Blind people can use their hearing more effectively

And here’s how to reproduce the effects in the seeing. Technorati Tags: mind hacks

Your shadow self

Apparently, if you stimulate part of the brain (left temporoparietal junction), you induce the feeling of _autoscopy_ or _heautoscopy_, where you experience a double of yourself. Mind Hack discusses some of the “recent research”:http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2006/09/inducing_the_shadow.html behind these phenomena. Technorati Tags: brain, neuroscience

Lots of talk about flow

It seems like people are getting into the flow of flow: * “lifehack.org”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/LifeHack?m=763 * “43Folders”:http://www.43folders.com/2006/02/09/flow/ * “c2″:http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MentalStateCalledFlow * “wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29 I’ve read both “Finding Flow”:http://www.randomjohn.info/wordpress/2005/02/07/finding-flow-by-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi/ and “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”:http://www.randomjohn.info/wordpress/2004/11/27/flow-the-psychology-of-optimal-experience/. I also describe a “negative experience with flow”:http://www.randomjohn.info/wordpress/2005/01/19/getting-high-legally-high-tech-meditation-etc/ that I had some time back. But all in all, I love being able to get [...]

The Dalai Lama and mind research

I knew the Dalai Lama was supportive in research on consciousness, but I didn’t know he was “this involved”:http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=00000000007,00000001381,0,0,1,0.

Meditation and training

More stuff comes out about meditation every day. Results of a new one detail how “meditation influences the regulation of visual perception”:http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8118.

Neurology, motivation, and the news

Whenever I file an entry under both “mind and consciousness” and “current events,” I am often nervous. This entry is no different. First up is the story about how tobacco advertisers are “targeting women”:http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8052, especially in developing countries. It seems they have their advertising techniques down to a science, including the perception of addressing health [...]

More hi-tech meditation

There is a new course that combines “meditation and virtual reality”:http://www.stnews.org/articles.php?article_id=578&category=news to teach people how to cope with stressful situations not only during a sitting practice, but also out in the world where stressful situations occur. One technique teaches meditation while using VR to simulate a stressful environment. They are testing these ideas especially on [...]

Prayer and health — the controversy rolls on

Whether prayer affects health has been controversial for some time now. “Here’s”:http://www.wral.com/goodnews/4507651/detail.html another study in favor of prayer.

This could be good

A medical research university in Texas and a yoga institute in Bangalore, India “team up”:http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=23561 to do research on mind-body interventions on cancer patients. Look for some good stuff to come out of this.

More mind over matter

bq. It’s all a matter of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. — goofy quote I heard in middle school Surprise, more happiness is linked to “a better heart”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4449199.stm.