It's All in Your Mind

No one did more to alter the consciousness of the generation that came of age in the 1960s than Augustus Owsley Stanley (who passed away March 13, 2011). Long before the Summer of Love drew thousands of hippies to Haight-Ashbury, Owsley was already an authentic underground folk hero, revered throughout the counterculture for making the purest form of LSD ever to hit the street. Yet today, at seventy-two, he is all but forgotten.

an umbrella term for a number of psychological techniques that share a theoretical basis in behavioristic learning theory and cognitive psychology.... In cognitive oriented therapies, the objective is typically to identify and monitor thoughts, assumptions, beliefs and behaviors that are related and accompanied to debilitating negative emotions and to identify those which are dysfunctional, inaccurate, or simply unhelpful. This is done in an effort to replace or transcend them with more realistic and useful ones.....

...Priming, he said, is when someone is exposed to a certain environment and their subconscious is activated, and then they tend to act in accordance with that environment without deliberate intent. Priming can manipulate behavior; if someone witnesses violent behavior, they would likely behave more violently... "Once they were in a patriotic point of view, they were less empathetic," Alvarado said. "They didn't put themselves in other people's perspective." Though songs like "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" were meant to be neutral primes, the researchers found that they stimulated a pro-social response.... [Ummm...]

REM sleep fosters the formation of associative networks in the brain... ""We found that — for creative problems that you've already been working on — the passage of time is enough to find solutions.... However, for new problems, only REM sleep enhances creativity..." appears REM sleep helps achieve such solutions by stimulating associative networks...

Tourette's syndrome afflicts three out of every 1,000 children between 6 and 17 in the United States, the CDC says... three times more common in boys than in girls, and about twice as common in children 12 to 17 as in those 6 to 11.

The mural comes alive. The photo of a beaming Lewis in formal attire transforms into Lewis the basketball player, streaking down the court [video]

theory that suggests that a clever cat parasite may alter human cultures on a massive scale. ... Toxoplasma gondii, has been transmitted indirectly from cats to roughly half the people on the planet, and it has been shown to affect human personalities in different ways. ... women who are infected with the parasite tend to be warm, outgoing and attentive to others, while infected men tend to be less intelligent and probably a bit boring. But both men and women who are infected are more prone to feeling guilty and insecure. ... Other researchers have linked the parasite to schizophrenia.... Can a common cat parasite account for part -- even if only a very small part -- of the cultural differences seen around the world?

babies are a lot smarter than others may realize. ... The finding that infants can distinguish between solids and liquids at such an early age builds upon a growing body of research that strongly suggests that babies are not blank slates who primarily depend on others for acquiring knowledge. That's a common assumption of researchers in the not too distant past.

Scientists have studied high-frequency brain waves, known as gamma oscillations, for more than 50 years, believing them crucial to consciousness, attention, learning and memory. Now, for the first time, MIT researchers and colleagues have found a way to induce these waves by shining laser light directly onto the brains of mice.

children's short sleep duration even without sleeping difficulties increases the risk for behavioral symptoms of ADHD.

Autistic children have variations on genes that help neurons route themselves in the brain of a developing fetus... One of the gene variants occurs 20 percent more often in autistic children and may play a role in 12 percent to 18 percent of cases of autism... The altered DNA is found near a gene that is active in the development of the frontal cortex, a brain region necessary for language and judgment....

morning people's circadian clocks can't resist the biological pressure to sleep, while night owls don't buckle as easily

Dogs and small children who share similar social environments appear to understand human gestures in comparable ways.... 3-year-olds rely on the direction of the index finger to locate a hidden object, whereas 2-year-olds and dogs respond instead to the protruding body part, even if the index finger is pointing in the opposite direction....

11:11 is a pre-encoded trigger placed into our cellular memory banks prior to our descent into matter which, when activated, signifies that our time of completion is near. This refers to the completion of duality. When the 11:11 appears to you, it is your wake-up call. A direct channel opens up between you and the Invisible. When this happens, it is time to reflect on whatever you are doing for a moment and Look Larger. A transfer is in position. You can enter the Greater Reality if you wish pray or meditate and seed your future and also, you can be seeded by the Invisible. You can ask for help in some specific area of your life or simply listen quietly and receive a revelation.