Enlightr Blog

As you mayknow, I'm intrigued by psychology. So I found this article very interesting, interesting enough to share with you lot!

"To test familiarity-based recognition, Cleary gave her subjects a list of celebrity names. Later, they were shown a variety of celebrity photographs. Some of the faces had been on the list of names and some had not. Subjects were asked to identify the people in the photographs and indicate how likely it was that the celebrity's names had been on the earlier list. According to the report, "Even when the volunteers were unable to identify a celebrity by photo, they had a sense of which names they had studied earlier and which they had not. That is, they couldn't identify the source of their familiarity with the celebrity, but they knew the celebrity was familiar to them."

Interesting? The article goes a lot more into detail on the test, along with another test that Cleary carried out to identify the trigger elements.

Personally I agree with thid article as an understanding of the mystery about  Déjà Vu, but you are completely free to make up your own mind!

Explaining Why It's Not Déjà Vu [popsci.com]

Well great news! Recently an article published on the BBC dismissed that compulsive gamers are addicted.

"Ninety per cent of the young people who seek treatment for compulsive computer gaming are not addicted."

 99%! If you enjoy playing a lot of gamer, for a lot of time. Don't worry, you're not addicted.

"This gaming problem is a result of the society we live in today," Mr Bakker told BBC News. "Eighty per cent of the young people we see have been bullied at school and feel isolated. Many of the symptoms they have can be solved by going back to good old fashioned communication."

I very much agree with this quoted section, I believe compulsive gamign is very much a social issue. The false sence of reality people get from games in my opinion is a good way to help them through lives, but should not be used to subsitute life completely.

Compulsive Gamers Are Not Addicts [bbc.co.uk]

If you do, great news! Recent advances could mean that the woolly mammoth could be a common sight in a zoo in the near future.

"In November 2008, a team of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania reported they had sequenced a large fraction of the mammoth genome. The genome of any living species is the DNA genes which make up the chromosomes that reside in the nucleus of every cell and if we have that, then we might be able recreate the entire beast. We are on the road that leads to cloning a woolly mammoth."

How long do you think Jarassic Park will take to be a reality? If science keeps going this way, I'd say it's likely in the future. I for one, would love to see it.

"A new DNA decoding machine made this exciting success possible because it can work with genetic material from hair and DNA that is broken up and can only be isolated as fragments. Decoding the entire mammoth genome is only question of money, cost estimate is about $USD 2 million."

At only a cost of money I doubt it'll take much longer, so watch out people. Here comes the woolly mammoth, back from the dead to a zoon near you.

Cloning the Wolly Mammoth [environmentalgraffiti.com]

Here's a video you may like to see. I'm not 100% sure if its true, but either way. It does help give awareness to technology that is required to sort out the water problems, especially in poorer countries.

 "Over 1.1 billion people in the world don't have access to clean drinking water. When I heard of a water purifier that uses nanotechnology to purify water even from fecal matter contaminated water sources, I couldn't help but test it out the "uncultured" way."

Cow Shit to Clean Water [youtube.com]

Most primates shift their gaze to show submission. If an ape is going to display aggression or is likely to attack, it will lock eyes onto its victim. To avoid being attacked, the victim will look away and try to make it appear smaller.

Scientific evidence shows that submission behaviour appears to be hardwired into primate brains for survival reasons. Under attack, we make ourselves appear smaller by hunching our shoulders, pulling our arms in close to the body, pressing our knees together and locking our ankles under a chair, dropping our chin to the chest to protect the throat and averting our gaze by looking away. These gestures activate an 'off switch' in the brain of the aggressor and the attack can be avoided.

Making yourself appear smaller turns off the aggression switch in an aggressor's brain.

This is an ideal position to take if you are being reprimanded by a superior when you actually deserve the reprimand, but it would be detrimental against a random street attack. From a person who is walking past a group of possible assailants in the street it would signal fear and this can contribute to inciting an attack. If you walk upright with larger movements, swinging your arms and legs and having your front open, you will project that you could defend yourself if necessary and so are less likely to be attacked.

When two people live together for a long time and have a good working relationship, they often begin to look alike. This is because they are constantly mirroring each other's facial expressions, which, over time, builds muscle definition in the same areas of the face. Even couples who don't look facially similar can appear similar in a photograph because they use the same smile.

In 2000, psychologist Dr John Gottman of the University of Washington, Seattle, and his colleagues, discovered that marriages are more likely to fail when one partner not only does not mirror the other's expressions of happiness, but instead shows expressions of contempt. Instead, this opposite behaviour affects the smiling partner, even when they are not consciously aware of what is happening.

The core temperature for the human body is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit but the skin temperature varies depending on our emotional state. People who are described as 'cold' are usually also physically cooler people because their blood is drawn into the leg and arm muscles for the 'fight or flight' response created by tension. So when you call someone a 'cold fish' you are correct on both the emotional and physical levels. Conversely, when one person is attracted to another, their blood rises to the surface of the skin, making them warmer.

This is why lovers who are in the 'heat of passion', give a 'warm embrace', have 'steamy encounters' and can be 'hot stuff'. In many women, this increase in body temperature can be seen as their chests will become flushed or covered in red blotches and their cheeks also flush.

In the 1980s, several American hospitals introduced the concept of the 'Laughter Room'. Based on Norman Cousins experiences and other laughter research by Dr Patch Adams.

They allocated a room and filled it with joke books, comedy films and other humorous tapes, and had regular visits from comedians and clowns. Patients were then exposed to 30- to 60-minute sessions each day. The result was impressive. A dramatic improvement in patient health and shorter average hospitalisation time per patient was found. The Laughter Rooms also showed a decrease in the number of painkillers required by those in pain and patients became easier to deal with. So you could say that doctors now take laughter more seriously.