Humans can justify almost anything
Cognitive dissonance is the extreme emotional discomfort we feel when two important beliefs, attitudes or perceptions collide. Humans cannot tolerate dissonance for long, so they ease the tension by making a change in belief or attitude—and justifying the change.

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Why Michael Moore’s SiCKO is a health care documentary every American must
America’s disastrous health care system is heaving the country head-first into near-certain economic collapse. Just about everybody’s either financially strained or going broke due to spiraling health care costs: the people, the employers, state governments and even the federal government. Multinational corporations are fleeing the United States du

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Power Napping: How To Fall Asleep Anywhere
The trick is the use sleep MP3s. They are essentially MP3s that play white noise for the duration of the nap, and then slowly wake you up by playing a variety of sounds. What’s great is that you can play them on your computer speakers, or make them portable by putting them on your iPod or cell phone.

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It’s something we’re all looking for — the perfect solution that will minimize our work life while still getting the stuff done that we need to get done. Well, that one solution doesn’t exist, but with a combination of strategies, you can get to where you want to be.

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“An article in science blog says we may have to rethink how genes work. So called “junk DNA” actually appears to be functional. What’s more it works in a mysterious way involving multiple overlaps that seems to be connected in some sort of network.” link..

Plants are able to recognise their siblings, according to a study appearing today in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

Researchers at McMaster University have found that plants get fiercely competitive when forced to share their pot with strangers of the same species, but they’re accommodating when potted with their siblings.

Plants ‘recognize’ their siblings

Links sorted by popularity. Tools for: database, email,
hard disk, internet, linux, macintosh, network, scripts, virus, and
windows.

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Title says it all.

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Hello everyone! I thought I would put this tutorial together, as it seems every time I post an image that I have processed in this way, everyone wants to know how I did it. Well here it is and check it out. Enjoy.

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Study Suggests Meditation Can Help Train Attention

In meditation, people sit quietly and concentrate on their breath. As air swooshes in and out of their nostrils, they attend to each sensation. As unbidden thoughts flutter to mind, they let them go. Breathe. Let go. Breathe. Let go.

According to a study published today in the online edition of the journal PloS Biology, three months of rigorous training in this kind of meditation leads to a profound shift in how the brain allocates attention.

It appears that the ability to release thoughts that pop into mind frees the brain to attend to more rapidly changing things and events in the world at large, said the study’s lead author, Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Expert meditators, he said, are better than other people at detecting such fast-changing stimuli, like emotional facial expressions.

Dr. Ron Mangun, director of the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study, called the finding exciting. “It provides neuroscience evidence for changes in the workings of the brain with mental training, in this case meditation,” he said. “We know we can learn and improve abilities of all sorts with practice, everything from driving to playing the piano. But demonstrating this in the context of meditation is interesting and novel.”

Recent research has shown that meditation is good for the brain. It appears to increase gray matter, improve the immune system, reduce stress and promote a sense of well-being. But Dr. Davidson said this was the first study to examine how meditation affects attention.

The study exploited a brain phenomenon called the attentional blink. Say pictures of a St. Bernard and a Scottish terrier are flashed before one’s eyes half a second apart, embedded in a series of 20 pictures of cats. In that sequence, most people fail to see the second dog. Their brains have “blinked.”

Scientists explain this blindness as a misallocation of attention. Things are happening too fast for the brain to detect the second stimulus. Consciousness is somehow suppressed.

But the blink is not an inevitable bottleneck, Dr. Davidson said. Most people can identify the second target some of the time. Thus it may be possible to exert some control, which need not be voluntary, over the allocation of attention.

In the study, 17 volunteers with no meditation experience spent three months at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Mass., meditating 10 to 12 hours a day. A novice control group meditated for 20 minutes a day over the same period.

Both groups were then given attentional blink tests with two numbers embedded in a series of letters. As both groups looked for the numbers, their brain activity was recorded with electrodes placed on the scalp.

Everyone could detect the first number, Dr. Davidson said. But the brain recordings showed that the less experienced meditators tended to grasp the first number and hang onto it, so they missed the second number. Those with more experience invested less attention to the first number, as if letting it go. This led to an increased ability to grasp the second number.

The attentional blink was thought to be a fixed property of the nervous system, Dr. Davidson said. But this study shows that it can change with practice. Attention is a flexible, trainable skill.

Just ask Daniel Levison, a staff researcher in the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin who meditated for three months as part of the study. “I’m a much better listener,” he said. “I don’t get lost in my own personal reaction to what people are saying.”

Source: New York Times, May 8, 2007,
Study Suggests Meditation Can Help Train Attention
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE