I have no idea what to do with this information about insults and anger from the New Scientist, and here it is:

If you really must offend someone, wait until they are lying down: people handle anger differently when they're lying on their backs, compared with sitting upright.

University students who heard personal insults while seated exhibited brain activity linked to so-called "approach motivation" – the desire to approach and explore something. This potential urge disappeared when students took their insults lying down, despite their anger remaining.

"In the upright or leaning forward state one might be more likely to attack," says Eddie Harmon-Jones, a cognitive scientist at Texas A&M University in College Station, who led the study. "Maybe in the reclining state you're more likely to brood."

(Thanks, Bookforum.)

Source: New Scientist 

There are two types of people in the world: people who are automatically honest and those who aren’t. An article in Seed magazine explains that researchers are using brain scans to determine which parts of the brain are involved when people lie. For some people, the decision to tell the truth takes no extra brain activity. For others, “both deciding to lie and deciding to tell the truth required extra activity in the areas of the brain associated with critical thinking and self-control.” The article refers to these two types of people as automatically “honest” and “dishonest,” but does not make any estimates of what percentage of people belong to which category.

(Thanks, 3QuarksDaily.)

Source: Seed

Image by  Dyanna , licensed under  Creative Commons .

For most of us, Gary Busey brings to mind big teeth and smaller roles in movies like “Black Sheep” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” But for Amelia Fedo, the actor’s name floods her mouth with tastes of cranberry and string cheese.

According to maisonneuve, “Fedo has lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, a rare condition that causes units of speech to trigger involuntary sensations of taste.” This explains why she has such a potent reaction to Mr. Busey and other proper nouns—bringing new meaning to the old idiom about leaving a bad taste in one’s mouth. But Fedo’s experience is just one type of the neurological condition:

Neuroscientists have identified more than one hundred synaesthetic variations, and the sensory combinations appear infinite. In the most common, called grapheme-color synaesthesia, numbers and letters are transformed into brilliant colors (Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman claimed to encounter equations as “light-tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s”). With sound-color synaesthesia (or chromesthesia), certain sounds—a doorbell, a barking dog, a guitar chord—elicit powerful visual episodes. Other synaesthetes see their orgasms. Some can hear fabrics, taste shapes, and smell their pain.

Despite what must surely be an inconvenience, Fedo takes great care to use specific descriptions for what she is hearing…err, tasting. Here's a sampling of her flavored names:

Roy: unseasoned kidney beans straight from the can

Derek: raw fennel cut into flat slices, with hints of cucumber

Vivian: vinyl records, coarse nylon or denim, with a faint hint of perfume

Danielle: the rind around the edge of a bologna slice

And she’ll taste your name too, if you like.

Source: maisonneuve

Modern society actively bombards the human consciousness, allowing the most primitive and consumption-oriented parts of the brain to take over, John Naish writes for the Ecologist. People are tricked on a base level into “feeling beset by famine and poverty, despite the abundant sufficiencies around us.” These feelings of need push people into buying, eating, and using resources, often without thinking rationally. 

Beyond foods and cars, the human brain is wired for conceptual consumption, too. The quest for more experiences can lead people into choosing more unique or interesting experiences over more pleasurable ones, according to PsyBlog. When faced with a choice between a consistently pleasurable ice cream flavor (say, chocolate) or a more interesting but clearly less tasty one (say, bacon), many people will choose the bacon-flavored ice cream, knowing it won’t be as good. A similar theory is employed to explain why people prefer horror movies over a good comedy.

The problem is that marketers and advertisers know how to stimulate the primitive parts of the human brain to prod people into more consumption. That drive is having a devastating effect on the environment, according to Naish, as people irresponsibly consume natural resources in a Sisyphean effort to quiet the irrational parts of the brain.

There are, however, plenty of exercises that people can use to stimulate the higher-functioning, more rational  parts of the brain. Naish suggests that society tap into the psychological need for social belonging to nudge people toward more responsible consumption. Some solutions are far more simple than that, too. Naish cites research showing that “pausing between deciding to buy something and taking it to the check-out dramatically increases the chance of a no-sale.” Simply taking a breath or walking around the block before making a purchase can help bypass the more irrational part of the brain and encourage more responsible and conscious consumption.

Image by  Simon Shek , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Source: The Ecologist, PsyBlog 

Learning to juggle can have measurable effects on a person’s brain in just seven days, according to new research published in the PLoS One science journal. The study called for 20 volunteers to learn 3-ball cascade juggling, and hooked them up to a brain scan to watch for changes in gray matter. After just 7 days of training, the test subjects’ gray matter in the occipito-temporal cortex had changed. According to the study’s authors, “[n]either performance nor exercise alone could explain these changes.”

The blog Mind Hacks reports that the study’s authors were careful not to specify whether the changes were caused by more neurons, or whether existing neurons had grown in size. It was, however, “an interesting example of rapid 'neuroplasticity', the ability of the brain to adapt structurally to new situations.”

The toughest time to fall asleep is often when you really need to. Not getting enough sleep can lead to short-term memory loss, impairing skills needed in high-stress situations. The problem is that high-stress situations can make it very difficult to get to sleep. Scientists at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute think they’ve found a way to help.

Using targeted magnetic impulses, researchers have been able to boost short-term memory, making up for some of the problems associated with sleep deprivation, ScienCentral reports. The research was funded by the Department of Defense and could help soldiers in high-pressure situations. The technique, known as  Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, could also be applied to help with age-related memory loss in and dementia.

You can watch a video about the research below.