http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2014/12/0...ng-skills/

EXCERPT: When it comes to getting out of a tricky situation, we humans have an evolutionary edge over other primates. Take, as a dramatic example, the Apollo 13 voyage in which engineers, against all odds, improvised a chemical filter on a lunar module to prevent carbon dioxide buildup from killing the crew.

UC Berkeley scientists have found mounting brain evidence that helps explain how humans have excelled at “relational reasoning,” a cognitive skill in which we discern patterns and relationships to make sense of seemingly unrelated information, such as solving problems in unfamiliar circumstances.

Their findings, reported in the Dec. 3 issue of the journal Neuron, suggest that subtle shifts in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain are linked to superior cognition. Among other things, the frontoparietal network plays a key role in analysis, memory retrieval, abstract thinking and problem-solving, and has the fluidity to adapt according to the task at hand.

“This research has led us to take seriously the possibility that tweaks to this network over an evolutionary timescale could help to explain differences in the way that humans and other primates solve problems,” said UC Berkeley neuroscientist Silvia Bunge, the study’s principal investigator.

“It’s not just that we humans have language at our disposal. We also have the capacity to compare and integrate several pieces of information in a way that other primates don’t,” she added....

http://news.ubc.ca/2014/12/03/check-less...il-stress/

RELEASE: Is your inbox burning you out? Then take heart – research from the University of British Columbia suggests that easing up on email checking can help reduce psychological stress.

Some of the study’s 124 adults — including students, financial analysts medical professionals and others — were instructed to limit checking email to three times daily for a week. Others were told to check email as often as they could (which turned out to be about the same number of times that they normally checked their email prior to the study).

These instructions were then reversed for the participants during a subsequent week. During the study period, participants also answered brief daily surveys, including information about their stress levels.

“Our findings showed that people felt less stressed when they checked their email less often,” says Kostadin Kushlev, the study’s lead author and a PhD candidate at UBC’s Dept. of Psychology.

Changing inbox behaviour may be easier said than done, however. “Most participants in our study found it quite difficult to check their email only a few times a day,” says Kushlev. “This is what makes our obvious-in-hindsight findings so striking: People find it difficult to resist the temptation of checking email, and yet resisting this temptation reduces their stress.”

Kushlev’s inspiration for the study came from his own experiences with email overload. “I now check my email in chunks several times a day, rather than constantly responding to messages as they come in,” he says. “And I feel better and less stressed.”

He also notes that organizations may help reduce employee stress by encouraging their workers to check their email in chunks rather than constantly responding to messages.

The study, Checking Email Less Frequently Reduces Stress, is published online in Computers in Human Behavior. Kushlev’s co-author is Elizabeth Dunn from UBC’s Dept. of Psychology. Kushlev can be followed on Twitter at @HappyScholar.

The two-week study involved 124 participants; about two-thirds of these were graduate and undergraduate students, while the remainder worked in a range of industries, including health care, academia, finance, administration and information technology.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ore-155102

EXCERPT: [...] At least part of the schism between Republicans and Democrats is based in differing conceptions of the role of the individual. We find these differences expressed in the frequent heated arguments about crucial issues like health care and immigration. In a broad sense, Democrats, particularly the more liberal among them, are more likely to embrace the communal nature of individual lives and to strive for policies that emphasize that understanding. Republicans, especially libertarians and Tea Party members on the ideological fringe, however, often trace their ideas about freedom and liberty back to Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who argued that the individual is the true measure of human value, and each of us is naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others. Self-described libertarians generally also pride themselves on their high valuation of logic and reasoning over emotion.

Philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have emphasized that human beings are essentially social creatures, that the idea of an isolated individual is a misleading abstraction. So it is not just ironic but instructive that modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual. Contrary to libertarian and Tea Party rhetoric, evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others.

[...] in the eyes of many conservative Americans today, religion and evolution do not mix. You either accept what the Bible tells us or what Charles Darwin wrote, but not both. The irony here is that when it comes to our responsibilities to one another as human beings, religion and evolution nowadays are not necessarily on opposite sides of the fence. And as Matthew D. Lieberman, a social neuroscience researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, has written: “we think people are built to maximize their own pleasure and minimize their own pain. In reality, we are actually built to overcome our own pleasure and increase our own pain in the service of following society’s norms.”

While I do not entirely accept the norms clause of Lieberman’s claim, his observation strikes me as evocatively religious. Consequently I find it more than ironic that American individualism today — which many link closely with Christian fundamentalism — is self-consciously founded on 17th- and 18th-century ideas about human beings as inherently self-interested and self-centered individuals....

Case in point, Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously declared in “The Social Contract” (1762) that each of us is born free and yet everywhere we are in chains. He did not mean physical chains. He meant social ones. We now know he was dead wrong. Human evolution has made us obligate social creatures. Even if some of us may choose sooner or later to disappear into the woods or sit on a mountaintop in deep meditation, we humans are able to do so only if before such individualistic anti-social resolve we have first been socially nurtured and socially taught survival arts by others. The distinction Rousseau and others tried to draw between “natural liberty, which is bounded only by the strength of the individual” and “civil liberty, which is limited by the general will” is fanciful, not factual.

This is decidedly not what Enlightenment philosophers wanted to hear. According to Rousseau and others, our responsibilities and duties to one another as members of society do not come from nature, but instead from our social conventions. Their speculations about the origins of the latter generally asserted that the most ancient of all societies was the family. Yet in their eyes, even the family as a social unit was seen as ephemeral.

[...] In fairness to Rousseau it should be noted, as I observed earlier, that he may not have meant such claims to be taken literally.

[...] However pragmatic their motivations and goals, what Rousseau and others crafted as arguments in favor of their ideas all had the earmarks of primitive mythology. As the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski argued almost a century ago: “Myth fulfills in primitive culture an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances, and codifies belief, it safeguards and enforces morality, it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man. [...] Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or an artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom.”

[...] While as an anthropologist I largely agree with Malinowski, I would add that not all myths make good charters for faith and wisdom. The sanctification of the rights of individuals and their liberties today by libertarians and Tea Party conservatives is contrary to our evolved human nature as social animals. There was never a time in history before civil society when we were each totally free to do whatever we elected to do. We have always been social and caring creatures...

http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/...g-massacre

RELEASE: During the excavation of Sandby borg ringfort on the island of Öland, Sweden, a number of macabre finds were made. Skeletal remains from a small child were found in one of the houses in the central block of the ringfort. This is the first child to be identified among the victims of the massacre at Sandby borg.

It is both frightening and sensational in the sense that prior to this find the results showed that there had only been adults in the ringfort when this horrific event took place, says Helena Victor, project manager at the Dept. of Museum Archaeology at Kalmar County Museum, Sweden. It sheds a whole new light on the massacre, she continues.

The excavation was carried out in September by the Department of Museum Archaeology at Kalmar County Museum, in cooperation with students from Linnaeus University. Osteological analyses have now been made of the bones that were uncovered and experts confirm that they belong to two individuals, one of which is a child of an estimated age of 2 to 5 years. In the same house the skeleton of a 50 to 60 year old man was found lying on its stomach in the central of the building.

What we can see by looking at the position in which the skeleton was found is that he was probably struck down and fell prone into the burning fireplace, says Clara Alfsdotter, osteologist at the museum of Bohuslän who conducted the analysis.

The Sandby borg research was started in 2010. Despite the fact that less than 3% of the ringfort have been excavated, the remains of over ten individuals have been uncovered and all of them show indications of having died in a massacre that took place around 1500 years ago.

The researchers are now asking for the public to help with donations so that the work can continue.

We need funding to be able to continue, Helena Victor explains. So we’re launching a crowdfunding campaign, where one of the rewards for funding will be to join us in the trench at the next Sandby borg excavation. It is the first time in Sweden that an archaeological crowdfunding campaign has been started.

The Sandby borg crowdfunding campaign will run between November 27 and December 31, 2014. You can find out more about this exceptional site on the KickStarter page https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/san...g-massacre

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...112014.php

RELEASE: Potential 'vampires' buried in northwestern Poland with sickles and rocks across their bodies were likely local and not immigrants to the region, according to a study published November 26, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lesley Gregoricka from University of South Alabama and colleagues.

In northwestern Poland, apotropaic funerary rites--a traditional practice intended to prevent evil--occurred throughout the 17th-18th c. AD. Those of the dead considered at risk for becoming vampires for a variety of reasons were given specific treatment, and investigating these burial practices may provide insight into community cultural and social practices, as well as the social identities of people living in the area at the time. Excavations at a cemetery in northwestern Poland have revealed six unusual graves, with sickles across the bodies or large rocks under the chins of select individuals, amidst hundreds of normal burials. To better understand whether the bodies selected for apotropaic burial rites were local or non-local immigrants, the authors of this study tested permanent molars from 60 individuals, including 6 "special" or deviant burials, using radiogenic strontium isotope ratios from archaeological dental enamel. They then compared the results to strontium isotopes of local animals.

The authors found that those in deviant burials seem to be a predominantly local population, with all individuals buried as potential vampires exhibiting local strontium isotope ratios. These data indicate that those targeted for apotropaic practices were not likely migrants to the region, but instead, local individuals whose social identity or manner of death likely marked them with suspicion in some other way. The authors suggest one alternate explanation behind these apotropaic burials may be the cholera epidemics that were prevalent in Eastern Europe during the 17th century, as the first person to die from an infectious disease outbreak was presumed more likely to return from the dead as a vampire. "People of the post-medieval period did not understand how disease was spread, and rather than a scientific explanation for these epidemics, cholera and the deaths that resulted from it were explained by the supernatural - in this case, vampires," said Dr. Gregoricka.

- - - - - - -

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper: http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113564

Citation: Gregoricka LA, Betsinger TK, Scott AB, Polcyn M (2014) Apotropaic Practices and the Undead: A Biogeochemical Assessment of Deviant Burials in Post-Medieval Poland. PLoS ONE 9(11):e113564. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0113564

Funding: This research was supported by a University of South Alabama (USA) Faculty Development Council Grant, USA Arts & Sciences Support and Development Award, USA Arts & Sciences Summer Professional Development Award, and the Slavia Project. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

http://www.the-american-interest.com/201...henomenon/

EXCERPT: We know atheism in its Jewish or Christian context, as a rejection of the Biblical God. What would atheism mean in a Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist context?

Adam Garfinkle, the editor of The American Interest, asked me this question. He told me that he had met a Saudi who claimed to be an atheist: What does this mean? We know atheism in its Jewish or Christian context, as a rejection of the Biblical God. What would atheism mean in a Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist context?

My short answer is: Yes, Atheism, as we know it, came out of a Judaeo-Christian context. But I would slightly re-phrase Garfinkle’s question. The dichotomy is not western/non-Western. It is Abrahamic/non-Abrahamic. It is a rebellion against the monotheistic faiths that originated in the Middle East–Judaism, Christianity, Islam. It makes much less sense in a non-monotheistic environment.

The rebellion is triggered by an agonizing problem: How can God, believed to be both all-powerful and morally perfect, permit the suffering and the evil afflicting humanity? This is the problem called theodicy, which literally means the “justice of God”; in the spirit of the rebellion it is also a demand that God has to justify himself.

[...] In Islam, the most recent in the trio of West Asian monotheisms, the motif of submission to God’s will is at the core of piety. The very name of the faith is derived from the Arabic word aslama–“to submit”. Every gesture of Muslim prayer is the bodily expression of this attitude. Again, it is in Sufism, the mystical undercurrent of Islam, that the austerity of mainstream piety is softened.

[...] Suffering is endemic to the human condition, and so is the urge to overcome or at least to explain it. Different attempts to satisfy this urge are not neatly divided geographically. Theodicy in its full force is unlikely to appear in contexts shaped by the religious imagination of the Indian subcontinent, as manifested in Hinduism and Buddhism (the latter could only arise from the former).

[...] The fundamental assumption of the Indian view of the cosmos is reincarnation–the linked realities of samsara and karma–the endless cycle of rebirths and deaths, and the cosmic law that the consequences of human actions, good or bad, are carried from one life to the next. I would propose that in this view the “Jerusalem” problem of theodicy evaporates.

This is why Max Weber called Hinduism (the same applies to Buddhism) “the most rational theodicy”: The individual cannot thank anyone but himself for his good fortune, or blame anyone else for his misery–what happens to the individual is the (so to speak) mathematically precise result of all his own past actions. The ultimate redemption is being able to escape from the endless death-laden cycle of rebirths. Of course there are very significant differences between Hinduism and Buddhism, and between various branches of these traditions...

http://www.the-american-interest.com/201...l-capital/

EXCERPT: [...] I suppose what I should have asked is this: Given the accelerating power of pluralization to upset and cast into doubt most traditional forms of religious belief, how will different forms of disbelief, emanating from different cultural contexts, differ (and not) from the forms of disbelief we in the West know best—that of atheism arising out of Christian and Jewish religion? So what I should have asked is broader—not just about belief or the lack thereof in an Abrahamic creator God, but about belief or lack thereof in any system of religious ideas. And the question flows from the assumption that any given form of rejected belief will take much of its shape from what it is rejecting. George Williams once noted that you should “be cautious when you choose your enemy for you will grow to be more like him”; I think one can apply this basic idea orthogonally to the question at hand in the sense that a former belief system becomes the enemy, so that what results from rejecting it may be closer in form to it than what the denier may suppose or hope....

I need to begin this week’s column with an apology. Due to a typo on my part in preparing notes for my files, I mistakenly indicated two weeks ago — Close Encounters in Joplin Area: Part One — that an encounter in Joplin took place in early August when it actually occurred on July 8. The full report is the subject of this column.

Then, it was so hectic when I was writing the column last week, that I completely forgot to give credit to the National UFO Reporting Center, the source of all but one of the sightings described. Sorry, Peter. Oh well. They say as you get older your memory is the second thing to go, but for the life of me I cannot remember what the first one is.

That being said, the incident that occurred that Tuesday evening was a UFOlogist’s dream: Three reputable witnesses, willing to be identified publicly, reporting a close encounter that left behind physical evidence of its reality. In addition, the initial witness possessed the training and experience to be considered an expert on objects and craft in the sky. He is an airline pilot.

At about 9:15 p.m. on July 8, Barry Powell, the pilot, was walking his dog when he noticed a strange craft with orange lights in the northern sky. He realized almost immediately that it was approaching him, descending as it did so, and his leashed dog started to jump excitedly in the object’s direction. At that point John Cruzan, general manager of the Joplin Globe newspaper, and his wife Traci, who is a technician in the medical field, came around a curve and were confronted with this strange scene. They immediately stopped and got out of their vehicle, joining Barry in trying to determine what they were all seeing.

As it approached, the confounded trio could make out a huge object, apparently soundless, displaying multiple lights of yellow, blue and orange on its underside. I said “apparently” because every dog within hearing distance was barking excitedly. Barry’s dog was even jumping up toward the craft to the extent his leash would allow.

When the UFO departed, still at slow speed, the witnesses followed in the Cruzan’s Jeep. They lost sight of it as it descended behind trees, but continued to an area they felt it might have landed. At that point, even stranger things began to happen. A spotlight they were using, which plugged into the cigarette lighter, dimmed but did not go out. The seatbelt warning buzzer began sounding intermittently, and the vehicle’s automatic transmission began to act up. None of these oddities had occurred previously, and, to my knowledge, none of them have been repeated since.

But the most chilling aspect of the incident showed up in its aftermath. On John Cruzan’s arm was a sizeable red spot that caused enough discomfort for him to go to a doctor, who told him it resembled an injury caused by a laser. It has since healed.

I spoke with Mr. Cruzan about his experience earlier this month. Although he did not express it in so many words, his attitude was clearly that of knowing the event was incredible but also knowing that many people would find it incredible. He was unwavering, however, in the fact that he was simply describing the event as completely and accurately as possible within the limits of human vocabulary. I came away from the visit convinced that he was one of the most credible witnesses I have interviewed in years.

Clusters of UFO sightings in a limited area within a relatively short period of time have occurred on several occasions before, and the diehard skeptics insist that they result from a single case of misidentification receiving publicity and triggering the imagination of others, making them even more prone to turning the lights of distant aircraft into an alien spacecraft. In this instance, however, the witnesses were in almost all cases unaware of the previous incidents prior to having their own encounter.

Special thanks to John Cruzan, Margie Kay and the rest of the team at Missouri Mutual UFO Network, and UFO Casebook for providing information used in writing this column."===http://ccheadliner.com/opinion/close-enc...95bef.html