Laughter Again Proves to be Good Medicine

A small group of diabetes patients at Loma Linda University were shown funny programs for a year and, at the conclusion of the study, were found to be in better shape than their peers in a humor-less control group.

According to LiveScience, researchers split 20 high-risk diabetic patients ~ all with hypertension and hyperlipidemia (a risk factor for cardiovascular disease) ~ into two groups. Both groups were given standard diabetes medication. One group, however, viewed 30 minutes of humor of their choosing, while the control group did not. (Note: Unfortunately the original article does not specify if the dose was daily, weekly or what.)

By two months into the study, the patients in the laughter group had lower levels of the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine, both considered to be measures of stress. After the 12 months, good HDL cholesterol had risen 26 percent in the laughter group but only 3 percent in the other. In yet another measure, C-reactive proteins, a marker of inflammation and cardiovascular disease, decreased 66 percent in the laughter group but only 26 percent in the control group.

"The best clinicians understand that there is an intrinsic physiological intervention brought about by positive emotions such as mirthful laughter, optimism and hope," said study leader Lee Berk.

Click here for the LiveScience article.

Belief in Afterlife, Ghosts, Astrology on the Rise

A new survey in Britain shows that 70 percent believe in the human soul and 53 percent believe in life after death. Conducted last fall for the think tank Theos, the survey also showed:

• 39 percent believe in ghosts
• 27 percent believe in reincarnation
• 22 percent believe in astrology or horoscopes
• 15 percent believe in fortune telling by Tarot cards

The think tank said the findings were "especially striking" when compared to the 1950s. Then only 10 percent of the public told Gallup they believed in ghosts, 7 percent said they believed in predicting the future by cards and 6 percent believed in astrology.

"The enlightenment optimism in the ability of science and reason to explain everything ended decades ago,” says Theos director Paul Woolley. "The extent of belief will probably surprise people, but the finding is consistent with other research we have undertaken. The results indicate that people have a very diverse and unorthodox set of beliefs.”

Click here for the BBC News article.

Peru to Protect Nazca Lines from Rainwater

A figure called La Mano (The Hand) damaged by unusual flooding.

Peru’s National Institute of Culture is preparing to protect from heavy rains the enigmatic Nazca Lines, located in the country’s southern region, according to the resident archaeologist in Nazca, Mario Olaechea.

"It's a project that will serve the whole area in general, including drainage services, to avoid events such as the one in January when rainwater accumulated and drained, covering with a clay layer of the geoglyph called La Mano", Olaechea said. "The figure has not been erased. It is still intact, only one percent was covered by the clay layer.”

In the first months of the year, heavy rains also affected the southern plains of Nazca, but without serious consequences.

Human Evolution May Be Accelerating

Humans are continuing to evolve as our genes respond to rapid changes in the world around us. In fact, according to some anthropologists, the pressures of modern life may be speeding up human evolution.

The idea that "human evolution is a continuing process is widely accepted among anthropologists,'' Robert Wald Sussman, editor of the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, told McClatchy news. This concept contradicts the 20th-century assumption that modern medical practice, antibiotics, better diet and other advances would protect people from the perils and stresses that drive evolutionary change.

It's even conceivable, Sussman said, that our genes eventually will change enough to create an entirely new human species, one no longer able to breed with our own species, Homo sapiens.

"Someday in the far distant future, enough genetic changes might have occurred so that future populations could not interbreed with the current one,'' he speculates.

Click here for the complete article.

Sorry You're Not As Beautiful . . .

Not a lot needs to be said here. Study these two images and you can clearly see how the original photographic image of Faith Hill has been digitally altered for the magazine cover. This is what surrounds us all of the time … in print, on television and in the movies. Any doubt about why so many people feel they don’t measure up?

People Still Place Meaning on Dreams

"The Dream," by Henri Rousseau, 1910.

Here are excerpts from a group of psychological studies concerning dreams, as documented recently in this month's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association:

• Researchers in the United States, India and South Korea asked 149 students to rate different theories about dreams. Across all three cultures, an overwhelming majority of the students endorsed the theory that dreams reveal hidden truths about themselves and the world, a belief also endorsed by a nationally representative sample of Americans.

• In another study, researchers surveyed 182 commuters at a Boston train station, asking them to imagine that one of four possible scenarios had happened the night before a scheduled airline trip: The national threat level was raised to orange; they consciously thought about their plane crashing; they dreamed about a plane crash; or a real plane crash occurred on the route they planned to take. A dream of a plane crash was more likely to affect travel plans, and the dream of a plane crash produced a similar level of anxiety as did an actual crash.

• Researchers asked 270 men and women from across the United States to remember a dream they had had about a person they knew. People ascribed more importance to pleasant dreams about a person they liked as compared to a person they did not like, while they were more likely to consider an unpleasant dream more meaningful if it was about a person they disliked.

And yet another study demonstrated that people who believe in God were likely to consider dreams where God spoke to them to be meaningful. Agnostics considered dreams in which God spoke to be more meaningful when God commanded them to take a pleasant vacation than when God commanded them to engage in self-sacrifice.

Click here for the Science Daily article.

One of my favorite astrology blogs is AstroTableTalk by a fellow calling himself Dharmaruci, out of Glastonbury, UK. Here’s part of a long and provocative post from last week, “Uranus-Pluto: It’s Time for Big, New Ideas.”

The 1929 Crash led directly to the Great Depression, they were part of the same process. In 1929, Uranus and Pluto were 10 degrees off a square, so I think we need to see that degree of separation as valid. This July Uranus and Pluto will be just 5 degrees off a square, so a fortiori this square is already very much with us, destroying our present reality in a big way, but also starting to provide the inspiration for some big new ideas.

We may, for example, see a resurgence of Communism. I was watching a French philosopher being interviewed on TV, and in response to this idea, the interviewer said isn’t that old hat, a dated 20th century idea that’s been proved wrong? And the philosopher said no, we just got the application wrong, but as an idea it still remains valid. But, he added, we also need some new ideas as well.

The capitalist model we have been living under is taking a hammering. The politicians are having to drop their ideologies and be intensely pragmatic in order to save the world economy. So space is opening up for new ideas.

Click here for the complete post.

Recession Raises Psychological Concerns

With the current worldwide recession battering Britain along with everybody else, the British Psychological Society devoted part of its annual meeting in Brighton last week to the impact of the economic downturn on people’s mental health. Here are some snippets:

Says Professor Stephen Lea of the University of Exeter:

"Money is a strong motivating force in society. Yet unlike other strong motivators such as food or sex, it has no apparent or direct biological basis. It can be seen not only as a useful tool for society, but also as a powerful drug. Modern money is, in a sense, a mutual confidence trick. Money and financial instruments like stocks and shares, only work because everyone believes that they will work.”

"Confidence in the supposed instrumental support for some kinds of money, or money-related tools, has collapsed resulting in substantial disorder in behavior. On the other hand, many people have suddenly been put in a situation where they are either in debt or are almost bound to go into debt. We need to consider whether there has been a mass psychology of both money and debt that has contributed to the credit crunch".

According to another speaker, Peter Cooper, chief executive of CRAM International and a fellow with the Market Research Society:

"For many people the recession is creating profound fears about loss of home, love, self-respect, and above all loss of meaning in their lives. Anxiety and depression are increasingly evident. Many blame the 'greed' of the past. Others see it as an opportunity for 'cleansing' and a 'new beginning'. However, many people lack the psychological resources to cope.”

"Psychological factors have played a part in the origins of the crisis, and are now critical in its resolution for individual and social well-being. Understanding psychological needs and working in partnership with organizations in fields like economics, ecology and politics can help forge the new world people are seeking."

Click here for the Medical News Today article.

The great Way is easy,
yet people prefer the side paths.
Be aware when things are out of balance.
Stay centered within the Tao.

When rich speculators prosper
while farmers lose their land;
when government officials spend money
on weapons instead of cures;
when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible
while the poor have nowhere to turn --
all this is robbery and chaos.
It is not in keeping with the Tao.

Early Christian Diet Laden with Fish

Roman fish mosaic from the early Christian period.

Early Christians ate more fish then their non-Christian counterparts. Some scientists theorize it was because the early Christians tended to be poor. Others will content it was because the fish was the symbol of the faith. And still other, I’m sure, would attribute the fish-laden diet to the Age of Pisces that dawned during at the outset of the Christian era and also is symbolized by the fish.

“The eating habits of Rome’s early Christians are more complex than has traditionally been assumed,” writes Leonard Rutgers and his colleagues in The Journal of Archaeological Science. They analyzed 22 skeletons found in the Catacombs of St. Callixtus on the Appian Way, an area utilized in the 3rd to 5th centuries AD, although some of the skeletons were radiocarbon-dated to the 2nd century, according to the Times of London.

“While distancing themselves from Jewish food taboos and generally avoiding meat derived from pagan sacrifices, the early Christians are normally hypothesized to have eaten the same food as their non-Christian Roman contemporaries,” the team says. “Within the larger context of what is currently known about Roman dietary habits, the inclusion of freshwater fish therefore comes as unexpected and raises questions about the social origins of Christianity as well.”

“When Romans ate fish at all, they are normally believed to have consumed sea fish. Freshwater fish has not been considered as an essential ingredient in the classical Roman diet.” In AD301, the Emperor Diocletian’s Edict on Prices tried to fix the cost of freshwater fish at around a half to a third of its marine equivalent, so that even the poor could eat it. Roman fish probably came from the Tiber, and would have been a free or cheap source of protein.

Rutgers and his colleagues conclude “that at least the small selection of early Christians analyzed were all simple folk, suggesting that the inclusion of freshwater fish is indicative of a relative lack of wealth rather than of religiously motivated ascetic behavior."

Click here for the complete Times of London article.

Vatican Reveals Shroud's Missing Years

The Vatican – in a surprise announcement this week – revealed that members of the Knights Templar hid and secretly venerated the Shroud of Turin for more than a century following the Crusades.

The linen shroud has been revered as the cloth in which Jesus was buried. In 1898 a photographic negative revealed the image of a bearded, wounded man somehow embedded in the fabric. The shroud disappeared from Constantinople in 1204 and resurfaced in the mid 1300s, leaving a century when its whereabouts a mystery.

The Knights Templar were founded at the time of the First Crusade in the eleventh century to protect Christians making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, recently found a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier ~ a young Frenchman who entered the Knights Templar order in 1287 ~ testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access.” There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times.

The Vatican now believes the Knights Templar rescued the shroud in Constantinople to ensure it didn’t fall into the hands of heretical groups such as the Cathars, who claimed Christ did not have a true human body, only the appearance of a man, and could therefore not have died on the Cross and been resurrected.

Radiocarbon dating tests on the Turin Shroud in 1988 indicated it was a medieval fake. However this had been challenged on the grounds that the dated sample was taken from an area of the shroud mended after a fire in the Middle Ages and was not a part of the original cloth.

The Vatican has not declared whether it is genuine or a forgery, leaving it to believers to decide. The late John Paul II said it was “an icon of the suffering of the innocent in every age.” Self-proclaimed heirs of the Knights Templar have asked the Vatican to “restore the reputation” of the disgraced order and acknowledge that assets worth some £80 million were confiscated.

Click here for the complete London Times article and a 2-minute video about the shroud.

At top is a photographic images from the shroud. Painting is a depiction of a Knights Templar member, and the society's insignia is at left.

Striving to Define Shamans vs. Priests

An important step toward clarifying ancient “religious specialists” is occurring and should provide archaeologists with a more consistent framework in defining a “shaman” versus a “priest.”

The Signs of the Sacred: Identifying Shamans Using Archaeological Evidence by Christine VanPool is being published in the upcoming Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, and the article is discussed in Kris Hirst’s About.com archaeology blog.

According to Hirst, quoting VanPool, religious specialists are people in a given society who have a connection to the deities who control things humans cannot.

“Religious specialists are classed by dry-as-dust archaeologists as ‘craft specialists’, and the presence of craft specialists ~ people with assigned part-time or fulltime jobs including crop tending and child care and pot making and flint knapping and tending to the religious needs of a society ~ is one of those characteristics of complex societies that anthropologists (and archaeologists) use to discuss how people organize themselves,” Hirst writes.

Definitions of the two major religious specialists, based on VanPool’s paper, are:

• A shaman is a type of religious specialist who uses altered states of consciousness to directly interact with gods and supernatural agents. Shamans are usually part time practitioners, who are part supernatural beings, at least some of the time. Shamans are generally associated with hunter-gatherer level societies. Shamans have special fetishes and their iconography (the symbols they use) include liminal creatures—creatures that are part-human, part-god, and/or part-animal; creatures that like the shaman him or herself are part in the mundane world, part in the otherwise inaccessible world of the gods.

• A priest, in the anthropological sense, is a full-time religious specialist who acts as a representative for a society's deity or deities. Priests are generally associated with societies that have attained at least the complexity associated with regular agriculture. Priests perform regular or cyclical rituals that ease the supernatural relationship between human and god. Unlike shamans, they don't typically address issues between individuals and deities, but rather speak as a mediator between the entire society and the gods which rule the earth.

The two categories are created by archaeologists and anthropologists, and are not mutually exclusive in real-life applications ~ you can have both types of specialists in a given society.

“Some societies have shaman-priests who combine traits of both,” Hirst writes. “Further, many native religions were greatly impacted by colonization and missionaries, creating a great loss of diversity; but colonization, agricultural complexity and even urbanization does not necessarily entail a complete shift away from shamanism.”

Click here for Kris Hirst’s post.
Click here for VanPool’s original article, which requires purchase.

Photos are late 1800s portraits of shamans, most Siberian.

Subliminal Messages Improve Recall

A new study has been released again showing that subliminally received information has a definite effect on our minds.

Researchers at Northwestern University showed volunteers 12 kaleidoscope images for two seconds each while the volunteers also performed an unrelated number task to distract them from consciously committing the images to memory. A minute later, the volunteers were asked to look at pairs of similar-looking images and choose the one they had seen before. They were also asked whether they were sure, had "a feeling" they were right, or were just guessing.

Those who said they were guessing still were 70 to 80 percent accurate, indicating the information had been stored even though they were unaware of it. A true guess based on pure chance would be only about 50 percent accurate.

During the memory task, the brain activity was monitored via electrical sensors attached to the volunteers’ heads. The pattern of activity differed between the "guessers" and the other groups, suggesting that we access unconscious and conscious visual memories differently.

Click here for the New Scientist article.

Insight Meditation Can Change Brain's Structure

A new study by leading researchers shows meditation is associated with increased cortical thickness. The structural changes were found in areas of the brain important for sensory, cognitive and emotional processing.

The extensive study on meditation involved researchers from Yale, Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It included 20 participants, all with extensive training in Buddhist Insight meditation, and who meditated an average of 40 minutes a day for the study.

"What is most fascinating to me is the suggestion that meditation practice can change anyone's grey matter," says Jeremy Gray, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale.

Magnetic resonance imaging showed that regular practice of meditation is associated with increased thickness in a subset of cortical regions related to sensory, auditory, visual and internal perception, such as heart rate or breathing. The researchers also found that regular meditation practice may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex.

"Most of the regions identified in this study were found in the right hemisphere," researchers said. "The right hemisphere is essential for sustaining attention, which is a central practice of Insight meditation."

Click here for the article in Medical News Today.
Photo at right is microscopy image of cerebral cortex.

Number 10 ~ TREADING (Conduct)

Treading upon the tail of the tiger.
It does not bite the man. Success.

The situation is really difficult. That which is strongest and that which is weakest are close together. The weak follows behind the strong and worries it. The strong, however, acquiesces and does not hurt the weak, because the contact is in good humor and harmless. In terms of a human situation, one is handling wild, intractable people. In such a case, one's purpose will be achieved if one behaves with decorum. Pleasant manners succeed even with irritable people.

Consciousness is More Than Our Brains

As anyone who’s a steady reader of this blog knows, there are a lot of current scientific studies trying to explain how we think and how we view the world. The most recent one below is a good example ~ do religious people have a less active anterior cingulated cortex, and if so, what does that mean?

I’m becoming increasingly uncomfortable with many of these neuroscientific studies. Either the researchers themselves are becoming more extreme in what they believe the evidence shows, or the news articles are sensationalizing the findings.

Likely some of both.

That’s why I’m interested in a new book by Alva Noë, a philosopher at the University of California. In Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness, he clearly disputes that our brains can be understood in their entirety by a bunch of laboratory tests.

Here are some quotes from Noë that I lifted from a recent interview in Salon.com. They give you a good idea of where he’s coming from:

I don't reject the idea that the brain is necessary for consciousness; but I do reject the argument that it is sufficient. That's just a fancy, contemporary version of the old philosophical idea that our true selves are interior, cut off from the outside world, only accidentally situated in the world. The view I'm attacking claims that neural activity is enough to explain consciousness, that you could have consciousness in a petri dish. It supposes that consciousness happens inside the brain the way digestion occurs inside the GI tract. But consciousness is not like digestion; it doesn't happen inside of us. It is something we do, something we achieve. It's more like dance than it is like digestion.

* * * * *

I think of religions as communal and as literary traditions, both things existing outside the brain. I don't think of religious belief as something we can understand individualistically. When someone says they believe in God, you've got to understand the practices, customs, backgrounds and social realities that are part of that. None of it is going to reduce to anything individual inside of that person's brain. People like Sam Harris, who worry about the irrationality of religious customs and practices, are right to be concerned. I agree that religion can be dangerous. But I don't think neuroscience is the way to understand it at all.

* * * * *

Instead of asking how the brain makes us conscious, we should ask, How does the brain support the kind of involvement with the world in which our consciousness consists? This is what the best neuroscientists do. The brain is not the author of our experience. If we want to understand the role of the brain, we should ask, How does the brain enable us to interact with and keep track of the world as we do? What makes a certain pattern of brain activity a conscious perceptual experience has nothing to do with the cells themselves, or with the way they are firing, but rather with the way the cells' activity is responsive to and helps us regulate our engagement with the world around us.

Click here for the entire Salon.com interview.
Photo at left is Alva Noë

Does Religion Reduce Perception of Error?

(The more I think about this article, the more I feel it's open for wide interpretation. If the subject interests you, I recommend you follow the link to the complete article for more details.)

A team of researchers recently took a close look at a small area of the brain called the anterior cingulated cortex, or ACC. According to research leader Michael Inzlicht, the ACC tells us when something is wrong, as when we've made a mistake.

"When it's fired, the response engendered is 'uh-oh, pay attention, something is amiss here'," says Inzlicht, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto.

• Among his findings are that people of a religious persuasion have less of an ACC ‘uh-oh’ response than non-religious types when they make an error on a simple test.

• On the other hand, people with known anxiety disorders tend to show high activity in the ACC when they make a mistake.

One explanation is that people with a genetic predisposition to reduced ACC activity gravitate toward religion. "It's possible that if you're born with a certain kind of brain, you're predisposed to religion," Inzlicht says. A recent article in New Scientist adds:

However, Inzlicht suspects that religious belief is driving the association. In unpublished experiments, Inzlicht's team asked religious volunteers to describe in writing either their faith or their favourite season. Those who wrote about their connection to God exhibited reduced ACC activation, compared with people who described the weather.

Inzlicht says it would be interesting to test people as their religious devotion strengthens or weakens over time to see if ACC activation changes accordingly. This could help confirm the correct explanation for the lower ACC activity.

"It's a very provocative finding and it is consistent with a lot of other things we know about religion" says Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. This might explain why religious belief seems to blunt feelings of anxiety.

Inzlicht's team tested 50 university students from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds. Christians made up most participants, but his team also tested Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists.

Click here for the complete New Scientist article.

Some 'Possession' Cases Still Baffle Exorcists

St. Francis Borgia Exorcising, by Francisco Goya, 1788.

Does Evil exist? Does Satan? How about Demonic Possession?

Such questions are nearly as old as Western Civilization and even if such notions are discarded by the scientific and medical communities, they’re still excellent fodder for scary books and movies.

That’s why I was interested to read of a new book entitled The Rite by journalist Matt Baglio, who follows an American priest named Father Gary, who is sent to Rome to learn to become an exorcist.

TIME magazine this week printed an interview with Baglio. Here are a few of the more interesting questions and answers taken directly from the TIME interview:

When you started the book, did you lean one way or another in terms of whether or not you believed in the possibility of exorcism?


I came at this topic very journalistically, not having an opinion for or against it. I wanted to really understand what it is and why the church still believes in it. But even exorcists themselves admit that 90% of the people that come to see them don't need an exorcism. There still remains a small percentage of cases, however, involving levitation, mind-reading and other paranormal phenomena that can't be explained through science. Maybe one day.

So how is a priest supposed to figure out that an exorcism is warranted? How do they judge who is and who isn't a worthy candidate?


The ritual stipulates that there are three signs that the priest has to look for: abnormal strength, the ability to understand unknown languages and the knowledge of hidden things. But they're very arbitrary, even those things. So they have to be in concert with something else. And typically what priests look for is what they call the aversion to the sacred, which is a person's inability to pray, to say the name of Jesus or Mary, to even look at the priest. Typically, when the person comes to see them, it's the last thing they want to do. They tend to have gone to see many doctors in search of a medical cure for whatever is afflicting them. They don't believe that the problem is demonic. They don't come in and say, "Father, I'm being attacked by demons. You need to pray over me." When someone says that to them, the priests immediately discounts that the problem is demonic.

So what happens during the exorcism rite?

The ritual, as its written, has several different stages to it. You say the litany of saints, you read the Gospel, you say a homily. The priest is allowed to bring in other elements if he wants to — the renewal of the baptismal vows, for example. But at the core of it are the exorcism prayers themselves, which are composed of the imperative and the depreciatory. The depreciatory involves the exorcist entreating God — "God, come down and bless this person." The imperative is the command, "I command you to leave this person." If you were to do the whole thing from start to finish, it would take out about an hour. But none of the priests that I followed in Rome do it like that. Almost all of them get rid of everything except the exorcism prayers. And the reason they do that is because they don't have time. They have a waiting room of 20 people. That's one day. The next day they have another 20 people.

Click here for the complete TIME interview.

Gratitude Seen as Essential to Happiness

Gratitude ~ the emotion of thankfulness and joy in response to receiving a perceived gift ~ is an essential ingredient for living a good life. And when it comes to achieving this well-being, gender plays a role. It seems men are much less likely to feel and express gratitude than women.

So says Todd Kashdan, an associate professor of psychology at George Mason University, whose most recent paper was published online this week at the Journal of Personality. Kashdan says that if he had to name three elements essential for creating happiness and meaning in life they would be:

• Gratitude
• Meaningful relationships
• Living in the present moment with an attitude of openness and curiosity.

"Previous studies on gratitude have suggested that there might be a difference in gender, and so we wanted to explore this further, and find out why. Even if it is a small effect, it could make a huge difference in the long run," says Kashdan.

In one study, Kashdan interviewed college-aged students and older adults, asking them to describe and evaluate a recent episode in which they received a gift. He found that:

• Women compared with men reported feeling less burden and obligation and greater levels of gratitude when presented with gifts.

• Older men reported greater negative emotions when the gift giver was another man.

"The way that we get socialized as children affects what we do with our emotions as adults," says Kashdan. "Because men are generally taught to control and conceal their softer emotions, this may be limiting their well-being."

Click here for the complete Medical News Today article.

Debate Erupts About Dead Sea Scrolls

If you're at all interested in Biblical or Jesus history, you might want to visit my Ancient Tides blog for a couple of posts regarding new scholarship that's rocking beliefs about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem says the sect that supposedly authored the scrolls ~ the Essenes ~ likely never existed, and that the scrolls are the work instead of Jewish priests writing about Sadducees in Jerusalem. This calls into question considerable speculation that Jesus may have been associated with the Essenes.

If right, this new scholarship throws into doubt some long-standing contentions regarding early Christianity and paves the way for fascinating revisions.

Higher IQ Can Mean a Longer Life

(Here's another take on the impact of human intelligence, coming on the heels of last week's post regarding IQ and personal wealth.)

A massive Swedish study shows a distinct correlation between intelligence and lowered risk of death. As for the inverse, researchers also found that a lower IQ was strongly associated with a higher risk of death from causes such as accidents, coronary heart disease and suicide.

The researchers studied data from one million Swedish men conscripted to the army at the age of 18. After they had taken into account whether a person had grown up in a safer, more affluent environment, they found that only education had an influence on the relationship between IQ and death. 

The link between IQ and mortality could be partially attributed to the healthier behaviors displayed by those who score higher on IQ tests.

"People with higher IQ test scores tend to be less likely to smoke or drink alcohol heavily, they eat better diets, and they are more physically active. So they have a range of better behaviors that may partly explain their lower mortality risk," says researcher Dr. David Batty of the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow.

A second study also co-authored by Batty used data from more than 4,000 US soldiers and followed them for 15 years. The study found the same relationship between IQ scores and mortality, as well as a significant association between higher neuroticism and increased mortality risk.

Click here for the complete Science Daily article.

Human Smell of Fear is Contagious

New research proves humans, when frightened, emit a particular odor that turns fear contagious. In fact, just a whiff of the odor of fear can turn an ambiguous situation into a frightening one.

"Our findings provide direct behavioral evidence that human sweat contains emotional meanings," says Denise Chen, a psychologist at Rice University in Houston.

In a recent study, male participants watched neutral clips, slapstick comedies and horror flicks, while a gauze pad in their armpits collected sweat. Later, female participants smelled the gauze pads as they watched images of faces that changed from somewhat happy to neutral to somewhat fearful.

• Researchers chose males as sweat donors because of their larger apocrine sweat glands. The men used only scent-free shampoo, conditioner and soap provided by the lab several days beforehand, and kept a diet journal to avoid odorous foods such as garlic, onion and asparagus.

• The study also used female respondents because of their better sense of smell and higher sensitivity to emotional cues.

The women were more likely to interpret ambiguous faces as fearful when they were smelling the "fear sweat," but only in the case of ambiguous faces. They still interpreted somewhat happy or somewhat scared faces according to what they saw.

Click here to read the complete LiveScience article.

Number 29 ~ THE ABYSMAL (Water)

The Abysmal repeated.

If you are sincere, you have success in your heart,

And whatever you do succeeds.

Through repetition of danger we grow accustomed to it. Water sets the example for the right conduct under such circumstances. It flows on and on, and merely fills up all the places through which it flows; it does not shrink from any dangerous spot nor from any plunge, and nothing can make it lose its own essential nature. It remains true to itself under all conditions. Thus likewise, if one is sincere when confronted with difficulties, the heart can penetrate the meaning of the situation. And once we have gained inner mastery of a problem, it will come about naturally that the action we take will succeed. In danger, all that counts is really carrying out all that has to be done ~ thoroughness ~ and going forward, in order not to perish through tarrying in the danger.

Is There Something Behind These Current Events?

Some conspiracy theories intrigue me and others I reject outright as just silly. However, the "world dominion" and "new world order" theories I put in the first category ~ intriguing ~ because so much has occurred during my lifetime to reinforce the concept. Some level of substantiation surfaces whenever I spend much time watching cable news.

The current economic and monetary crisis carries overtones of new-world-order thinking. The prominence of the Federal Reserve in developing our much-needed "solutions." The whispers already being heard of the need for a worldwide currency to "stabilize" international monetary problems. The presumed "socialist" governmental support of failing industries, when actually the Federal Reserve, through its unprecedented control over fiscal policy, actually is the body pulling the strings.

With all of that in mind, I offer this 10-minute video. Perhaps it's exaggerated or just silly, but you can't deny the ongoing references to "new world order" we've heard for decades, the paternalistic approach government and world leaders have exhibited toward their mass populations, and ~ worst of all, in my estimation ~ the numbing and dumbing of the populace who listens passively as they absorb world-domination messages from the inanity of the mass media.

So here it is. I hope you can spare at least a minute or two to get the idea.

IQ Not a Factor in Personal Wealth

A national survey has shown that people with below-average intelligence can be just as wealthy as geniuses. In fact, people with high IQs may make higher salaries but often are disasters when it comes to managing their money.

"What the results really say is it doesn't matter whether you are born smart or you are not born smart, you can do financially okay," said the study's author Jay Zagorsky, an economist at Ohio State University.

The study also showed that highly intelligent people have financial difficulties, maxing out credit cards and missing bill payments. Zagorsky suggests that the financial troubles could be linked with an inability to save money.

Higher IQ, Higher Income

Participants with higher IQ scores tended to earn higher incomes, with each additional IQ point associated with an income boost of $202 to $616 each year. For example, a person with an IQ that's in the top 2 percent of society (130 points) would earn between $6,000 and $18,500 per year more than an individual with an average IQ of about 100 points.

The results showed a financial sweet spot of sorts that hovered around the average IQ score, for which people had the lowest financial distress.

Ultimately, a person's IQ had no impact on his or her wealth. So even though the "rocket scientists" earned on average higher incomes, they didn't have the savings to show it. And in fact, some higher-IQ people had more problems with maxing out credit cards and missing bill payments.

Click here for the complete LiveScience article.

Peking Man's Age Now at 750,000 Years

Homo erectus skull from the Zhoukoudian caves.

A new and more accurate dating method shows Peking Man may be 200,000 years older than previously thought. Bones of Sinanthropus pekinensis ~ a Homo erectus commonly known as Peking Man ~ were discovered in the 1920s during cave excavations near Beijing and now believed to be 750,000 years old.

Scientists have used various techniques to try and date the fossils, but a lack of suitable methods for cave deposits has limited their accuracy. Shen and his colleagues used a relatively new method that examines the radioactive decay of aluminum and beryllium in quartz grains, which enabled them to get a more precise age for the fossils.

"The analysis dated the finds to around 750,000 years old, some 200,000 years older than previous estimates and indicates a hominin presence in the area through glacial and interglacial cycles. The results should help to build a more reliable chronology of human evolution in East Asia," the researchers wrote.

Click here for the Reuters article.
Click here for a more extensive LiveScience article.

Is 'Full-Moon Madness' a Myth?

The familiar concept of “full-moon madness” is being examined in the harsh light of day by a number of scientists who now are concluding it’s mostly … well, lunacy.

Essentially, the scientists say the condition is a psychological urban legend, according to an article in the new issue of Scientific American. But if it’s just a legend, why is it so widespread?

• Media coverage almost surely plays a role. Scores of Hollywood horror flicks portray full-moon nights as peak times of spooky occurrences such as stabbings, shootings and psychotic behaviors.

• Perhaps more important, research demonstrates that many people fall prey to “illusory correlation” ~ the perception of an association that does not in fact exist. For example, many people who have joint pain insist that their pain increases during rainy weather, although research disconfirms this assertion. Much like the watery mirages we observe on freeways during hot summer days, illusory correlations can fool us into perceiving phenomena in their absence.

As for how the full-moon notion got started, the article quotes psychiatrist Charles Raison of Emory University:

According to Raison, the lunar lunacy effect may possess a small kernel of truth in that it may once have been genuine. Raison conjectures that before the advent of outdoor lighting in modern times, the bright light of the full moon deprived people who were living outside ~ including many who had severe mental disorders ~ of sleep. Because sleep deprivation often triggers erratic behavior in people with certain psychological conditions, such as bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression), the full moon may have been linked to a heightened rate of bizarre behaviors in long-bygone eras. So the lunar lunacy effect is, in Raison and his colleagues’ terms, a “cultural fossil.”

Click here to read the complete Scientific American article.

Number 24 ~ THE RETURN (The Turning Point)

Return. Success.
Going out and coming in without error.
Friends come without blame.
To and fro goes the way.
On the seventh day comes return.
It furthers one to have somewhere to go.

After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has been banished returns. There is movement, but it is not brought about by force. The upper trigram is characterized by devotion; thus the movement is natural, arising spontaneously. For this reason the transformation of the old becomes easy. The old is discarded and the new is introduced. Both measures accord with the time; therefore no harm results. Societies of people sharing the same views are formed. But since these groups come together in full public knowledge and are in harmony with the time, all selfish separatist tendencies are excluded and no mistake is made.

The idea of Return is based on the course of nature. The movement is cyclic, and the course completes itself. Therefore it is not necessary to hasten anything artificially. Everything comes of itself at the appointed time. This is the meaning of heaven and earth.

DNA Shows Mysterious Telephathic Qualities

Scientists are reporting that intact double-stranded DNA has an “amazing” ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands at a distance ~ somehow identifying one another ~ and that the tiny bits of genetic material tend to congregate with similar DNA.

There is no known reason why the DNA is able to combine in the way it does, and from a current theoretical standpoint this feat should be chemically impossible, scientists say.

Communication But No Physical Contact

Research published in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry shows clearly that homology recognition between sequences of several hundred nucleotides occurs without physical contact or presence of proteins. Double helixes of DNA can recognize matching molecules from a distance and then gather together, all seemingly without help from any other molecules or chemical signals.

In the study, scientists observed the behavior of fluorescently tagged DNA strands placed in water that contained no proteins or other material that could interfere with the experiment. Strands with identical nucleotide sequences were about twice as likely to gather together as DNA strands with different sequences.

May Foster DNA Repair

No one knows how individual DNA strands could be communicating in this way.

“Amazingly, the forces responsible for the sequence recognition can reach across more than one nanometer of water separating the surfaces of the nearest neighbor DNA,” said study authors Geoff S. Baldwin, Sergey Leikin, John M. Seddon, and Alexei A. Kornyshev and colleagues.

This recognition effect may help increase the accuracy and efficiency of the homologous recombination of genes, which is a process responsible for DNA repair, evolution, and genetic diversity. The new findings may also shed light on ways to avoid recombination errors, which are factors in cancer, aging, and other health issues.

Click here for the Daily Galaxy article.

Suit Goes After Yale's Secret Society

A reputed photo of Geronimo's remains used in Skull and Bones secret rituals. Photo below shows Geronimo in 1887.


Descendants of the Apache warrior Geronimo are suing the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale University to retrieve the warrior’s skull, which they claim was robbed from his grave in 1918 by Prescott Bush, scion of the Bush family.

The claim is part of a lawsuit filed in late February in federal court in Washington. Geronimo’s heirs are seeking to have all his remains transferred to a new grave at the headwaters of the Gila River in New Mexico, where Geronimo wished to be interred. “I believe strongly from my heart that his spirit was never released,” Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo, 61, recently told reporters at the National Press Club.

Prescott Bush the Alleged Thief

Geronimo died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Okla., in 1909. A longstanding tradition among members of Skull and Bones holds that Prescott S. Bush ~ father of President George Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush ~ broke into the grave with some classmates in 1918 and made off with the skull, two bones, a bridle and some stirrups, all of which were put on display at the group’s clubhouse in New Haven, known as the Tomb.

“Of all the items rumored to be in the Skull and Bones’s possession, Geronimo’s skull is one of the more plausible ones,” Alexandra Robbins, the author of “Secrets of the Tomb” (Little Brown 2002), a book about the society, told the New York Times. “There is a skull encased in a glass display when you walk in the door of the Tomb, and they call it Geronimo.”

The Skull and Bones is one of America's most famous secret societies, noted for its bizarre rituals and a prestigious list of members, including U.S. presidents and Supreme Court justices. It is a popular topic among some conspiracy theorists.

Though the society is not officially affiliated with the university, many of Yale’s most powerful alumni are members, among them both Bush presidents and Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts.

Click here for the complete New York Times article.

Meditation Can Alter Neural Perception

Researchers have found evidence that skills developed by Tibetan Buddhist monks in their practice of a certain type of meditation strongly influences their experience of "perceptual rivalry," dealing with attention and consciousness.

Perceptual rivalry arises when two different images are presented to each eye, and it is manifested as a fluctuation ~ typically over the course of seconds ~ in the "dominant" image that is consciously perceived. The neural events underlying perceptual rivalry are not well understood but are thought to involve brain mechanisms that regulate attention and conscious awareness.

Some previous work had suggested that skilled meditators can alter certain aspects of their brain's neural activity. To gain insight into how visual perception is regulated within the brain, researchers in the new study chose to investigate the extent to which certain types of trained meditative practice can influence the conscious experience of visual perceptual rivalry.

With the support of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 76 Tibetan Buddhist monks participated in the study, which was carried out at or near their mountain retreats in the Himalaya, Zanskar, and Ladakhi Ranges of India. The monks possessed meditative training ranging from 5 to 54 years.

Two Types of Meditation

The researchers tested the experience of visual rivalry by monks during the practice of two types of meditation:

• “Compassion"-oriented meditation, described as a contemplation of suffering within the world combined with an emanation of loving kindness.

• “One-point" meditation, described as the maintained focus of attention on a single object or thought, a focus that leads to a stability and clarity of mind.

Whereas no observable change in the rate of "visual switching" during rivalry was seen in monks practicing compassion meditation, major increases in the durations of perceptual dominance were experienced by monks practicing one-point meditation.

Within this group, three monks reported complete visual stability during the entire five-minute meditation period. Increases in duration of perceptual dominance were also seen in other monks after a period of one-point meditation.

Click here for the complete Medical News Today article.

Doodling Shown to Enhance Recall Abilities

According to a new study published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, subjects given a doodling task while listening to a dull phone message had a 29% improved recall compared to their non-doodling counterparts.

Forty members of a research panel were asked to listen to a 2.5-minute tape giving several names of people and places and were told to write down only the names of people going to a party. Half of the participants were asked to shade in shapes on a piece of paper at the same time, but paying no attention to neatness. Participants were not asked to doodle naturally so that they would not become self-conscious. None of the participants were told it was a memory test.

After the tape had finished, all participants in the study were asked to recall the eight names of the party-goers they were asked to write down, as well as eight additional place names which were included as incidental information.

The doodlers recalled on average 7.5 names of people and places compared to only 5.8 by the non-doodlers.

"If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream," said study researcher Professor Jackie Andrade of the University of Plymouth in England. "Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poorer performance. A simple task ~ like doodling ~ may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task."

"This study suggests that in everyday life doodling may be something we do because it helps to keep us on track with a boring task, rather than being an unnecessary distraction that we should try to resist doing," Andrade added.

Click here for the complete Medical News Today article.

Perception of Power Often Misguided

None of us needs to look very far to spot someone whose sense of personal power has gone to his or her head. If you don’t happen to have a power-monger friend or relative, simply turn on cable news and you’ll be overdosing in a matter of minutes.

It comes as no surprise to even the casual observer that people who hold power ~ real or only self-perceived ~ are often misguided in their actions.

In a new study reported today in ScienceDaily, Nathanael Fast and Deborah Gruenfeld at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Niro Sivanathan at the London Business School and Adam Galinsky at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, show that power can literally "go to one's head," causing individuals to think they have more personal control over outcomes than they really do.

• Leaders and commanders of warring nations regularly underestimate the costs in time, money, and human lives required for bringing home a victory.

• CEOs of Fortune 500 companies routinely overestimate their capacity to turn mergers and acquisitions into huge profits, leading to financial losses for themselves, their companies, and their stockholders. 

• Even ordinary people seem to take on an air of invincibility after being promoted to a more powerful position. 

The consequences of these tendencies, especially when present in the world's most powerful leaders, can be devastating.

"We conducted four experiments exploring the relationship between power and illusory control ~ the belief that one has the ability to influence outcomes that are largely determined by chance," said Galinksy. 

"In each experiment ~ whether the participant recalled power by an experience of holding power or it was manipulated by randomly assigning participants to manager-subordinate roles ~ it led to perceived control over outcomes that were beyond the reach of the individual.  Furthermore, the notion of being able to control a 'chance' result led to unrealistic optimism and inflated self-esteem," he said.

Click here to read the complete ScienceDaily article.

Religious Services Reinforce Zealotry

Hamas supporters protest Israel's seige of Gaza, typical of the 'strength in numbers' psychology that can create 'parochial altruism.'

A group of studies in Middle East war zones shows that the more frequently a person attends religious services, the more likely he or she is to become a zealot, especially a suicide bomber. It is the sense of reinforced community ~ not the religious beliefs themselves ~ that encourage such things as suicide bombings.

The studies use the rather benign term “parochial altruism” to define such behaviors, where here “parochial” refers to killing someone from another religious group and “altruism” refers to self-sacrifice.

A major conclusion of the studies is that collective religious ritual appears to facilitate parochial altruism in general and support for suicide attacks in particular.

• Researchers surveying Palestinian Muslims found that devotion to Islam, as measured by prayer frequency, was unrelated to support for suicide attacks. However, frequency of mosque attendance did predict support for suicide attacks.

• In a separate survey of Palestinian Muslim university students, researchers found again that those who attended mosque more than once a day were more likely to believe that Islam requires suicide attacks.

• In another experiment, researchers conducted phone surveys with Israeli Jews living in the West Bank and Gaza and asked them either how frequently they attended synagogue or how often they prayed to God. All participants were then asked if they supported the perpetrator of a suicide attack against Palestinians. Analysis of the responses showed that 23% of those asked about synagogue attendance supported suicide attacks while only 6% of those queried about prayer frequency supported suicide attacks.

In the last experiment, the psychologists surveyed members of six religious majorities in six nations (Mexican Catholics, Indonesian Muslims, Israeli Jews, Russian Orthodox in Russia, British Protestants and Indian Hindus) to see if the relationship between attending religious services and support for acts of parochial altruism holds up across a variety of political and cultural contexts.

These results also showed that support for parochial altruism was related to attendance at religious services, but unrelated to regular prayer.

Click here for the complete Science Daily article.

Leper-Treating Priest to be Sainted

Father Damien ~ the Belgian priest who ministered to lepers in Hawaii until he succumbed to the disease himself in 1889 ~ will be canonized as a saint in October.

Born Joseph de Veuster in 1840, he took the name Damien and went to Hawaii in 1864 to join other missionaries and minister to leprosy patients on Molokai island, where some 8,000 people had been banished amid an epidemic in Hawaii in the 1850s.

He eventually contracted the disease ~ also known as Hansen's disease ~ and died in 1889 at age 49. "He went there knowing that he could never return," The Rev. Alfred Bell, who spearheaded Damien's canonization cause, told Vatican Radio. "He suffered a lot, but he stayed."

Miracles Ascribed to Father Damien

Father Damien was beatified ~ a step toward sainthood ~ in 1995 by Pope John Paul II after the Vatican declared that the 1987 recovery of a nun of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary was a miracle. The nun recovered after praying to Damien.

After beatification, a second miracle is needed for sainthood.

In July, Pope Benedict XVI declared that a Honolulu woman's recovery in 1999 from terminal lung cancer was the miracle needed for the priest to be made a saint. She too had prayed to Father Damien.

Click here for the Associated Press article.
Photo shows Father Damien two months before his death of leprosy.

Beware of Hnegripitrom!

In a new study reported in Psychological Science, a group of students were given a list of made-up food additives and were asked to rate how harmful they were. The additives all contained 12 letters, with "Magnalroxate" being one of the easiest to pronounce and "Hnegripitrom" one of the hardest.

• The students consistently rated the difficult-to-pronounce additives as being more harmful.
• In addition, the hard-to-pronounce additives were considered to be more novel than those with easier names.

In another experiment, students were shown a list of made-up names of amusement-park rides and were asked to rate the rides on how adventurous they would be and how risky ~ and therefore most likely to make them sick ~ the rides would be. The names ranged from being easy to pronounce, such as “Chunta,” to very difficult to pronounce, such as “Vaiveahtoishi.”

• Consistent with the first experiment, the students rated the rides with the difficult-to-pronounce names as being more risky, but also more exciting.

The findings also suggest that risk perception may be influenced by the way the items are presented. If they are difficult to process ~ such as hard-to-pronounce names ~ they will be viewed as being inherently riskier.

Click here for the complete article in Science Daily.