There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.
In the wake of "Brexit," the UK's referendum to leave the European Union, hundreds of thousands of British citizens took to wearing a safety pin on their lapel, a quiet and dignified gesture intended to signal to their immigrant brothers and sisters that they stood in solidarity with them against the tide of fear and hate that drove the Brexit decision.
Simply put, I say that, in the wake of Trump's election, we repeat the practice here in the states. Too many reports have already flooded the airwaves indicating a sharp increase in racially-motivated violence and intimidation across the country, and while this simple act may not change that, it will demonstrate to those who are the targets of such aggression in your community that they have allies on the streets, and not just the Internet.
For many women, just walking down the street can mean being subject to harassment by men—from subtle comments to overtly hostile remarks. Back in 2012, fed up with such treatment, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, an oil painter by trade, decided to speak out: She produced an illustrated self-portrait with a caption—"Stop Telling Women To Smile"—and plastered copies all around her Brooklyn neighborhood. Since then, Fazlalizadeh has created countless posters, literally taking to the street to combat sexist harassment. Each piece features a different woman, with a caption that reflects her own experiences with public harassment. With $35,000 raised on Kickstarter, Fazlalizadeh has now taken her project, named after that first caption, on the road. In January, after traveling to Chicago and Boston to interview women there about how they experience public space, she'll be heading to the West Coast.Read more at Mother Jones
Vaccine-autism claims, "Frankenfood" bans, the herbal cure craze: All point to the public's growing fear (and, often, outright denial) of science and reason, says Michael Specter. He warns the trend spells disaster for human progress. Michael Specter is a staff writer for the New Yorker. His new book, Denialism, asks why we have increasingly begun to fear scientific advances instead of embracing them.TED Talks via Roger Ebert's Journal
Palin's Facebook page ... carries a map featuring 20 gun sights, one for each of the Democrats targeted this year by her political action committee SarahPAC. Three of the gun sights, those where incumbent Democrats have already announced their retirement, are colored red.
Using video of the 8.7-inch-long [Brazilian salmon pink tarantula], British researchers showed that the human brain engages several different systems when evaluating threats. For instance, the part of the brain that engages when a threat is approaching is different from the part that is activated when a threat is receding, they reported Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Previous work had shown that avoiding a threat people were trained to fear in the lab caused brain activity to switch from anxiety-related regions to panic centers. But it was not clear that people would respond in the same way to something they feared naturally. The researchers chose a spider species for the test because fear of spiders is one of the most common phobias in human beings, said Dean Mobbs, the study's lead author and a neuroscientist at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England.
The researchers recruited 20 volunteers and placed them in a magnetic resonance imaging machine to watch which parts of their brains were activated during different stages of the experiment. Each volunteer was asked to place a shoeless foot into a box that was connected to a row of five other boxes.
The researchers asked the subjects how scared they thought they would be when the tarantula was placed into each of the boxes. Then they showed them four-second videos of the creature entering the compartments. When the tarantula was placed far away from the foot, the MRI machine showed brain activity in the part of the prefrontal cortex involved in recognizing threats. As the tarantula appeared to move closer to the foot, a different fear system kicked in inside a primitive region of the midbrain associated with the fight-or-flight response. In other words, as the spider advanced toward people's feet — regardless of its absolute distance — their brains switched from anxiety to panic.
In addition, as the tarantula appeared to recede, the MRI machine registered increased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex. Mobbs said this area might emit a safety signal that dispels the fear signal.
The subjects were led to believe that the tarantula was entering a box while they lay in the brain scanner, but in reality there were no spiders present. The video was prerecorded so the scientists could control for the tarantula's movements.
When people underestimated their own fear, they also remembered the tarantula being bigger than those who had a better handle on their own fear responses. That suggests fear affects cognition as well, Mobbs said.
... The researchers tested only people whose fear of spiders was low to middling. But learning where proper fear responses break down in people with phobias or anxiety issues could eventually help researchers develop targeted therapies for them, Mobbs said.
Researchers working with mice have discovered that by removing a protein from the region of the brain responsible for recalling fear, they can permanently delete traumatic memories. Their report on a molecular means of erasing fear memories in rodents appears this week in Science Express.Read the abstract [Calcium-Permeable AMPA Receptor Dynamics Mediate Fear Memory Erasure] here.“When a traumatic event occurs, it creates a fearful memory that can last a lifetime and have a debilitating effect on a person’s life,” says Richard L. Huganir, Ph.D., professor and director of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “Our finding describing these molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in that process raises the possibility of manipulating those mechanisms with drugs to enhance behavioral therapy for such conditions as post-traumatic stress disorder.”
..."This may sound like science fiction, the ability to selectively erase memories,” says Huganir. “But this may one day be applicable for the treatment of debilitating fearful memories in people, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome associated with war, rape or other traumatic events.”
“Memory”, wrote Oscar Wilde, “is the diary that we all carry about with us”. Perhaps, but if memory is like a diary, it’s one filled with torn-out pages and fabricated passages.Read the rest of the article by Daniel Lametti in Scientific American
In January, a group of New York University neuroscientists led by Daniela Schiller reported in the journal Nature that they had created fearful memories in people and then erased them. Besides being rather cool, the result provides new insight into how to treat traumatic memories in people.
The research was based on the work of neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, a coauthor on the paper. Ten years ago, while experimenting with rats, Ledoux made a discovery that changed the way neuroscientists view memory from that of Wilde’s tidy diary to something more along the lines of a James Frey memoir.
In that experiment, Ledoux conditioned rats to fear a bell by ringing it in time with an electric shock until the rats froze in fear at the mere sound of the bell. Then, at the moment when the fear memory was being recalled, he injected the rats with anisomycin, a drug that stops the construction of new neural connections. Remarkably, the next time he rang the bell the rats no longer froze in fear. The memory, it seemed, had vanished. Poof!
Ledoux concluded that the neural connections in which memories are stored have to be rebuilt each time a memory is recalled. And during rebuilding—or reconsolidation, as he termed it—memories can be altered or even erased. Neuroscientists now believe that reconsolidation functions to update memories with new information—something of an unsettling idea, suggesting that our memories are only as accurate as the last time they were remembered.
