Links to Spirituality Found in the Brain Scientists have identified areas of the brain that, when damaged, lead to greater spirituality. The findings hint at the roots of spiritual and religious attitudes, the researchers say. The study, published in the Feb. 11 issue of the journal Neuron, involves a personality trait called self-transcendence, which is [...]

It may be possible to smell fear on another person: “The chemical transfer of anxiety may cause a feeling of discomfort in the perceiver. It’s like a sixth sense,” says psychologist Bettina Pause of the University of Düsseldorf in Germany, one of the authors of the paper. Here is the paper at PLoS ONE. I’ve [...]

A smattering of articles on attractiveness, desire (as a cognitive function) and what it all means sort of sprung up on me today, with wonderful serendipity. The science of sex is complex, but from my observations thus far in life, the assertion that beauty is not limited to the physical is bullshit. This comes the [...]

Anthropologist: Modern Man is Inferior to Ancestors “If you’re reading this then you — or the male you have bought it for — are the worst man in history,” McAllister writes in the opening sentence of the prologue. “No ifs, no buts — the worst man, period. … As a class we are in fact [...]

A Neuron’s Obsession: In their most recent work this year, the research team reported that a single human neuron could recognize a personality through pictures, text or the sound of a name — no matter how that person was presented. In tests, one brain cell reacted only to Oprah Winfrey; another just to Luke Skywalker; [...]

Study: Body posture affects confidence in your own thoughts Sitting up straight in your chair isn’t just good for your posture – it also gives you more confidence in your own thoughts, according to a new study. Researchers found that people who were told to sit up straight were more likely to believe thoughts they [...]

Reading Kafka Improves Learning, Suggests Psychology Study According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka’s “The Country Doctor” or Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions. The researchers’ findings appear in an article published in the [...]

Tremble before science.

Psychology is one of those bizarre soft sciences that uses qualitative and quantitative empirical data to study how the brain works. Freud has been more or less dismissed in the field outside of setting historical precedents – although he is widely studied in other fields, namely literary studies and sociology. Philosophy can study any discipline [...]

Logic and language are not the same thing It’s difficult for us to imagine what our mental lives would be like without language. Some theorists have even gone so far as to argue that language and logical thought are one and the same thing. A new brain imaging study challenges this notion by showing that [...]