Scientists Say Everyone Can Read Minds

Empathy allows us to feel the emotions of others, to identify and understand their feelings and motives and see things from their perspective. How we generate empathy remains a subject of intense debate in cognitive science.

Some scientists now believe they may have finally discovered its root. We're all essentially mind readers, they say.

The idea has been slow to gain acceptance, but evidence is mounting.

Mirror neurons
In 1996, three neuroscientists were probing the brain of a macaque monkey when they stumbled across a curious cluster of cells in the premotor cortex, an area of the brain responsible for planning movements. The cluster of cells fired not only when the monkey performed an action, but likewise when the monkey saw the same action performed by someone else. The cells responded the same way whether the monkey reached out to grasp a peanut, or merely watched in envy as another monkey or a human did.

Because the cells reflected the actions that the monkey observed in others, the neuroscientists named them "mirror neurons."

Later experiments confirmed the existence of mirror neurons in humans and revealed another surprise. In addition to mirroring actions, the cells reflected sensations and emotions."Mirror neurons suggest that we pretend to be in another person's mental shoes," says Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine. "In fact, with mirror neurons we do not have to pretend, we practically are in another person's mind."

Link: http://livescience.com/humanbiology/050427_mind_readers.html

The Myth of Women's Intuition

I always felt that intuitive ability was evenly placed between the genders, now a recent study seem to show this:


By Nic Fleming,Science CorrespondentThe Telegraph

The popular assumption that women's powers of intuition exceed those of men has been overturned by a new study.

Psychologists who tested the abilities of more than 15,000 people to identify the sincerity or otherwise of different smiles have concluded that female intuition is a myth.

Shown a series of pairs of images of individuals displaying real and fake smiles, men marginally outperformed women. When it came to judging genuine and false expressions of happiness in the opposite sex, male participants did significantly better than females.

Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, said: "These findings question the notion that women really are more intuitive than men. Some previous research has found evidence for female intuition but perhaps, over time, men have become more in touch with their intuitive side.

"I was surprised, given that women had so much more confidence in their intuition. We thought women would be better but, overall, men just pipped them to the post."
Participants were shown 10 pairs of photographs of smiling faces, some of which were partially masked. One of each pair of smiles was genuine and the other was fake.

Before studying the faces, participants were asked to rate their intuitive abilities. More women defined themselves as highly intuitive - 77 per cent compared with just 58 per cent of men. However, their claims were not backed up in the experiment this month at the Edinburgh International Science Festival.

Men were able to pick out 72 per cent of genuine smiles, while women detected 71 per cent. When evaluating sincerity in the faces of the opposite sex, men were right in 76 per cent of cases compared with 67 per cent for women.

Dr Wiseman said: "This could be because women experience emotions more fully and are more expressive. If men have a more limited emotional system, this may make it easier for them to fake it."

Susan Quilliam, a relationship psychologist and author of books on relationships and body language, said women were not as good at spotting insincerity because they were programmed to look on the bright side. "Women seek out approval more often than men. They will be less likely to notice and to want to see fakeness in any situation."

Gladeana McMahon, a psychologist, said: "Cognitive psychologists define intuition as the fast processing of information, so that we get the answer before knowing the question. It may be women have been labelled as intuitive because they tend to talk more about their feelings."


Link:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/04/12/nsmile12.xml

Mind-reading machine knows what you see

It is possible to read someone’s mind by remotely measuring their brain activity, researchers have shown. The technique can even extract information from subjects that they are not aware of themselves.
So far, it has only been used to identify visual patterns a subject can see or has chosen to focus on. But the researchers speculate the approach might be extended to probe a person’s awareness, focus of attention, memory and movement intention.

In the meantime, it could help doctors work out if patients apparently in a coma are actually conscious.

Link: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7304

Tag energy medicine

Telepathy Renamed

Telepathy Renamed "Distant Neural Signaling" for Scientific Experiments

By Mary Sawyers


You’ve heard of telepathy -- it’s when you can communicate with someone just by thinking about it. Now, a researcher in Seattle says her studies show that, at least for some people, it works.

Leanna Standish, ND, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at Bastyr University in Seattle, calls the phenomenon "distant neural signaling." She agrees it sounds kind of whacky, and she can’t explain why it works with some people and not others, but after several experiments, she’s convinced the phenomenon is real.

In one study, Standish recruited 30 pairs of volunteers who knew each other and in some cases were related. The pairs spent 10 minutes meditating together and were then sent to separate rooms 30 feet apart. The "sending" partner watched checkerboard patterns flicker on and off on a video monitor, while the "receiving" partner watched a static pattern. Both of the partners were hooked up to electroencephalograms (EEGs) to measure their brain activity.
When the pattern flickered, it triggered increased brain activity in the "sender." "What we were trying to see was if the increased brain activity in the sender would correspond with increased activity in the receiver," says Standish.

The experiment showed this increased activity in five out of the 60 receivers. That means this brain connection didn’t happen in the majority of the partners, but Standish says, "If it happens even once, it’s kind of amazing."

To make sure the connections that did happen were not just coincidence, Standish repeated the same experiment, but this time she was the "receiver" and she was lying in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner -- with several inches of lead and a magnetic field separating her from the "sender."

Brain scans show that even when shielded by the MRI, blood flow to Standish’s brain increased in sync with the "sender." However, when the pair switched places and Standish acted as the "sender," the "receiver’s" brain did not show the increased blood flow.

In a third experiment, Standish’s colleagues at North Hawaii Community Hospital in Kamuela asked traditional Hawaiian healers to try to send brain signals to "receivers" who were laying in the MRI scanners. In all but one of the cases, Standish says the healer was able to produce increased brain activity in the "receiver."

Standish says she doesn’t know how these signals traveled between brains, and she doesn’t know if the healer was actually healing, but she says something is going on, and it deserves more study.
Link: www.ivanhoe.com

Tag: /"remote viewing/"

Blind Man Displays 'Sixth Sense'

This 52-year-old lab subject somehow uses a part of his brain not normally used for sight to process visual signals linked to emotions.

When the scientists showed him images of circles and squares, he could only guess at what they were at an accuracy no greater than chance expectation.

But when he was presented with photos of happy, sad or fearful human faces, his accuracy rate became uncanny, far beyond chance. Brain scans taken when he was sensing the faces showed an activation of the brain's right amygdala, which responds to non-verbal emotional signs.

In sighted people that part of the brain processes subliminal emotional stimuli. Interestingly, this is the same part of the brain that 'lights up' when people are engaged in remote viewing.

Here is the research significance for those of us interested in generating intuitive "luck".

My contention has been that strong emotions are the carrier signal for intuitive information.
Intuition, in turn, alerts us to, or helps to create, luck-making opportunities and danger avoidance.

The more we isolate where in the human body intuition is received and processed, the better able we will be to use biofeedback approaches to induce intuitive states at will.

Link: http://www.disabilities.afreepress.com/articles/index.cfm?artOID=295470&cp=309459

Tag: remote viewing

What Your Brain Knows About Trust

Want to build trust with someone? Watch how you treat them and be more generous than they expect -- the sooner, the better.

That nugget of common sense has scientific backing. Brain scans reveal what people's minds were up to during a game of trust.

The results hint at what makes or breaks trust -- a complex process in the "real world" outside the lab. The findings might also yield new leads on conditions like schizophrenia, autism, and borderline personality disorder, say the researchers. Those conditions can make it tough to size people up correctly, they note.

Link: http://my.webmd.com/content/article/103/107160.htm