Hot MedFax

I'm one of those people who basically only operates on her gut.  It's been right a lot of times.  Meeting my husband and knowing he was the one (at least, at that time!).  Making new friends.  Knowing whether a potential boss is really right for me.   Now a new study is saying that, when it comes to empathy, don't trust your gut. According to newswise.com, empathy is more the result of logic than emotion.  "Cultivating successful personal and professional relationships requires the ability to accurately infer the feelings of others -- that is, to be empathetically accurate.  Some are better at t his than others, a difference that may be explained by a mode of thought," says Jennifer Lerner, PhD, of Harvard University, a co-author of the study. "Until now, however, little was known about which mode of thought -- intuitive vs. systematic, offers better accuracy in perceiving another's feelings." You'd think that would make men better a...

What if you could read your partner's mind?  Some of us might not like what we find there, but now a new study is saying that "mapping" the brain might help us do it. What mapping does is to decode the brain, according to researchers as reported at newswise.com.  Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have built a "semantic atlas" that shows in vivid colors and multiple dimensions how the human brain organizes language. The atlas identifies brain areas that respond to words that have similar meanings. In a brain imaging study, neural activity was recorded while  volunteers listened to stories from the "Moth Radio Hour." The results show that at least one-third of the brain's cerebral cortex, including areas dedicated to high-level cognition, is involved in language processing. One study found that different people share similar language maps: "The similarity in semantic topography across different subjects is re...

Do you really see what you think you see? Guess what?  You don't. Perception experts have long known that we see much less of the world than we think we do, according to newswise.com. A person creates a mental model of their surroundings by stitching together scraps of visual information gleaned while shifting attention from place to place. Counterintuitively, the very process that creates the illusion of a complete picture relies on filtering out most of what's out there. Kind of like focusing on just what's in front of you when you're trying to ignore distractions.   "The visual system really cares about objects," says postdoctoral fellow J. Eric T. Taylor, who is the lead author on the paper reporting this. "If I move around a room, the locations of all the objects - chairs, tables, doors, walls, etc. -- change on my retina, but my mental representation of the room stays the same." Objects play such a fundamental role in how we...

I suppose it should come as no surprise. But people who are anxious perceive things differently than those who are not.  It turns out, according to a new study, that people suffering from anxiety perceive the world in a fundamentally different way than others. That means that people diagnosed with anxiety are less able to distinguish between a neutral, “safe” stimulus (in this case, the sound of a tone) and one that had earlier been associated with gaining or losing money. In other words, when it comes to emotionally charged experiences, they show a behavioral phenomenon known as “over-generalization,” the researchers say, newswise.com reports. “We show that in patients with anxiety, emotional experience induces plasticity in brain circuits that lasts after the experience is over,” says Prof. Rony Paz of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. “Such plastic changes occur in primary circuits, and these later mediate the response to new stimuli. The result is an...

I remember, years ago, seeing a man expose himself on a busy main street while I was out running.  I immediately went to the police station and was asked to look through a notebook of potential suspects. I saw someone immediately who looked like the man, but we had seen a movie recently with a villain who (oddly enough) looked very similar.  Figuring that couldn't be the right man, I said I couldn't pick him out of the faces.  The cop pointed to the exact same picture and said, "Is that him?" Now, if I were a witness on the stand who was asked the same question, a trial might have gone very differently.  (I never heard back, but clearly, he was a frequent flier!) Turns out that many decisions we make are often influenced by our memories and the confidence we have in them.  (Don't get me started on False Memory Syndrome, that awful -- and false -- idea put forward by groups in the '90s trying to deny sexual abuse memories that surface later in life.) B...

How's this for brains?  They can judge a face's trustworthiness even without consciously seeing it. According to newswise.com, “Our findings suggest that the brain automatically responds to a face’s trustworthiness before it is even consciously perceived,” explains Jonathan Freeman, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the study’s senior author. Haven't you proven it?  Just by looking at someone, sometimes getting a sense to be wary? “The results are consistent with an extensive body of research suggesting that we form spontaneous judgments of other people that can be largely outside awareness,” adds Freeman, who conducted the study as a faculty member at Dartmouth College.  The study showed people photos of faces that were both real and artificially created, judging them for trustworthiness in a brief few seconds.  An earlier group had been shown the photos for a longer period of time. This rapid exposure,...