New Research on the Question - Does Thinking Positive Really Help? - ABC News

Scientists may have found a physiological explanation for the power of positive thinking. When optimists and pessimists attempt the same task, their different attitudes are reflected in different neural activities in their brains. Can the power of positive thinking cure illness and disease? Researchers at the California Institute of Technology found that participants in brain-scanning experiments who thought they were doing well on a complex task had greater neural activity in a high-level area of the brain called the posterior parietal cortex (PPT). Different neural activity was observed in the brains of participants who thought they were doing poorly. The implication in those results is that personal attitudes may pre-program us to succeed if we are optimists, and protect ourselves against failure if we are pessimists. Does that mean that optimists are more likely to succeed, as other experiments have suggested?

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The Neurology of The Spiritual Experience: A Conversation with Andrew Newberg | h+ Magazine

The science of spirituality has become something of a hot topic in the past few decades. Some of this may be because the absolutist rational materialism that dominated much of the twentieth century has given way to something slightly more flexible. But mostly, it is because we finally have the advanced imaging technology — fMRI and SPECT scans and the like — to actually peer inside the brain and find out what is going on during so-called spiritual experience. No one has peered deeper than the Director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Andrew Newberg. During his career, Newberg examined the brains of Tibetan monks during peak meditation, Franciscan nuns during ecstatic prayer, Evangelicals in the throes of glossolalia — all with an eye towards understanding how brain function produces mystical experience. His books include How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist and Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief.

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Neuroscience May Have An Answer to the Nature vs. Nuture Debate : Jim Falloon, NPR

The criminal brain has always held a fascination for James Fallon. For nearly 20 years, the neuroscientist at the University of California-Irvine has studied the brains of psychopaths. He studies the biological basis for behavior, and one of his specialties is to try to figure out how a killer's brain differs from yours and mine. About four years ago, Fallon made a startling discovery. It happened during a conversation with his then 88-year-old mother, Jenny, at a family barbecue. "I said, 'Jim, why don't you find out about your father's relatives?' " Jenny Fallon recalls. "I think there were some cuckoos back there." Fallon investigated. "There's a whole lineage of very violent people — killers," he says.

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What conditions best support learning and personal growth? - Ed Batista

Stephanie West Allen points to a thought-provoking and compelling answer to the question above in the work of Judy Willis, a former neurologist who obtained her teaching credential after a 15-year career in medicine and now teaches at Santa Barbara Middle School and blogs at Psychology Today. Willis brings an unusual and highly valuable combination of hands-on experience as an educator and a deep understanding of neuroscience to her writing, and her article in the Summer 2007 issue of Educational Leadership, "The Neuroscience of Joyful Education," is one of the most helpful pieces I've read on the subject of understanding the practical relevance of neuroscientific research. Willis's article is focused on formal education in a classroom setting, but I believe that the findings she discusses have relevance for any experience in which we're trying to impart knowledge, stimulate understanding and foster growth, from a group workshop to an executive coaching session to an impromptu feedback conversation.

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The Aha! in the Brain - The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight

A sudden comprehension that solves a problem, reinterprets a situation, explains a joke, or resolves an ambiguous percept is called an insight (i.e., the "Aha! moment"). Psychologists have studied insight using behavioral methods for nearly a century. Recently, the tools of cognitive neuroscience have been applied to this phenomenon. A series of studies have used electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural correlates of the “Aha! moment” and its antecedents. Although the experience of insight is sudden and can seem disconnected from the immediately preceding thought, these studies show that insight is the culmination of a series of brain states and processes operating at different time scales. Elucidation of these precursors suggests interventional opportunities for the facilitation of insight..

Click here to read this new paper from John Kounios, Drexel University and Mark Beeman, Northwestern University