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What's the deal with OCD?
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"I'd better check......one more time.....just let me make sure.....I'd better go back...." In isolation these comments might come from anyone wondering whether the headlights are turned off on the car. But as the mantra of people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) these thoughts plague their daily lives. Whether its washing one's hands 25 times a day (above, scene taken from The Aviator (2004)) or checking to make sure the stove burner is off every hour on the hour, OCD can severely hobble one's peace of mind. More rightly, it may be a piece of brain that produces these intrusive thoughts. UCLA's Jeffrey Schwartz and his colleagues used PET scans to study the brains of obsessive-compulsive patients. They found that the orbita ...
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12155 |
Biology Forums |
A year ago |
Overcoming your fear of heights using technology
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The fear of heights experienced by acrophobics is no small matter; tall buildings, airplane rides, bridges, even stepladders may present a paralyzing challenge. A new therapeutic approach, however, can help to lessen the anxiety experienced by acrophobics. Ralph Lamsen, of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, uses virtual reality to desensitize acrophobes to their fear. The virtual world experienced through the helmet, glove, and handgrip presents a series of challenges relevant to the phobic situation. For example, clients are presented with a plank they must cross, an experience that usually produces elevated heart rate and blood pressure. Clients are encouraged to progress at a comfortable pace, staying at the edge of the plank until read ...
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14313 |
Biology Forums |
A year ago |
How to become an elephant
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Learning about how to become an elephant is almost synonymous with learning how to rediscover what it means to be human. Understanding elephants and saving elephants is a lesson in humanity. So many traits that are innate in elephants are those that we humans strive to be and possess. The "Elephant Lessons" take what we learn about elephant minds, culture and lives and applies it to our own everyday living to cultivate elephant qualities that are within each of us. Today's Lesson focuses on the Importance of Family. Dame Daphne Sheldrick (photo shown above), the founder and director of The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, has lived in Kenya and has been hand-rearing baby and orphaned elephants for over thirty years. She notes that they share ...
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6094 |
HeldCaptive |
9 years ago |
Fake it till you BECOME it
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Perhaps one of my favourite TEDtalks. Amy Cuddy’s research on body language reveals that we can change other people’s perceptions - and even our own body chemistry - simply by changing body positions. Her take-home message is simple, instead of faking it till you make it and living a life as an impostor, you must fake it till you become it.
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5192 |
bio_man |
8 years ago |
Are women better than men at sensing emotions?
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A new psychology study suggests that women are better than men at reading people's thoughts and emotions, just by looking at the eyes. Researchers from around the globe tested the way genes influence a person's cognitive empathy; their ability to accurately recognise another person's emotional state. 90,000 people were shown different photographs of people's eyes and asked to determine their mood. Results showed that women more consistently picked the correct feeling when the participants had to select what emotion they perceived when shown a visual of a person's eyes. This is the first big study on cognitive empathy and its relationship to gender. The international research team has also identified a potential genetic region that influences ...
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6251 |
bio_man |
6 years ago |
Are you a 'supertaster'?
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A supertaster is a individual who lives in a more intense taste world because they have up to twice as many taste buds than the average person. Among individuals of European descent, it is estimated that about 25% of the population are supertasters. The evolutionary advantage to supertasting is unclear. In some environments, heightened taste response, particularly to bitter plant alkaloids, would represent an important advantage. However, other environments, increased response to bitter may have limited the range palatable goods. In our modern energy rich environment, supertasting may be cardioprotective, due to decreased liking and intake of fat, but may increase cancer risk via deceased vegetable intake. It may be a cause of picky eating ...
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1436 |
bio_man |
6 years ago |
Male hand grip strength predicts your reproductive fitness and sexual behavior
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If you've ever been told to give a firm handshake at the start of an interview, this advice now holds scientific truth with a new study published by Frontiers in Psychology.According to the study, hand grip strength correlates with numerous measures involved in social and sexual competition in men, and typically fails to correlate (or to a lesser extent) with these measures among women. Given that this trait scores highest in people between the ages of 24 and 39 years, and subsequently weakens as we age, the author insists that hand grip strength is a powerful indicator of health and vitality for both men and women, as it relates to overall physical functioning and morbidity. Researchers of the study mention that the predominantly male-speci ...
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1292 |
bio_man |
6 years ago |
Why maintaining eye contact is tougher than it seems
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Have you ever felt awkward staring into a person's eyes while holding up a conversation? It turns out that there is a good scientific reason why some of us struggle with this. Research tells us that staring while trying to come up with the right words actually uses the same mental resources as sustaining eye contact. Scientists from Kyoto University in Japan put this to the test in 2016 by having 26 volunteers play word association games while staring at computer-generated faces. When making eye contact, the participants found it harder to come up with links between words, suggesting that there is interference between these processes. The volunteers were tested while looking at both animations of faces making eye contact and animations of fac ...
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8672 |
bio_man |
4 years ago |
Depth perception in babies
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Despite his mother beckoning him to come towards her, this infant hesitates to cross the "visual cliff" – an apparently steep drop that is actually covered by transparent glass. Psychologists in the 1960s found that most infants 6 to 14 months of age were reluctant to crawl over the cliff, suggesting they had the ability to perceive depth. Most psychologists believe that the ability to perceive depth is partly innate and partly a product of early visual experience. Here's a test you can try to demonstrate how your perception of depth is still live and active. Below are two perfect circles, yet the smaller circle appears distorted. Our brain interprets the converging lines to be adding depth to the screen, as if the solid middle is further aw ...
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18875 |
bio_man |
2 years ago |
Child with ADHD vs. one who is simply more active
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What's the difference between a child with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and one who is simply more active than other children?Many children are rambunctious, to an extent that their parents or teachers find somewhat worrisome. Figuring out how to distinguish between normal high-energy levels and pathological overactivity can be quite difficult. Furthermore, the distinction can be complicated by parental tendencies to be permissive and to fail to set up clear rules, reprimands, or restrictions for when a child steps outside the limits. Figuring out how to make this distinction is not a trivial issue. Children diagnosed with ADHD are usually prescribed methylphenidate (Ritalin) or other medications that lessen their activity ...
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4411 |
bio_man |
2 years ago |
Hand washing in public restrooms, not so common
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Bayer Corporation and the Public Health Committee of the American Society for Microbiology sponsored a study of hand washing in public restrooms. Researchers from the survey group hid in stalls or pretended to comb their hair while they observed over 6,000 men and women in five large cities. Their observations revealed that many people prefer a "get up and go" strategy, failing to wash their hands after using the restroom facilities. In New York's Penn Station, for example, only 60% of restroom users washed after relieving themselves. Similar rates were found in other cities: 64% of restroom users washed at a Braves game in Atlanta, 69% washed in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, 71% used soap and water in a New Orleans casino, and a laudab ...
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5183 |
bio_man |
A year ago |
What is the purpose of stress?
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The stress response exists for the purpose of survival. When we experience stress, our sympathetic nervous system activates, blood pressure and heart rate increase, and often we begin to sweat. These physiological reactions prepare us for "fight or flight." Our bodies are at optimal physical performance and alertness levels, and we are therefore optimized for survival in a physically challenging situation. Sometimes we use this physiological activation to our advantage: Consider a champion weightlifter who, prior to lifting an extremely heavy weight, "pumps himself up." By doing this, the weightlifter is attempting behaviorally to elicit a stress response from his brain and body in order to achieve the highest level of physical performance ...
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3732 |
bio_man |
A year ago |
A sense of control can aid recovery
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If emotions can make you sick, if a belief that you will die can kill you (as in voodoo deaths), and if a sugar pill that you believe is a powerful drug can take away your pain, can a belief that you can bring about your own recovery help you to recover?Even with acceptance of the role of emotional factors in both illness and recovery, the assumption has persisted that emotional factors work on an unconscious level, and because of this they are not subject to voluntary control. Most of us still see illness as something that happens to us. Dr. Carl Simonton, chief of radiation at Travis Air Force Base, questioned this assumption. He was impressed by demonstrations that people could learn to control autonomic processes through biofeedback and ...
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2164 |
bio_man |
A year ago |
A scientific explanation for déjà vu
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People are fascinated by the topic of déjà vu, or the feeling that one is reliving some prior experience. The déjà vu phenomenon has been investigated by psychologists throughout the history of the discipline, and a number of theories — neurological, supernatural, pathological, and otherwise — have been proposed to explain its presumed occurrence. A team of Dutch researchers, led by Herman Sno, have investigated the topic at length in recent years. Sno and his colleagues argue that the déjà vu experience can be examined using the hologram as a model. In holographic photography, each piece of an image contains the full information necessary to reproduce the image, a property that gives holographic images their three-dimensional qualities. T ...
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1882 |
bio_man |
A year ago |
I swear that thing was looking at me
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Pareidolia is a phenomenon that allows us to "see" faces and other objects in completely unrelated objects and settings. Carl Sagan theorized that this provided an evolutionary advantage, as it allows humans to better recognize each other, even under poor visual circumstances. The important thing to remember is that even though these images may seem significant and life-changing, they aren't. It's all just a really fun figment of your imagination.
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8921 |
duddy |
10 years ago |
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