The Science of Magic: Understanding Human Cognition and Perception
Source: Medical Research News
A new study concludes that elements of human cognition and perception that are not yet fully understood by scientists may receive greater insight by analysing tricks and techniques used by magicians. These techniques, which have been developed over thousands of years, offer powerful tools to manipulate our perception, according to the scientists.
The research team, from Durham University and the University of British Columbia, say the findings of their work have potential long-term applications in activities that aim to grab - and hold - people's attention, such as human computer interfaces which are thought to become increasingly more complicated.
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Can Hypnosis Make You a Poker Champion?
By Iain Legg
Creator of Think Like a Poker Pro
Could hypnosis really help you become a better poker player? When you become aware of all the great things that have been achieved with the power of hypnosis, you have to answer 'Yes' to this question. Definitely yes.
It's now a proven fact that hypnosis and simply changing your frame of mind can help you lose weight, quit smoking and overcome many other challenges.
To quote Matt Damon, poker playing star of the movie Rounders, "I should have done it years ago. It's amazing I didn't even want cigarettes anymore," describing his hypnosis experience to Jay Leno on The Tonight Show in 2004.
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Microscopic Robots Could Explore Brain
By Zoe Elizabeth Buck
McClatchy Newspapers
Gas prices have auto manufacturers rushing to make cars smaller, but Bruce Donald drives vehicles so tiny you need a microscope just to see one.
Donald and his team of Duke University computer scientists have constructed a fleet of fully steerable microrobots small enough to move around on the head of a pin. Robots this small could someday explore brain tissue or manipulate delicate electronics.
The robots are about 250 microns long and 60 microns across. They are thinner than the width of a human hair, and you could line two of them end to end inside the period at the end of this sentence.
They look like spatulas that move around on a charged surface using small, springlike steps similar to an inchworm's crawl. The microrobots have a long, thin arm that can be lowered and used as a pivot for turning, allowing the machines to steer freely in any direction.
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Humans and Machines Will Merge in the Future
By Lara Farrar / Source: CNN
A group of experts from around the world will hold a first of its kind conference Thursday on global catastrophic risks.
They will discuss what should be done to prevent these risks from becoming realities that could lead to the end of human life on Earth as we know it.
Speakers at the four-day event at Oxford University in Britain will talk about topics including nuclear terrorism and what to do if a large asteroid were to be on a collision course with our planet.
On the final day of the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference, experts will focus on what could be the unintended consequences of new technologies, such as superintelligent machines that, if ill-conceived, might cause the demise of Homo sapiens.
"Any entity which is radically smarter than human beings would also be very powerful," said Dr. Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, host of the symposium. "If we get something wrong, you could imagine the consequences would involve the extinction of the human species."CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY
Infra-Red Helmet Might Cure Dementia
By David Derbyshire
Source: Daily Mail
Two months ago Clem Fennell was fading fast.
The victim of an aggressive type of dementia, the 57-year-old businessmen was unable to answer the phone, order a meal or string more than a couple of words together.
In desperation, his family agreed to try a revolutionary new treatment - a bizarre-looking, experimental helmet devised by a British GP that bathes the brain in infra-red light twice a day.
To their astonishment, Mr Fennel began to make an astonishing recovery in just three weeks.
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Positive Brainwashing
By Cornelis Boertjens
Creator of Vision Board
Brainwashing is a term perceived in a negative way by most people. But you know what, I think our brains could actually do with a bit of a washing sometimes!
You see, everyone comes into this world with a clear mind, and a belief that everything is possible. All is positive and well. Remember as a child, you could do and become everything, without any boundaries! As we grow up however, we pick up beliefs, fears and limitations from our surroundings and peers that gradually form the person we are today. A lot of these beliefs unfortunately are negative and as we build our lives they limit us in our actions and being. Very often they therefore contribute to unhappiness or feeling unfulfilled in our lives and business.
It can be the smallest –seemingly harmless- remark from a mother like “just let me handle that, you are no good at that” that can convince you that you are not good at a certain task. A teacher who calls a pupil “the clumsy one” can do more harm with this remark than he realizes when repeated often enough. With every remark the belief is harnessed further in the child that it indeed is clumsy. Even though a remark is said with a smile or with the intend to be funny, it still leaves a legacy in the belief system.
This programming of course doesn’t stop at adulthood, it keeps influencing people in all stages of life. We are being influenced by our parents, kids, partner, friends, colleagues, television, newspapers, magazines and so on. Sometimes positive, but very often in a negative way. No wonder we limit ourselves in so many ways! Belief is the key to your success. If you belief you can do something, you can. If you belief you can’t do something, you will be right too.CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY
Your Mind's Role in Weight Loss
By Jon Benson
Excerpt from 7 Minute Muscle
It is estimated that we have approximately 65,000 thoughts each day. Ninety five percent of those thoughts are the same thoughts we had yesterday, and the day before that and the day before that. And most of the thoughts we have, be they positive or negative, elicit specific physical responses. It makes sense to look into this.
Before we get into the science and specifics necessary to think your way to faster results I want to utterly convince you that success begins and ends between your ears. If you have any doubts as to the validity of this claim, read on.
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How Your Brain Lies to You
By Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt
Source: New York Times
False beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found.
Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way.
The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger.
But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.
This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.
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The Science of Creating Your Own Reality
By John Assaraf and Murray Smith
Excerpt from "The Answer"
In 1633, an aging Italian astronomer named Galileo Galilei was taken before the Roman Inquisition, tried, convicted of heresy, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Galileo’s crime? He endorsed the idea, proposed a century earlier by the great Catholic astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, that the earth is not the center of the solar system. In fact, said Galileo, it is the other way around: The sun sits at the center, and the earth is simply one of a handful of planets that revolve around it.
This idea was judged as being diametrically opposed to the position taken by Holy Scripture. Galileo was forced to publicly recant his views, and his book containing the offending idea, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was banned. The old man’s sentence was later commuted to house arrest, and he lived out the rest of his days confined to his villa outside Florence, where he eventually went blind.
Still, Galileo’s views persisted, and the meticulous experiments and mathematical models he used in his search to understand nature set the stage for all the developments of modern science that followed. Three centuries later, a German physicist named Albert Einstein called him “the father of modern science.”CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY
Mind Over Pain: The Future of Surgery
By Danny Penman
Source: Daily Mail
A beautiful sunny day in the Cotswolds, two years ago.
Six paragliders are circling like eagles on powerful currents of rising air. A group of children gaze with open mouths as the giant parachutes dive and swoosh silently above their heads.
Then, suddenly, something starts to go wrong.
Breaking away from the group, one of the paragliders is hit by a powerful gust of wind, turning the parachute canopy inside out.
The pilot starts spinning like a sycamore seed towards the earth. Though he fights desperately, he cannot regain control of his parachute.
After what seems an eternity, the young man smashes into the hillside, driving the lower part of his right leg through the knee and into his thigh. He lies face down on the ground, blood trickling from his mouth.
After a moment of stunned silence, he begins screaming in agony.
He knows medical help is at least 30 minutes away and that it will take another hour to reach hospital.
To make matters worse, he knows that he can’t afford to lose consciousness because he might never again awaken if his skull has been fractured in the fall.
Something stronger than a ‘stiff upper lip’ is called for.
So the man slowly begins to suppress the pain of his shattered leg using a form of self-hypnosis he’d read about as a child.
He begins by forcing himself to breathe slowly and deeply before imagining himself in a garden full of flowers.
With a supreme effort of will, he mentally pushes the unwanted pain of his shattered knee to the back of his mind.
Even though shards of bone can be seen through his jeans, he forces himself to believe that his knee is only bruised.
He refuses to believe in pain.
‘It is a myth,’ he keeps telling himself. ‘Pain does not exist.’
And inch-by-inch the agony recedes before, finally, becoming isolated and distant.
The hypnosis had worked. He remains in a state of calm, until finally the paramedics arrive with the blessed relief of chemical anaesthesia.
An apocryphal tale? Perhaps so. But I know this story to be all too true. I know it, because I was that young man who crashed his paraglider.
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Near-Death Experiences of the Rich and Famous
By Kevin WilliamsExcerpt from: Near-Death.comThe near-death experiences of rich and famous people are particularly interesting. They are known all over the world. They are often beautiful, articulate and very talented in what they do. With this in mind, why would such a person reveal to everyone that they were dead and came back to life? Money? They already got that. Fame? They are already famous.In fact, by telling everyone they came back from the dead, they may be risking their own reputation. People who reveal such things to others often become the butt of jokes or thought to be crazy. Why would anyone rich and famous subject themselves to this when it might result in lost fame and fortune? The only rational reason that such people who have nothing to gain is that it really happened to them and they want to share it.The following are rich and famous people who risked it all to tell the world about their near-death experience.
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Did Madonna Use Mind Control to Snare A-Rod?
By George Rush and Bill Hutchinson
Source: New York Daily News
Pop icon Madonna is using kabbalah to brainwash Yankee star Alex Rodriguez into believing they are "soulmates," the ballplayer's estranged wife is telling friends.
Cynthia Rodriguez, who has bolted to rocker Lenny Kravitz's Paris pad to avoid the limelight, is blaming the Material Girl for breaking up her five-year marriage, a close friend told the Daily News. The 34-year-old stunner has revealed to close confidants that she discovered a note her husband wrote professing his true feelings to Madonna.
"I believe he was having an affair with Madonna," she told a friend, who spoke anonymously for fear of angering A-Rod. "She said she found a letter where Alex told Madonna: 'You are my true soulmate.'"
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The Disease of Self Improvement
Dr. Robert Anthony,
Creator of the Rich Mind Life StrategyHave you purchased self-improvement programs or read self-improvement books that you thought were going to change your life – but nothing really changed after your purchased them? You are not alone.
Self-Improvement is a False Concept
Billions of dollars are spent every year on self-improvement books and programs. Why do we purchase these types of materials in the first place? It is because we are suffering from “The Disease of Self Improvement.”
The Disease of Self Improvement is the false notion that somehow we are “deficient” and in order to be happy and successful we have to “improve” ourselves. The very act of trying to improve ourselves causes us to believe that there is something wrong with us in the first place.
The idea that there is something wrong with us is simply not true. So before we go any further -I want you to understand that – you cannot “improve” yourself because there is nothing wrong with you.
The only thing” wrong” is your beliefs ABOUT yourself and about the way life works. CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY
The World Is Getting Happier
Despite the anxieties of these times, happiness has been on the rise around the world in recent years, a new survey finds.
The upbeat outlook is attributed to economic growth in previously poor countries, democratization of others, and rising social tolerance for women and minority groups.
"It's a surprising finding," said University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who headed up the survey. "It's widely believed that it's almost impossible to raise an entire country's happiness level."
Denmark is the happiest nation and Zimbabwe the the most glum, he found.
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The Placebo Effect: The Triumph of Mind Over Body
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.CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY
Can Placebos Heal the Economy?
By Alan TuttAuthor of Choose To Believe
With today’s economy being such a hot topic in the presidential campaigns, everyone’s asking, “What are the candidates’ plans for healing the economy?”
“It may not matter what they do,” says Alan Tutt, author of Choose To Believe. “The world around us reflects the sum total of our beliefs. If we believe the economy is bad, that’s what we’ll see. On the other hand, if we believe the economy is only getting better, our experience will prove it to be true. If the public believes the issue is being effectively handled, we’ll see the economy improve. It’s that simple.”
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Three Strange Cases of Mass Hysteria
By M. Christian
Source: DarkRoastedBlend.com
For a topic involving laughter, what you're about to read is not amusing. Creepy and disturbing, yes. Funny, no.
1. The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic
Things supposedly started innocently enough. Kashasha, near Lake Victoria in Tanzania in 1962: One girl in a boarding school there told another girl a joke. Maybe, "Have you heard the one about?" or "A Jew, an Indian, and Herbert Hoover walk into a bar …" or "Take my wife, please … " Whatever the setup, the delivery, or punch line, the result was laughter. Whether it was a giggle, a guffaw, a chortle, a snort is irrelevant. The listener found it funny.
But then things went dark, weird, and creepy: one girl laughed, but then so did another, and then another, and then another, and then another.
After exposure, the incubation period from nothing to hysteria was short, from a few hours to a couple of days. There was no fever, no physical symptoms, just laughter and occasional crying between short moments of exhausted recuperation. When victims were restrained they sometimes became violent.
No one knew what to do. The school administrators were puzzled, local doctors were confused. Trying to put a lid on the phenomena, the administrators shut the school down.But that was too little, too late: Whatever it was began to spread.
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10 Mind Tricks to Quit Smoking
By Valerie Dawson
Creator of Stop Smoking Fast & Easy
Have you decided to stop smoking? It doesn't have to be hard! One of the keys for breaking the habit once and for all is to tap into the power of your mind. Here are some tips to help you succeed.
1. Make quitting smoking your number one goal. Rather than having a long list of different goals, make quitting smoking your number-one top priority. By focusing on quitting smoking as your most important goal, you increase your chances of success.
2. Keep the end result in mind. Focus on how much better your life will be as a non-smoker. Think about how you'll be able to breathe better and your energy level will increase. Imagine all the things you can do with the money you'll save each year by not purchasing cigarettes. And most importantly, focus on how you'll add many; many healthy years to your life, so you can do all the things you've wanted to do, spending time with people you care about. Make a long list of all the positive benefits of being a non-smoker!CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY
The Spiritual Effects of Psychedelic Drugs
In a follow-up to research showing that psilocybin, a substance contained in "sacred mushrooms," produces substantial spiritual effects, a Johns Hopkins team reports that those beneficial effects appear to last more than a year.
Writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the Johns Hopkins researchers note that most of the 36 volunteer subjects given psilocybin, under controlled conditions in a Hopkins study published in 2006, continued to say 14 months later that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.
"Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives," says lead investigator Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor in the Johns Hopkins departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Neuroscience.CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY
Scientific Evidence of a Living, Conscious Universe
I believe that the most far-reaching trend of our times is an emerging shift in our shared view of the universe – from thinking of it as dead to experiencing it as alive.
In regarding the universe as alive and ourselves as continuously sustained within that aliveness, we see that we are intimately related to everything that exists.This insight – that we are cousins to everything that exists in a living, continuously regenerated universe – represents a new way of looking at and relating to the world, and overcomes the profound separation that has marked our lives.
From the combined wisdom of science and spirituality is emerging an understanding that could provide the perceptual foundation for the diverse people of the world to come together in the shared enterprise of building a sustainable and meaningful future.
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