http://exploringthemind.com Brain Candy for the Curious Mind! Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:46:17 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Copyright © Exploring The Mind! 2010 michael@hypnosisnetwork.com (Exploring The Mind!) michael@hypnosisnetwork.com (Exploring The Mind!) posts 1440 http://exploringthemind.com/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/itunes_144.jpg http://exploringthemind.com 144 144 Brain Candy for the Curious Mind! Exploring The Mind! Exploring The Mind! michael@hypnosisnetwork.com no no http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/brain-scans-can-reveal-your-decisions-7-seconds-before-you-decide http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/brain-scans-can-reveal-your-decisions-7-seconds-before-you-decide#comments Thu, 24 Jun 2010 19:44:11 +0000 admin http://exploringthemind.com/?p=698 In a kind of spooky experiment, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences reveal that our decisions are made seconds before we become aware of them. In the study, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their right or left hand. The only condition was that they had to remember when they made the decision to either use their right hand or left hand. Using fMRI, researchers would scan the brains of the participants while all of this was going on in order to find out if they could in fact predict which hand the participants would use BEFORE they were consciously aware of the decision.

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]]> http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/brain-scans-can-reveal-your-decisions-7-seconds-before-you-decide/feed 44 http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/the-power-of-profanity http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/the-power-of-profanity#comments Fri, 28 May 2010 05:16:26 +0000 admin http://exploringthemind.com/?p=411 Have you ever wondered why swearing seems to be your immediate reaction to pain? In June 2009, researchers at the Keele University in England sought to determine why the automatic response for so many people in pain is to blurt out swears. The question at hand was, does simply expressing pain (in a shout, yelp, or cry) make you feel better, or, is it the specific words you choose to yell that helps to lessen pain? Do curse words contain a hidden power that has the ability to help decrease pain?

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]]> http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/the-power-of-profanity/feed 13 http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/spirituality-and-the-brain http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/spirituality-and-the-brain#comments Fri, 28 May 2010 05:14:00 +0000 admin http://exploringthemind.com/?p=391 A new study published in the Feb. 11 issue of the journal Neuron, has identified areas of the brain that, when damaged, leads to a greater sense of self-transcendence. The higher you are on the self-transcendence scale, the more you view yourself as being an integral part of the universe as a whole… So if you rank low on this scale, it is all about YOU!

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]]> http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/spirituality-and-the-brain/feed 14 http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/if-you-want-something-talk-to-the-right-ear http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/if-you-want-something-talk-to-the-right-ear#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:05:34 +0000 admin http://exploringthemind.com/?p=160 I just found some current research* (published in June of 2009), that appears to indicate that we are more receptive to requests made to our right ear (as opposed to our left). This is pretty interesting stuff. The paper, published in the German Journal, Naturwissenschaften, looks at a series of three studies of ear preference between humans. The researchers, Dr. Luca Tommasi and Daniele Marzoli from the University “Gabriele d’Annunzio” in Italy, are pretty clever. Controlled laboratory studies have shown a preference for right ear dominance with the reasoning being that humans process verbal information more efficiently with their left brain hemisphere.

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