Ramanisblog

Tag: bloglines

  • The brain may feel other people’s pain

    We are all parts of the Universal conciousness, which is an attribute of Reality( Brahman)
    This was called(consciousness) was named as elan vital by Henri Bergson.
    We feel, rather we think, we are different from others due to Space and Time.Please read my blogs on Philosophy and Astrophysics.
    NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – If you’ve ever thought that you literally feel other people’s pain, you may be right. A brain-imaging study suggests that some people have true physical reactions to others’ injuries.

    Using an imaging technique called functional MRI, UK researchers found evidence that people who say they feel vicarious pain do, in fact, have heightened activity in pain-sensing brain regions upon witnessing another person being hurt.

    The findings, published in the journal Pain, could have implications for understanding, and possibly treating, cases of unexplained “functional” pain.

    “Patients with functional pain experience pain in the absence of an obvious disease or injury to explain their pain,” explained Dr. Stuart W. G. Derbyshire of the University of Birmingham, one of the researchers on the new study.

    “Consequently,” he told Reuters Health in an email, “there is considerable effort to uncover other ways in which the pain might be generated.”

    Derbyshire said he now wants to study whether the brains of patients with functional pain respond to images of injury in the same way that the current study participants’ did.

    For the study, Derbyshire and colleague Jody Osborn first had 108 college students view several images of painful situations — including athletes suffering sports injuries and patients receiving an injection. Close to one-third of the students said that, for at least one image, they not only had an emotional reaction, but also fleetingly felt pain in the same site as the injury in the image.

    Derbyshire and Osborn then took functional MRI scans of 10 of these “responders,” along with 10 “non-responders” who reported no pain while viewing the images.

    Functional MRI charts changes in brain blood flow, allowing researchers to see which brain areas become more active in response to a particular stimulus. Here, the researchers scanned participants’ brains as they viewed either images of people in pain, images that were emotional but not painful, or neutral images.

    The investigators found that while viewing the painful images, both responders and non-responders showed activity in the emotional centers of the brain. But responders showed greater activity in pain-related brain regions compared with non-responders, and as compared with their own brain responses to the emotional images.

    “We think this confirms that at least some people have an actual physical reaction when observing others being injured or expressing pain,” Derbyshire said.

    He noted that the responders also tended to say that they avoided horror movies and disturbing images on the news “so as to avoid being in pain” — which, the researcher said, is more than just an empathetic response.

    As far as the potential practical implications of the findings, Derbyshire said it would be a “reach” to think that such brain mechanisms might be behind all functional pain. But, he added, “they might explain some of it.”
    http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BK35F20091221?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100

  • US ‘Forged’ Nuclear Documents, Says Iran

    Charges and counter charges-who is telling the Truth?
    Iran’s president has said documents appearing to show his country is working on a nuclear bomb trigger were “forged” by the US.

    Iranian president Ahmadinejad visits the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility
    The papers, revealed last week by The Times newspaper, describe a four-year plan to test the neutron initiator.
    Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the reports about a nuclear trigger were “fundamentally not true”.
    Speaking to US TV network ABC News, he said of the documents: “They are all a fabricated bunch of papers continuously being forged and disseminated by the American government.”
    Foreign intelligence agencies have dated the documents to early 2007, four years after Tehran was thought to have suspended its weapons programme, the newspaper claimed.
    The world powers know the documents are damning but they are choosing to wait until they use them to try and damn Iran.
    Sky’s foreign affairs editor Tim Marshall
    He said accusations that Iran was continuing work on a nuclear arms plan were “a repetitive and tasteless joke”.
    US President Barack Obama’s senior advisor David Axelrod has said any accusation that Washington had fabricated documents was “nonsense”.
    He added: “Nobody has any illusions about what the intent of the Iranian government is.”
    Tehran has insisted its nuclear programme is solely for civilian purposes and rejects Western suspicions that it is covertly trying to develop a bomb.
    Mr Ahmadinejad also said Iran was ready to strike a uranium enrichment deal if the US and the West respect the Islamic Republic and stop making threats.
    Iran is under three sets of UN sanctions for refusing to suspend enrichment and it risks more after rejecting a UN-brokered deal to send its low-enriched uranium abroad to be further refined into fuel for a reactor.
    http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Iran-President-Mahmoud-Ahmadinejad-Says-US-Forged-Documents-About-Nuclear-Bomb-Trigger-Claims/Article/200912415506440?DCMP=EMC-news_OBU

  • Avatar’s gaze illuminates social brain


    Please follow the link and watch video.
    Video: Follow my eyes

    They may seem a little unsettling but the staring eyes of this female avatar were designed to grab your gaze and hold it, and also to obligingly follow where you look. By performing these actions with people placed inside a brain scanner, she has helped to demonstrate that guiding the gazes of others activates different brain areas than following.

    This could help unravel the brain activity underlying the process of “joint attention”, thought to be key to complex, human social interactions. It could also offer insights into why social interactions can break down for people with autism.

    Joint attention – the ability and motivation to both guide and follow someone else’s gaze – develops early in infants. It is considered necessary for complex social interactions, the learning of language and co-operation. For example, an eye signal from one person to another can indicate a potential meal, mate or menace.

    In people with autism, joint attention seems to be abnormal, which may underpin some of the social difficulties they experience. Previously researchers have studied brain activity in people watching a video designed to engender a feeling of joint attention in the viewer. The new study is the first to separate out the processes of following and initiating joint attention.

    Watch me watch her

    Psychiatrist Leonhard Schilbach at the University of Cologne in Germany and his colleagues developed an avatar that can hold someone’s gaze and an infrared camera that tracks the eye movement of someone watching the avatar. The system was set up inside an MRI scanner.

    Then the team asked 21 healthy volunteers to use their eyes to guide the avatar’s gaze towards a grey box projected on a computer screen, or to follow the avatar’s gaze, while inside the scanner. The camera allows the researchers to determine when the volunteers are following the avatar’s gaze and when the avatar is following theirs.

    The real-time fMRI scans revealed that when the volunteers successfully got the avatar to follow their gaze, brain areas involved in reward and motivation were activated. When they followed the avatar’s gaze, a different area of the brain, known to be involved in imagining what other people are thinking, was active. “It’s kind of surprising that sharing something as basic as a grey square is something we enjoy,” says Schilbach.

    Get engaged

    The finding is novel, says autism researcher Peter Mundy at the University of California, Davis, because previous studies of joint attention have not distinguished between initiating and responding.

    It points to the possibility that differences in motivation to initiate joint attention “may be involved in the early social impairments of autism”, he says.

    Mundy adds that interactive avatars will be helpful in other areas of social psychology by allowing us to simulate social interactions and observe the neural systems they involve. “Our method is progress in the direction of studying things which stem from being engaged with another person,” agrees Schilbach.

    His team now plans to study the brains of people with autism as they interact with the avatar.

    Journal reference: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2009.21401
    http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18236-avatars-gaze-illuminates-social-brain.html

  • Seven of the greatest scientific hoaxes

    For this week’s issue of New Scientist I edited a review of The Sun and the Moon by Matthew Goodman, which tells the story of the great moon hoax of 1835. Read the review here.

    This got me thinking about other great scientific hoaxes in the past. After doing a bit of digging, I was amazed by how many there were – and at the variety and creativity of the hoaxes. Here are a few of the best.

    Of course, there are serious cases of scientific fraud, such as the stem cell researchers recently found guilty of falsifying data and the South Korean cloning fraud. The following stories, however, are not so serious.

    Piltdown Man

    In 1912, solicitor and amateur palaeontologist Charles Dawson “found” the Piltdown fossils, a skull and jawbone that appeared to be half-man half-ape, in Sussex. They were hailed as the evolutionary “missing link” between apes and humans.

    It was over 40 years later, in 1953, that the fossil was exposed as a fake. In fact, the skull was constructed from a medieval human cranium attached to the jaw of an orang-utan.

    The Cardiff Giant

    A ten-foot “petrified man” was dug up on a small farm in Cardiff, New York, in October 1869. The “Cardiff Giant” became a huge news story and many Americans travelled to see it.

    Early in 1870, it was revealed as a fake, the creation of New Yorker George Hull, who had paid for it to be carved out of stone.

    Beringer’s fraudulent fossils

    Physician Johann Beringer was amazed when he was presented with fossils “found” in Wurzburg, Germany, in 1725, which depicted incredible scenes: the forms of birds, bees, snails, lizards, plants with flowers, frogs mating and insects feeding, not to mention comets, moons and suns.

    It turned out that he was the victim of an elaborate plot: envious colleagues of Beringer had planted the fossils.

    Unfortunately, Beringer fell for it hook, line and sinker, and even published a book to tell the world about the fossils. Rumour has it that once Beringer realised the hoax, he tried to buy up any unsold copies of his book. (See Johann Beringer and the fraudulent fossils)

    There are many more examples of fossil fraud, such as the fake “entombed toad” and the fake fossil fly in amber.

    The Sokal hoax

    In 1996, American physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper loaded with nonsensical jargon to the journal Social Text, in which he argued that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. (Read Sokal’s paper)

    When the journal published it, Sokal revealed that the paper was in fact a spoof. The incident triggered a storm of debate about the ethics of Sokal’s prank.

    The spaghetti tree

    In 1957, the BBC show Panorama broadcast a programme about the spaghetti tree in Switzerland. It showed a family harvesting pasta that hung from the branches of the tree.

    After watching the programme, hundreds of people phoned in asking how they could grow their own tree. Alas, it was an April Fools’ Day joke.

    Watch the BBC’s spaghetti tree footage

    The Upas tree

    An account was published in the London Magazine in 1783 by a Dutch surgeon named Foersch (his initials were variously given as NP and JN). It claimed the existence of a tree on the island of Java so poisonous that it killed everything within a 15-mile radius.

    Read the original account (scroll down to find it)

    This was the start of a legend. Even Erasmus Darwin wrote about it in a poem in 1791. A note to the poem read, “There is a poison-tree in the island of Java, which is said by its effluvia to have depopulated the country… in a district of 12 or 14 miles round it, the face of the earth is quite barren and rocky, intermixed only with the skeletons of men and animals; affording a scene of melancholy beyond what poets have described or painters delineated.”

    You really can find the Upas tree in Indonesia. Though not as potent as legend would have it, the latex of the tree does contain a powerful toxin, which was traditionally used on arrow points.

    Read more about the Upas tree (PDF: go to page 8)

    The secret of immortality

    Johann Heinrich Cohausen, an 18th-century physician, wrote a treatise on the prolongation of life, entitled Hermippus redivivus. Amongst other secrets of longevity, it claimed that life could be prolonged by taking an elixir produced by collecting the breath of young women in bottles.

    Actually, Cohausen admitted in the last few pages of the work that it was a satire, so any gullible readers wouldn’t have been duped for too long
    http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn15012-seven-of-the-greatest-scientific-hoaxes.html

  • Apple Bran Muffins

    Recipe By : NANCY HAGFORS
    Serving Size : 12 Preparation Time :0:00
    Categories : Brunch Muffins
    Microwave

    Amount Measure Ingredient — Preparation Method
    ——– ———— ——————————–
    1 cup Brown sugar
    3 teaspoons Baking soda
    3/4 cup Butter
    3 teaspoons Cinnamon
    1/2 cup Molasses
    1 teaspoon Nutmeg
    2 Eggs
    1 teaspoon Salt
    2 cups Flour
    1 pound Can applesacue
    1 1/2 cups 100% bran cereal

    Cream sugar and butter. Beat in eggs and molasses. Add dry ingredients,
    then applesauce. Will look curdled. Use 2 paper liners per muffin and
    fill 1/2-full. Last up to 4 weeks.
    Cook on medium-high (4 muffins – 2-1/2 minutes; 6 muffins – 3-1/2
    minutes.)
    http://www.recipesource.com/main-dishes/breakfast/breads/apple-bran-muffins1.html