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A recent study shows that when faced with a decision, it’s best to take some time–relax and cool off–so logical thinking can guide us to the best choice. Christie Nicholson reports (Scientific American)
Play the Podcast here:
sa_p_podcast_100417 or from Scientific American’s Website (Note that this broadcast uses stereo features and for part of the time, sound only comes from one channel)
Brain imaging studies show that low offers activate the anterior insula, an area associated with feelings of disgust or anger. So the authors note that the delay allows us to chill out and accept the most logical and best option even if we’re dealing with cheapskate partner.
Notes: From our perspective, could this cooling off time be where the unconscious has a chance to get a message through to you about the choice?
From literature to architecture, academics and entrepreneurs are using neuroscience to explain everything from why we like a complex narrative thread to why round tables are more social. Christie Nicholson reports (Scientific American)
Play the Podcast here:
sa_p_podcast_100403 or from Scientific American’s website
…all sorts of industries are jumping to use any new brain information to support their work. Neuromarketing claims to get objective truth about peoples’ preferences by decoding the “reactions” of our neurons. Companies like No Lie fMRI, Inc., are capitalizing on the potential for tools that can “read the brain” to replace the polygraph in lie detection. The literary world wants to unweave the rainbow by studying the way the brain processes literature and certain narrative techniques. And there’s even an Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture which reveals that oval tables make eye contact easier.
Scientists find that when the area of the brain responsible for understanding the intent of others is disrupted, moral judgment is also affected. Christie Nicholson reports (Scientific American)
Play the Podcast here:
sa_p_podcast_100329 or from Scientific American’s website
The researchers disrupted the activity in this brain area using what’s called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). And they asked subjects to consider the morality of various acts. Some where the perpetrator had the intent to harm, others where they had no premeditation.
When subjects had their brains affected by TMS, they focused less on the intention of the perpetrator and more on the outcome of the act. Regardless of whether the protagonist wanted to poison their friend, if the friend was okay, then it wasn’t such a bad thing. As opposed to a lucky outcome after a heinous act.
The ultimate goal is to understand how the brain makes moral judgments. Because the real world is often less black and white, where judgment is easy, than shades of gray.
We can’t touch time, or smell it. Yet it is utterly inescapable. But, research shows, time is – at least partly – something we control in our heads.
Although we rely on other ques when they are available, have you ever woken from a good sleep because you have told yourself you must get up at a certain time? I know many times when I set an alarm for getting up for a specific event, my body wakes me about 2-10 minutes early.
The Caveman experiment (from BBC article)
The body clock determines our most fundamental behaviours: when we wake up, go to sleep, and eat. But it also determines our physical strength and performance over a day.
However basic the clock’s functions seem to us today, its existence was only proved in 1962, by a French caver.
19th September 1962: Michel Siffre, the scientist who spent nine weeks alone in a cave 400 ft underground in southern France has his eyes covered to protect them from the light. He is being helped by two gendarmes to a helicopter on his way to Nice. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
Michel Siffre had been planning to study the movement of a glacier through an underground cave, when he realised the enormous potential of his experiment for the field of biology.
“I had the idea of my life: I decided not to take a watch in the cave. I decided to live without time cues,” he said.
By isolating himself underground, away from daylight, clocks or routines, he hoped to discover whether the body had its own rhythm. And if so, what it was.
The continuation of the newspaper article is in French also.
“I decided to live following my feelings of hunger, my feelings of going to sleep. In the cave it’s always dark, then your body follows its own sense,” said Mr Siffre.
His plan was to call a surface-team of assistants every time he woke, ate, exercised or urinated so every one of his biological functions could be monitored.
Each time, he would give an estimate of the date and time, and the surface-team would compare this with the real time. This he did for two months, before emerging into the real world. Mentally, he had completely lost track of time, but the results showed his body had kept up a rhythm.
While the length of Siffre’s waking days varied widely, from 40 hours to just six, a clear pattern emerged. The average length of his days was just over 24 hours. Evolution, it seems, had tailored his body’s clock to run closely to the Earth’s day length.
It’s now known that the body clock is controlled by a tiny pea-sized organ in the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN. This tiny region commands a chain of chemical and nervous instructions that ripple through the body, controlling how each organ and tissue functions over the 24-hour day.
“I can’t believe I just said that, I am sorry – it came out all wrong that is not what I meant. I am sorry, I should think before I speak …” As my friend, Jan, trying to explain the situation over the phone with her boyfriend, Chris, responded “yes, you should have” and he then hung up on her. This happened six years ago.
Have you ever experienced the “I shouldn’t have done that” moment? May that be the email you have just sent, things you said or the action you just did? While with Microsoft Word, you can click on “Undo”, or with Gmail you can use “Undo Sent” in 5 seconds or with LinkedIn you can have “15 seconds to un-publish”, but when you are interacting with another person, there is no way to “undo” what had just happened. Worst of all, as my grandma puts it “I can forgive, but I won’t forget” and “by the time that one says sorry, it is already too late”.
The best thing is “don’t do it”; stop before it happens. It seems simple, but to Jan, it sounds like “Mission Impossible”. This article will explain to you how our response is formed and how we can create change with NLP.
It is all because of the Amygdala
I first heard about the Amygdala when I learned about the “fight-or-flight responses”. Listed in the Gray’s Anatomy as the nucleus amygdalæ), the Amygdalae are almond-shaped groups of nuclei located deep the brain in complex vertebrates, including humans.
The amygdalae perform primary roles in the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events, where they form associations with memories of the stimuli. This is for both fear and appetitive (positive) conditioning. In his recent interview with Harvart Business Review writer, Peter Bregman, Assistant Professor Joshua Gordon, a Neuroscientist at Columbia University, “There are direct pathways from sensory stimuli into the amygdala …, the emotional response centre of the brain. When something unsettling happens in the outside world, it immediately evokes an emotion”.
The Interplays of Mind and Body
Figure 1. An Illustration of the different parts of human brain
I remember the time that I was an IT project auditor, appointed to check on the quality of a project delivery as was carried out by a group of contractors. To ensure the quality was up to standard before it was handed back to in house support staff, I as a junior programmer and the only permanent staff member representing the company, was requested to carry out a series of auditing activities. As I carried out my work diligently and finding multiple areas that required re-work, the program manager and project manager (both contractors) become very unsettled.
One night as I was working late, they invited me to go into their office, which is situated in a rather prestigious club. The program manager, in front of her team of six people sitting on either side of her, pointed her finger at me with one hand and slammed the table with the other and roared “How dare you second guess me with your audit report”. Unsettling, was an understatement, my first reaction was to cry and slap her face for humiliating me in front of a group of strangers. My heart was pumping hard, my breath was fast and I felt my brain become very fuzzy. I heard myself saying in side “No you can’t slap her, she is just trying to scare you; take a deep breath, wait a minute, then respond.”
What happens at the moment of facing an unsettling situation is that our body is ready to respond; in the past it was “fight or flight” response. When we perceive or sense that there is danger, the sensory information is relayed through hypothalamus to the brainstem (The brainstem (or brain stem) is the lower part of the brain, adjoining and structurally continuous with the spinal cord.)
Figure 2. Hypothalamus in our brain
That rate of signalling increases the rate of noradrenergic activity, which means that the stress hormone – norepinephrine is produced and affects parts of the brain where attention and response actions are controlled. Both epinephrine and norepinephrine, directly increases the heart rate, triggers the release of glucose from energy stores, and increases blood flow to the skeletal muscle. The person experiencing the stress now becomes alert and attentive to the environment and ready to act.
This chain of events creates various degrees of changes and reactions within us chemically and physically. In NLP, the easiest way to explain is by understanding New Code NLP’s “Chain of Excellence”, simply put; your level of performance (or behaviour) is dependent on your emotional state (which is related to your brain chemical productions), which will have a corresponding physiology and breathing pattern (respiration).
When I ask myself to wait and take a deep breath, I am asking myself to change my breathing pattern, physiology and emotional state so that I can perform or behave in the way that is optimal for the situation.
At the same time, I am also allowing myself the time for my prefrontal cortex to work. According to Dr. Gordon “The key is cognitive control of the amygdyla by the prefrontal cortex. If you take a breath and delay your action, you give the prefrontal cortex time to control the emotional response”. And he says it only take the prefrontal cortex a second or two to respond.
It seems Google’s 5 seconds is a good guide. So, go back to my experience at the club, I took a breath to calm myself down and wait for a while and responded in a way that no face was slapped, no tears were shed and the issue was resolved with the right level of escalation within the company hierarchy.
As to Jan, after calming her down through breathing exercises, I asked her to mentally play out how she would like to respond and step into Chris’s shoes to notice how he might re-act. Based on how Chris might re-act, Jan made changes to her approach to convey her feelings and messages differently. Six years later, Jan shared that “that day when we (Chris) argued over the phone, marked the turning point in our relationship, because we learned how to manage our emotions as well as being considerate to each other’s feelings”.
How NLP techniques can help you
One of the fundamental skills that NLP teaches is the individual’s ability to self observe and become very self aware of how they are contributing to the current relationships that they are observing. In other words, we are observing the role that each of us play in a current situation and create alternate behaviour accordingly.
Not only do we teach people how to become self-aware, with NLP we also teach students how to really step into another person’s shoes and consider other people’s perspectives, not just our own. To be able to self-observe and consider other people’s perspective is key for building successful relationships, creating harmony and makes us human.
Another fundamental skill that one can learn from NLP Practitioner training is how to re-program our own responses or neural-pathways to create change. The simplest way that you can do is remember a time that you might have lost your temper and reacted very strongly, only to regret what you said or did later. This is a bit like watching a movie frame by frame, right to the end of the event.
As you watch this mental movie, notice the frame that presents the behaviour that you would like to change. While noticing the frames you would like to change, pay attention to note your alternative behaviours that might be more suited. It is like you are the producer in the editing room, chopping and changing the sequence of the film over and over again until you are satisfied with the film. Once you feel good and satisfied with your new film, act it out mentally or physically as if you are in the film. Pick three more potential situations that might happen in the future where your new behaviour would be useful, create a new film and act it out mentally or physically, as if you are rehearsing a role.
Another simple way is using NLP’s “Chain of Excellence”. These days, whenever I notice I am about to react in a way that will only make things worse, based on the NLP “Chain of Excellence”, I might change my breathing pattern, my physiology or simply pause to give my prefrontal cortex the time to respond differently and change my emotional state.
There you are – a few very simply ways you can use NLP to enhance and improve the quality of your life today. Improving the quality of life is one of the main benefits that our students get from our NLP training programs. Now is a good time to become aware of how to improve your lot in life, because our next NLP Practitioner course is starting very soon in Brisbane.
Improving the quality of your life and your emotional intelligence is an investment for the rest of your life.
This year we will reach out to the Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast as well. So, an invitation from us to you to make improving your quality of life a priority this year, learning NLP will be a good way to achieve that. If you want an NLP training course that is as good as you will find, contact us. We value our reputation for attracting the best students who really want to make a difference in their own life as well as others.
The Peeriodic Table of Illusions from an article on http://www.newscientist.com 12 November 2009 by Richard L. Gregory, Magazine issue 2733. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
Excerpt….
FOR all the fun we have with them, illusions do serious work in illuminating how our brains work, and in particular how perception works. They may also help us understand how consciousness developed, and tell us about our “neuro-archaeology” and the behaviour patterns laid down in the nervous system over evolutionary time.
But let’s concentrate on perception: it is tricky enough. I’ve tried to classify illusions in a way that shows the principles underlying them, starting with physical causes, moving on to physiological disturbances of neural signals, and finally to cognitive processes – where the brain tries to make sense of sensory signals, not always successfully.
The distinction between physiological and cognitive is not straightforward. It’s rather like the distinction between how a machine works and what it does. For example, a can opener needs two descriptions: the mechanism of levers and cutters, and what this does to open a can.
That distinction between physiological and cognitive has “real-world” consequences. Think of the placebo effect, which suggests close connections between the physiological and the cognitive-psychological. So different types of illusions could be significant in ways we do not yet know. That’s why I have constructed my Peeriodic Table of Illusions (bad pun intended) thus: blindness, the ambiguities, instability, distortion, fiction, and paradox, plus their causes.
….
We know what we see is very different from the images on our retinas because perceptions are scaled, like maps. So what sets the scaling for seeing the sizes and shapes of surrounding objects? Using ambiguity illusions I found that the scaling in Ponzo and Muller-Lyer illusions can be set from visual cues, such as the convergence of lines by perspective, or from the current perception of distance. The fact that the same retinal image can give more than one perception, as when perceptions “flip”, is useful because it lets us separate “bottom-up” (from the eye) from “top-down” (from the brain) processes. This way we know that a perceptual change without a change in the eye must be top-down, from the brain, and not bottom-up, as there is no change in the image….
Full atricle – neurophilosophy
Relevance to New Code NLP and NLP – Processing of unconscious and conscious awareness – evidence of the unconscious awareness is prior to conscious processing… …unconscious representation of a visual object is processed for around one tenth of a second before it enters conscious awareness…
Category: Neuroscience • Vision, Posted on: November 6, 2009 12:50 PM, by Mo
A novel temporal illusion, in which the cause of an event is perceived to occur after the event itself, provides some insight into the brain mechanisms underlying conscious perception. The illusion, described in the journal Current Biology by a team of researchers from France, suggests that the unconscious representation of a visual object is processed for around one tenth of a second before it enters conscious awareness.
Chien-Te Wu and his colleagues at the Brain and Cognition Research Centre in Toulouse used a visual phenomenon called motion-induced blindness, in which a constantly rotating background causes prominent and motionless visual stimuli to disappear and reappear, as demonstrated in the video below. Fixate on the flashing green spot in the centre, and you’ll notice that the surrounding yellow spots begin to disappear and reappear after about ten seconds. Then replay the clip and focus on any of the yellow spots; you’ll see that it is a visual disappearance illusion. Exactly how it works is unclear; according to one hypothesis it is due to the properties of neurons in area V1 of the visual cortex.
If the video’s do not load here, take the alternative links.
Motion Induced Blindness – The most amazing videos are a click away
Motion Induced Blindness – Funny home videos are a click away
The researchers first used a variation of these stimuli to test the occurence and duration of the motion-induced blindness effect. In these pre-test trials, seven participants were presented with a static yellow ring on a rotating background, and asked to report when the ring disappeared from and reappeared to conscious awareness, by respectively pressing and releasing a button. read more…
These are demonstrations surrounding Phantom Limbs. The concept is interesting for understanding our body and the subject of proprioception and how we perceive our bodies.
| Video: Derren Brown working with a man’s Phantom Limbs | Derren Brown works with a person’s Phantom Limb and demonstrates how he can touch limbs that don’t even exist. How he does this trick I do not know, the man shows some signs of being in a trance, and there might be some hypnotic language patterns used… After all, this is Derren Brown. |
| Demonstration of the Mirror Box as designed and developed by V.S. Ramachandran. http://www.23NLPeople.com Demonstrated by Andrew T. Austin. This video shows the box before it is used. | |
| Andrew T. Austin discusses the problems of contractures in treating phantom limb pain with Ramachandran’s Mirror Box. | |
| Andrew T. Austin (http://www.23NLPeople.com) discusses the phenomenum of “remapping” and the relevence to treatment with the mirror box. Also see: http://www.phantomlimbpain.org | |
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When Spc. Bryan Wagner is driving, he pushes the gas pedal with his right foot in spite of the fact that he doesn’t have a right foot.
“I drive with it,” the 23-year-old said, referring to the prosthetic limb that replaced the real one he lost in Baghdad on Dec. 17, 2007, when the Humvee he was a gunner on ran over an improvised explosive device. But Wagner, an Exeter, Calif. native with a military buzz and the burly build of an offensive lineman, says vehicular matters aren’t high on his to-do list. Neither is running a marathon, which he has somehow done, and snowboarding, which he still enjoys. What dogs him is the “phantom pain” he feels in the limb he lost, a common complaint among amputees dating back to previous wars and even showing up in literature. In David Guterson’s novel “Snow Falling on Cedars”, about the Japanese-American experience during and after World War II, the protagonist Ishmael Chambers complains of pain from his missing left arm. As of July 1, a total of 904 service members have undergone amputations resulting from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Therapy helps limbs “see” But a new technique called “mirror image therapy” is using the reflection of the intact limb to trick Wagner’s brain-in a good way. Wearing black shorts and sweating though a tan cut-off T-shirt, Wagner demonstrated the technique Thursday at a physical therapy hub for wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Dr. Jack Tsao, a staff neurologist at Walter Reed, oversaw the exercises. Removing his prosthetic limb and sitting up, Wagner places a mirror on its side facing his outstretched left leg. He then performs a number of exercises with his left foot, like rolling it in circles and imitating pushing the gas pedal. “It’s very weird,” Wagner conceded. Patients will typically do activities like these 15 minutes a day, five days a week for a total of eight weeks. If the pain persists, which according to Tsao it can even after two years without the therapy, they start the cycle again. The Army medical center has treated 652 of the total 904 service members who have lost arms, legs, arms and hands. It doesn’t count lost fingers or toes. The hand isn’t quicker than the eye There are two theories as to what causes phantom pain. The first deals with mismatched signals between a person’s vision and the intact neurons that dictated the movement of the missing limb. Eyes see one thing, neurons another. Another theory posits that proprioceptive-or muscle-memory retains certain positions of limbs, some of which are painfully distressing. Before working out with the mirror, Wagner said he often had the sensation that one toe was crossed over another or he felt like someone was stabbing him between his toes. Dr. Tsao suggests the mirror therapy is “like a computer wiping your memory buffer.” Starting in 2006, “mirror image therapy” has since grown into wide usage. Though it has had mixed results among amputees and hasn’t been very successful yet with arm or hand phantom pain, Wagner is a testament to its power. Channeling the theories behind the therapy, Wagner has turned it into his own motivational mantra. “Disability is only a state of mind.” |
The research into neuroplasticity in neuro-science gives us an insight into what is possible for NLP interventions and generally how the brain functions.
ABC Lateline report on Neuroplasticity including an interview with NORMAN DOIDGE, a PSYCHIATRIST in Canada and author of The Brain that Changes Itself.
In recent years, many experts have changed the way they think about the brain and now believe it can actually reinvent itself. The theory’s called neuroplasticity, the idea that the brain can build new connections to compensate for injury or disease….
…She was given an antibiotic for a routine hysterectomy which poisoned her inner ear, so that 97 per cent of what’s called the vestibular apparatus or the balance organ in the inner ear, was blown out. And one day she woke up and she had no balance. She was a woman who felt she was perpetually falling. And in fact, even when she fell to the floor, the sense of falling didn’t go away. She felt a trap door opened up and swallowed her….. Now, Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, had been working on sensory substitution and he found a way to give her a hat that contained something called an accelerometer, which is like a gyroscope. It told her her position in space. It fed information to a computer that fed the information back to something about the size of a stick of chewing gum that had about 100 little electrodes on it that gave little sparks on her tongue – very gentle stimulation that felt like champagne bubbles, so that if she rolled forward she would get champagne bubbles rolling forward telling her the position of her head. And I was there when this cure occurred and she couldn’t stand up, she put on the hat, they turned on the machine and suddenly it was as though there was total peace of mind that she had and her balance was restored.
…what Descartes did is he was trying to solve a problem, which is that it seemed that the rules of mind were different, would follow logic or maybe the rules of emotion, and the brain seemed to follow, you know, the physical laws of Galileo and the mechanical laws of movement. And he argued that the mind will influence the brain, but he could never persuasively show how that happens. And we still haven’t totally solved that problem. But what we can do now, which is very, very exciting, is we can actually see a person in the process of thinking and the number of brain cells – the number of connections between brain cells being altered.
Attention turns out to be very, very important for speeding up plastic change. And many people with strokes have a problem with attention.
For more details, watch the ABC Video ABC Lateline report on Neuroplasticity or Read the rest of this entry »
ABC Lateline report on Neuroplasticity including an interview with NORMAN DOIDGE, a PSYCHIATRIST in Canada.
The research into neuroplasticity in neuro-science gives us an insight into what is possible for NLP interventions and generally how the brain functions.
In recent years, many experts have changed the way they think about the brain and now believe it can actually reinvent itself. The theory’s called neuroplasticity, the idea that the brain can build new connections to compensate for injury or disease….
…She was given an antibiotic for a routine hysterectomy which poisoned her inner ear, so that 97 per cent of what’s called the vestibular apparatus or the balance organ in the inner ear, was blown out. And one day she woke up and she had no balance. She was a woman who felt she was perpetually falling. And in fact, even when she fell to the floor, the sense of falling didn’t go away. She felt a trap door opened up and swallowed her….. Now, Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, had been working on sensory substitution and he found a way to give her a hat that contained something called an accelerometer, which is like a gyroscope. It told her her position in space. It fed information to a computer that fed the information back to something about the size of a stick of chewing gum that had about 100 little electrodes on it that gave little sparks on her tongue – very gentle stimulation that felt like champagne bubbles, so that if she rolled forward she would get champagne bubbles rolling forward telling her the position of her head. And I was there when this cure occurred and she couldn’t stand up, she put on the hat, they turned on the machine and suddenly it was as though there was total peace of mind that she had and her balance was restored.
…what Descartes did is he was trying to solve a problem, which is that it seemed that the rules of mind were different, would follow logic or maybe the rules of emotion, and the brain seemed to follow, you know, the physical laws of Galileo and the mechanical laws of movement. And he argued that the mind will influence the brain, but he could never persuasively show how that happens. And we still haven’t totally solved that problem. But what we can do now, which is very, very exciting, is we can actually see a person in the process of thinking and the number of brain cells – the number of connections between brain cells being altered.
Attention turns out to be very, very important for speeding up plastic change. And many people with strokes have a problem with attention.
For more details, watch the ABC Video ABC Lateline report on Neuroplasticity or read the transcript from the program.
I Didn’t Sin—It Was My Brain Brain researchers have found the sources of many of our darkest thoughts, from envy to wrath.
by Kathleen McGowan; illustrations by Christopher Buzelli
From the September 2009 issue, published online October 5, 2009
This article talks about the research neuroscience has begun into such things as inhibitory cognitive control networks involving the front of the brain activate to squelch the impulse and other brain regions such as the caudate—partly responsible for body movement and coordination—suppress the physical impulse. These are interesting to follow, but as yet do not yet seem to have identified the solutions that many have already found in other modalities such as NLP.
Creator: Priamo della Quercia Date: 1444-1452 Medium: manuscript illumination Source: Yates Thompson 36. Reprinted with permission of the British Library.
More disagreeable forms of sin such as wrath and envy enlist the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). This area, buried in the front of the brain, is often called the brain’s “conflict detector,” coming online when you are confronted with contradictory information, or even simply when you feel pain…. In the annals of sin, weaknesses of the flesh—lust, gluttony, sloth—are considered second-tier offenses, less odious than the “spiritual” sins of envy and pride. That’s good news for us, since these yearnings are notoriously difficult to suppress.
Why does being bad feel so good? Pride, envy, greed, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth: It might sound like just one more episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, but this enduring formulation of the worst of human failures has inspired great art for thousands of years. In the 14th century Dante depicted ghoulish evildoers suffering for eternity in his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. Medieval muralists put the fear of God into churchgoers with lurid scenarios of demons and devils. More recently George Balanchine choreographed their dance.….
For most of us, it takes less mental energy to puff ourselves up than to think critically about our own abilities. In one recent neuroimaging study by Hidehiko Takahashi of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Japan, volunteers who imagined themselves winning a prize or trouncing an opponent showed less activation in brain regions associated with introspection and self-conscious thought than people induced to feel negative emotions such as embarrassment. We accept positive feedback about ourselves readily, Takahashi says: “Compared with guilt or embarrassment, pride might be processed more automatically.”
The most notable thing about lust is that it sets nearly the whole brain buzzing.
Pride gets its swagger from the self-related processing of the mPFC, which Keenan calls “a very interesting area of the brain, involved in all these wonderful human characteristics, from planning to abstract thinking to self-awareness.” Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), in which a magnetic field applied to the scalp temporarily scrambles the signal in small areas of the brain, he was able to briefly shut off the mPFC in volunteers. With TMS switched on, his subjects’ normal, healthy arrogance melted away. “They saw themselves as they really were, without glossing over negative characteristics,” he says….
It makes sense that we are so sensitive to being cheated, notes Matthew Lieberman, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Mammalian survival depends on social bonds, and fairness is a really important social cue,” he says. Inequitable treatment might be an important sign that we are not valued by the group, he says, so we had better pay attention.
In response to unfair offers, the brain activates the pain detection process that takes place in the multitasking dACC. Interestingly, it also engages the bilateral anterior insula, an area implicated in negative emotions such as anger, disgust, and social rejection. The picture that emerges from fMRI is that of a brain weighing an emotional response (the urge to punish the guy who cheated you) against a logical response (the appeal of the cash)….
See the full article at I Didn’t Sin—It Was My Brain from the Discover Magazine, Sep 2009
This is a link to the transcript of a Catalyst Report which is about the Synaesthesia. This use of the term Synaesthesia is basically the same concept that NLP has had from many years ealier. See our previous article on Synaesthesia to understand a little more about the concept from both an NLP perspective, and also from other research teams in Sydney.
The interest in this documentary is mainstream research of synaesthesia going on in Australia. The researchers also propose that synaesthetes have extra brain regions devoted to colour imagery. I am not sure if they are getting their information from fMRI scans or similar, or experience with their studies. I do wonder how they would cope with the knowledge that the average NLP Practitioner that often overlaps representations to see if we can give the client more choice.
From the Catalyst Report (ABC) on Synaesthesia:
Around 10,000 Australians have this condition, where the five senses – sight, sound, taste, smell and touch – are mingled in some way….. It’s early days yet but already the researchers have found that people with synaesthesia do seem to use their brains differently and this can actually help them in certain tasks. For example, it seems a surprisingly large number of synaesthetes are artists…Jennifer and Catherine are…and a tantalising theory is… the reason for that is that synaesthetes have extra brain regions devoted to colour imagery.
Unravelling the secrets of synaesthesia could even ultimately advance medical science, by revealing how the brain puts the information from the senses together in all of us. But in the meantime the goal is to find an explanation for Jennifer and Catherine’s colourful world. A world that really makes you think you’re missing out on something here….
Sources for this story
Catalyst Report (ABC) on Synaesthesia and a site to Check if you have a Synaesthesia
Story Contacts
- Anina Rich, PhD Student in Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne
- Dr Jason Mattingley, Research Fellow in Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne
- Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, School of Behavioural Science, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia
Opera 2.0
See also TIME Magazine which is of interest, where entertainment is pushing the boundaries and combining two senses in the one event – Opera 2.0
where audience members listen to and smell “Green Aria,” described by its writer and director Stewart Matthew as a “scent opera” at the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain.
The Synaesthetic Phenomenon Excerpt… When we speak of various types of communication that are perceived through the combination of two or more senses and are integrated and focused at the level of meaning, we are, of course, speaking about the phenomenon that goes under the name of synaesthesia. Grosso modo, synaesthesia is a kind of intertransposition based on the interaction of the sensory experience during the act of perception. As such, it belongs to the realm of metaphor. Yet it can be considered more than a simple metaphor.
Wheel of the Five Senses, a medieval wall painting in Longthorpo Tower (near Peterborough, England) discovered some fifty years ago and said to have been made before 1340.
Surrounding the wheel, from the king’s right to his left, at the points where the spokes connect to the rim, are five animals: a spider in its web, a eagle or vulture, a monkey, a cock, and a boar. According to a passage from De rerum natura by Thomas of Cantimpré, each of the five animals represents a sense18. Now for our purpose, this painting may be considered as the first known visual representation19 of the connections among the five senses, both in relation to the sense of touch (scholastically understood as the most important sense, in that it is the foundation of all senses and the closest “to the fontal root”, that is common sense)20 and in relation to the king, who may be considered to represent man’s ratio.
Below are two links to videos of a presentation which is about the Synaesthesia. This use of the term Synaesthesia is basically the same concept that NLP has had from many years ealier. In NLP, the phenomenon of “overlap” has many applications, but specifically it is where we are either as a practitioner observing a synaesthesia, bringing awareness of the synaesthesia to client to, or undoing the connections between the senses. We can “overlap” an image and a sound or feeling together, for example. In the broad sense, a synaesthesia can be useful for the client or it can be limiting the client’s choices.
As the phenomenon of overlap demonstrates, not all of our mental experiences are clearly distinguishable in terms of the five senses. Sometimes experiences become connected and overlapped so completely that it is not possible to easily distinguish one from the other.
In NLP, this connection is called a synaesthesia, and the term means “a synthesizing of the senses.” Synaesthesias are usually more than perceiving something through a single sense alone. Some artists increase the richness of their visual experience and some record memory with colours assoicated that help them recall or associate the memory with another aspect of the experience.
The interest in this presentation is that it demonstrates some of the mainstream research into ‘natural’ synaesthesia’s that have been observed in humans and how science is measuring trends and liklehoods of the types of connections that occur.
Synesthesia: Hearing colours, tasting sounds. David Eagleman, July 2009
Imagine a world of magenta Tuesdays, tastes of blue, and symphonies seen as well as heard. At least one in a hundred otherwise normal people experience the world this way in a condition called synesthesia, in which stimulation of one sense triggers an experience in a different sense. Synesthesia is a fusion of different sensory perceptions, though most synesthetes are unaware their experiences are in any way unusual.
Synesthesia is far more important scientifically than a mere curiosity. In this CHAST lecture at the University of Sydney, world authority David Eagleman explains its wild variety of forms, and shows how his laboratory studies these experiences in the brain, using tools from genetics to advanced neuroimaging.
Videos of the presentation
Video – Synesthesia: Hearing colours, tasting sounds (Part 1) Duration: 23m 38s
Video – Synesthesia: Hearing colours, tasting sounds (Part 2) Duration: 26m 15s
Find out if you are a Synesthete
Source: CHAST, University of Sydney
