Mind Power News
Issue No. 175 / Saturday, July 14, 2007
www.MindPowerNews.com

In this issue:

THE 5 BIGGEST NEUROSCIENCE DISCOVERIES OF THE YEAR: Since last summer scientists have discovered lots of things about female sexuality, incest, psychopaths, IQ, brain death, addiction, compulsive buying, and how to remotely control animals through cranial implants. But five major trends and breakthroughs stand out.

THE PLACEBO EFECT: THE TRIUMPH OF MIND OVER BODY: Make-believe drugs -- drugs that carry no active chemical substances -- often act as the real drugs and provoke therapeutic effects when administered to patients.

THE ULTIMATE VISUALIZATION EXERCISE: The following simple exercise is widely regarded as the most powerful visualization exercise ever discovered.

7 QUESTIONS NO ONE CAN ANSWER: In a new book, I argue that though many scientists think we are on the verge of knowing everything, they are wrong... Here are some of the most intriguing questions science has not yet answered or, in some cases, even really addressed.

SCIENTISTS CREATE 'AMNESIA DRUG' TO ERASE BAD MEMORIES: "As the memory is getting restored, we gave patients a drug that turns down the emotional part of the memory. It left the conscious part of the memory intact, so they could still remember all the details but without being overwhelmed by the memory."

THE ABSENCE OF DESIRE IS THE BEGINNING OF HAPPINESS: When you have no desire... all of a sudden, you're happy for no reason... In that moment, your mind stops... you are empty, you do not need anything else.



Best of the Brain: The 5 Biggest Neuroscience Discoveries of the Year

By William Saletan
Source: Slate.com
The human brain has spent its evolutionary history learning about everything else in the world. Since last summer, it has learned quite a bit about itself. It has discovered lots of things about female sexuality, incest, psychopaths, IQ, brain death, addiction, compulsive buying, and how to remotely control animals through cranial implants. But five major trends and breakthroughs stand out.

1. The arrival of mind reading

Scientists in Germany used pattern recognition software to predict, from functional magnetic resonance imaging of people's brains, whether each person had secretly decided to add or subtract two numbers he was looking at. The computer correctly predicted the decision 71 percent of the time. The advertised application of this technology is computers that can discern and execute your will when you want them to—for example, if you're paralyzed or don't want to use a mouse. The feared application is mental surveillance.

2. The neural alteration of morality

Six people with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex were presented with moral dilemmas (e.g., would you smother a baby to prevent bad guys from finding and killing people in hiding) and were found to be two to three times more willing to kill than people without brain damage. The advertised conclusion is that such willingness to kill is objectively immoral. The feared conclusion is that if brain design determines what's moral, you can change morality by changing the brain—and once technology manipulates ethics, ethics can no longer judge technology.

3. The medicalization of sexual orientation

U.S. experiments confirmed that 7 percent to 10 percent of rams are gay. Research suggests brain biology is involved. The advertised application is identification of gay or asexual rams, "thus eliminating their use for general breeding purposes." The feared application is identification of gay male fetuses, leading parents to abort them or alter their orientation through hormone treatment in the womb. Some conservative Christian leaders have already endorsed this idea.

4. The discovery of vegetative consciousness

For five months after her car crash, an English patient displayed "no reproducible evidence of purposeful behavior" and was declared vegetative. Then she was asked, during an fMRI scan, to imagine playing tennis and walking through her home. The scan lit up with patterns that in healthy brains signify language, movement, and navigation. A follow-up report cited anecdotal cases in which Ambien woke brain-damaged people from prolonged unresponsiveness. The happy implication is that some people we thought were finished may be salvageable. The horrifying corollary is that until we find these people, they're buried alive in their skulls.

5. The progress of artificial intelligence

Computers completed their rout of humans at chess, as a $137 computer program beat the world chess champ in a six-game match, giving computers a 2-0-2 record (two wins, two ties) against human champs in their last four matches. Computers also improved their ability to adapt and modify themselves, as a robot demonstrated that it could recognize an injury to itself, infer how its limbs worked, and adjust its method of locomotion. However, DARPA scrapped a program to reverse-engineer the brain, leaving scientists to wonder whether the project had lost out to other priorities or had simply failed.

The Placebo Effect: The Triumph of Mind Over Body

A growing body of research reveals not just psychological and perceptual components to the placebo effect but also a biochemical substrate to the mechanism.

By Peter Arguriou
Source: Nexus Magazine

One of the most commonly used terms in medical language is the word placebo. The placebo effect is used as a scale for evaluating the effectiveness of new drugs. But what exactly is the placebo effect and what are its consequences in the deterministic structure of Western medicine?

The placebo effect has been frequently abused by health professionals to denote and stigmatise a fraud or fallacy. Alternative therapies have often been characterised as merely placebos.

But the placebo effect is not a fraudulent, useless or malevolent phenomenon. It occurs independently of the intentions of charlatans or health professionals. It is a spontaneous, authentic and very factual phenomenon that refers to well-observed but uninterpreted and contingent therapies or health improvements that occur in the absence of an active chemical/pharmacological substance.

Make-believe drugs -- drugs that carry no active chemical substances -- often act as the real drugs and provoke therapeutic effects when administered to patients.

In many drug trials, the manufacturers of the drug sadly discover that their product is in no way superior to the effect of a placebo. But that does not mean that a placebo equates to a null response of the human organism. On the contrary, a placebo denotes non-chemical stimuli that strongly motivate the organism towards a therapeutic course. That is, the placebo effect is dependent not on the drug's effectiveness but solely on therapeutic intention and expectation.

Effects of positive and negative thinking

The placebo effect has been often misunderstood as a solely psychological and highly subjective phenomenon. The patient, convinced of the therapy's effectiveness, ignores his symptoms or perceives them faintly without any substantial improvement of his health; that is, the patient feels better but is not healthier.

But can the subjective psychological aspect of the placebo effect account for all of its therapeutic properties? The answer is definite: the placebo effect refers to an alternative curative mechanism that is inherent in the human entity, is motivated by therapeutic intention or belief in the therapeutic potential of a treatment, and implies biochemical responses and reactions to the stimulus of therapeutic intention or belief.

But placebos are not always beneficial: they can also have adverse effects. For example, administering a pharmacologically inactive substance to some patients can sometimes bring about unexpected health deteriorations. A review of 109 double-blind studies estimated that 19 per cent of placebo recipients manifested the nocebo effect: unexpected deteriorations of health.

In a related experiment, researchers falsely declared to the volunteers that a weak electrical current would pass through their head; although there was no electrical current, 70 per cent of the volunteers (who were medical students) complained of a headache after the experiment.

In a group of patients suffering from carotid atherosclerosis, prognosis and progression of the disease were burdened when their psychological health was bad (i.e., they were affected by hopelessness or depression). In another group of carotid atherosclerosis patients, prognosis and progression were burdened not only by hopelessness but also by hostility. In patients with coronary heart disease, hopelessness was a determinative risk factor. Social isolation, work stress and hostility comprised additional risk factors.

Positive or negative thinking seems to be a decisive risk factor for every treatment, perhaps even more important than medical intervention.

The nocebo effect appears to have a specific biological substrate. A group of 15 men whose wives suffered from terminal cancer participated in a small perspective study. After their wives' deaths, the men experienced severe grief that caused immunodepression. The spouses' lymphocytes for a period of time after their wives' deaths responded poorly to mitogenes. Grief had assaulted their immune system. The study proposed that grief and grief-induced immunodepression resulted in high- level mortality of the specific group.

Read the full story here...
http://www.mindpowernews.com/Placebo.htm


The Ultimate Visualization Exercise

The following simple exercise is widely regarded as the most powerful visualization exercise ever discovered.

Source: The Super Mind Evolution System

Relax with your eyes closed and focus on your breathing. Tell yourself that with each breath you take you are relaxing more and more.

Now imagine yourself as part of the entire universe. The easiest way to do this is to project your mind at high speed out into space... see the planets then solar systems rushing by.

See the universes rushing by until you have reached as far as you can go. When you look back you see all the matter of creation shimmering and pulsating in a large vibrant form before you. You can visualize this shape in human form if you wish (God?).

The suns and planets are your body cells, each filled with energy and power but