newscasts and metro briefs. In the days bracketing the Aurora massacre, San Francisco police shot and killed mentally ill Pralith Pralourng; Tampa police shot and killedJavon Neal, 16; an off-duty cop shot Pierre Davis, 20, of Chicago; Miami-Dade police shot and killed an unidentified “stalking suspect”; an off-duty FBI agent shot an unnamed man in Queens; Kansas City police shot and killed 58-year-old Danny L. Walsh; Lynn police and a Massachusetts state trooper shot and killed Brandon Payne, 23, a father of three; Henderson police shot and killed Andy Puente Soto, 42, out in the desert wastes near Las Vegas.
The lack of authoritative and comprehensive national data on police shootings and the reluctance of local law enforcement departments to release information on the use of deadly force has sent researchers onto the Internet searching for stories and anecdotal evidence. Newspapers looking into the issue must painstakingly gather information and documents from multiple agencies and courts to determine who is being killed and why. One major recent independent effort by the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2011—undertaken in the wake of community protests over two police shootings in 2010—confirmed anecdotal evidence drawn from virtually all major metropolitan areas. If you are a young man, a person of color, and live in a poor urban area, you are far more likely to become a victim of police gunfire than if you are none of those things.
Shocking Forecast: A Century-Long Megadrought
The Insurance Bureau of Canada’s (IBC) new study warns Canadians “the frequency and severity of severe weather is on the rise,” and we had better prepare for it. “Telling the Weather Story” confirms the recent landslides, fires and drought are becoming the new norm.
Another study, this one published by Nature Geoscience, confirms the prediction. A team of Canadian and American scientists studied the drought of 2000 to 2004 and found it was the worst since the one that lasted from 1146 to 1151. They warn a “megadrought” could parch the planet through the entire 21st century.
Insurers have been hit hard by the impacts of catastrophic events. IBC reports insured losses internationally reached $10 billion to $50 billion a year over the past decade and exceeding $100 billion in 2011. In Canada alone insurers were on the hook for roughly $1.6 billion in 2011 and close to $1 billion annually in the previous two years. Aging infrastructure contributed to the losses, as older sewer systems are unable to handle the increased precipitation.
