A recent study on personal space, reported in Personal Space Is a Fear Response, shows that this fear response can be stimulated by words alone.
When placed in an MRI—and told a person was standing over the machine—[people with normal amygdalae] showed heightened activity in their amygdala; when they were told the person was further away from the machine, the activity returned to normal. This shows, says the study’s leader, Ralph Adolphs, that the belief that someone is too close for comfort is enough to spark the same activity as if they actually are.
You could also say that just hearing the words that “someone is too close for comfort is enough to spark the same activity as if they actually are.”
I doubt I need to illustrate this idea as most readers are surely aware that all people have many strong emotional responses to words, gestures, facial expressions, as well as personal space encroachments.
In the basal ganglia, two main types of paths carry opposing messages: One carries a ‘go’ signal which spurs an action, the other a ‘stop’ signal.
Experiments by Duke neurobiology graduate student Justin O’Hare found that the stop and go pathways were both more active in the sugar-habit mice. O’Hare said he didn’t expect to see the stop signal equally ramped up in the habit brains, because it has been traditionally viewed as the factor that helps prevent a behavior.
The team also discovered a change in the timing of activation in the two pathways. In mice that had formed a habit, the go pathway turned on before the stop pathway. In non-habit brains, the stop signal preceded the go.
These changes in the brain circuitry were so long-lasting and obvious that it was possible for the group to predict which mice had formed a habit just by looking at isolated pieces of their brains in a petri dish. (same link as just above)
The study on habits is about mice with sugar habits, but I think it is fair to hypothesize that something similar happens with humans in their use of communication cues.
Humans, in my view, habituate to semiotic stimuli in much the same way that mice habituate to sugar.
The Duke study shows that the stop pathway grew as much as the go pathway in the mice, the main difference being that the go pathway turned on before the stop pathway.
Since human language and its uses is more complex than mice habituated to too much sugar, there must be many more stop and go pathways within the language and communication networks of human beings.
Many of these pathways will be similar among people in the same culture, but many of them won’t. Each human being is a repository of a multitude of idiosyncratic emotional and semantic responses and outputs.
So how do you figure out what your pathways are? And how do you correct ones that aren’t working well? And similarly, how do you figure out your partner’s pathways?
FIML practice helps partners to both identify their idiosyncratic communication habits and correct ones that are not working well. FIML finds and corrects pathways through micro-analysis.
It seems very likely to me that a FIML-style analysis corrects mistaken communication pathways by bringing the stop pathway to the fore. When a particular mistaken response is stopped a few times and under analysis seen to be wrong, the go pathways for that response will tend to be extirpated.
By using words to analyze micro units of miscommunication, FIML partners tap into the power of words to change actual pathways of neurons in their brains, thus reorganizing the deep linguistic basis of habitual psychological responses, no matter how idiosyncratic.
Was NSA Director Mike Rogers aware that political spying was conducted through the use of searches on the NSA database? Yes. Did NSA Director Mike Rogers take action in April 2016 to stop the searches within the NSA database that were entirely due to political surveillance? Yes.
Six months later, October 20, 2016, the extensive review of all the political surveillance searches done from November of 2015 to April of 2016 was completed; the NSA compliance officer briefed Director Rogers. Six days later on October 26, 2016, NSA Director Mike Rogers then informed the FISA court of the unlawful searches and his action to address the issue.
One month later on November 17th, 2016, NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers went to see President-Elect Donald Trump in Trump Tower, New York. –SEE HERE– Director Rogers never told his boss DNI, James Clapper. The very next day, Friday November 18, 2016, The Washington Post reported on a recommendation in “October” that Mike Rogers be removed from his NSA position.
“The heads of the Pentagon and the nation’s intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed. The recommendation, delivered to the White House last month, was made by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., according to several U.S. officials familiar with the matter. […] In a move apparently unprecedented for a military officer, Rogers, without notifying superiors, traveled to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump Tower. That caused consternation at senior levels of the administration, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal personnel matters.”
Notice how the WaPo conflates the two issues. (1) Meeting with Trump (Nov), and (2) the recommendation to fire him (Oct). The October recommendation to fire Rogers was likely based on the outcome of his decision to fully stop “about queries” of the NSA database and speak to the FISA court.
The recommendation to fire Rogers preceded his visit to Donald Trump, though the IC effort may have provided some additional motivation for the Rogers visit itself.
NSA Director Mike Rogers traveled to New York November 17, 2016, when a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) was set up for President-elect Trump to use following the November 8, 2016, election.
The next day, November 18, 2016, the Trump Transition Team announced they were moving all transition activity to Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. –SEE HERE– Where they interviewed and discussed the most sensitive positions to fill. Specifically, Defense, State, CIA and ODNI.
There was a great deal of speculation at the time surrounding the visit by Director Rogers and the move from Trump Tower to New Jersey. Did Rogers tell President Trump about the political surveillance from November 2015 to April 2016? We now know the answer is no, he did not.
Director Rogers did recommend an easier venue for the SCIF to operate with secured communication channels; but Rogers did not notify President Trump about the use of the NSA database for political spying.
And there are other SAEs, including cancers, autoimmune maladies, cardiac arrest, harms done to fetuses and babies, and more.
All facts and outcomes point to the mRNA covid vaxxes being bioweapons.
The dubious plandemic, followed by dubious lockdowns, followed by near-mandatory vaxxing based on zero proved ‘safety and efficacy’ cannot all be due to incompetence.
Surely, many functionaries and underlings were incompetent or afraid to speak or act, but the overall covid phenomenon is best explained as a bioweapon attack on Western peoples and nations.
That the West is being attacked in every other area imaginable only bolsters this conclusion, ABN
A young Ukrainian woman who fled to the United States seeking a better life has been identified as the victim of a merciless stabbing on Friday night.
Iryna Zarutska, 23, was found dead at 9.55pm on Friday at South End light rail station in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The woman had only recently moved to the US from Ukraine in an effort to escape the ongoing war with Russia.
Violent crime remains a major issue in Charlotte which has a higher-than-average crime rate compared to other US cities. The city is run by Democratic mayor Vi Lyles, who has been in office since 2017.
She was ‘hoping for a new beginning,’ loved ones say.
As the old joke goes many people can’t travel on holiday without taking the kitchen sink. However, King Charles III seemingly takes this to the extreme.
Rather than trying to fit his sink into a suitcase, the King prefers to travel with a truck full of his furniture when he visits friends for the weekend.
Writing in his bestseller Rebel King, author Tom Bower revealed the array of eclectic belongings Charles brought with him during a visit to the North East of England.
These items varied from a his own bed to his very own luxury toilet rolls to make the King’s stay is as pleasant as possible.
Bower wrote: ‘He [The King] sent his staff ahead a day early with a truck carrying furniture to replace the perfectly appropriate fittings in the guest rooms.
‘And not just the odd chest of drawers: the truck contained nothing less than Charles and Camilla’s complete bedrooms, including the Prince’s orthopaedic bed, along with his own linen.
‘His staff had also made sure to pack a small radio, Charles’s own lavatory seat, rolls of Kleenex Premium Comfort lavatory paper, Laphroaig whisky and bottled water (for both bedrooms), plus two landscapes of the Scottish Highlands.’
On top of this, Charles also travels with his own organic food which arrived shortly after his furniture.
I know this feeling, too. Many of us know how dangerous life can be for children and young people. She is clearly not looking for trouble but protecting herself from trouble.
If I were king, I would praise and reward her and then listen to everything she has to say. She’s 13 years old and has been arrested for protecting herself. ABN
A new study on working memory has some intriguing insights into how working memory works and how it doesn’t work.
It’s widely known that when working memory is overtaxed, confusion results, skills decline, while feelings of frustration and anger may arise. The reason for this seems to be:
Feedback (top-down) coupling broke down when the number of objects exceeded cognitive capacity. Thus, impaired behavioral performance coincided with a break-down of Prediction signals. This provides new insights into the neuronal underpinnings of cognitive capacity and how coupling in a distributed working memory network is affected by memory load. (Working Memory Load Modulates Neuronal Coupling)
A well-written article about this study contains the following diagram and explanation:
Miller thinks the brain is juggling the items being held in working memory one at a time, in alternation. “That means all the information has to fit into one brain wave,” he said. “When you exceed the capacity of that one brain wave, you’ve reached the limit on working memory.”
…The prefrontal cortex seems to help construct an internal model of the world, sending so-called “top-down,” or feedback, signals that convey this model to lower-level brain areas. Meanwhile, the superficial frontal eye fields and lateral intraparietal area send raw sensory input to the deeper areas in the prefrontal cortex, in the form of bottom-up or feedforward signals. Differences between the top-down model and the bottom-up sensory information allow the brain to figure out what it’s experiencing, and to tweak its internal models accordingly. (Emphasis added)
Working memory works via connections between three brain regions that together form a coherent brain wave.
Notice that “an internal model of the world,” which is a “top-down signal” within the brain wave feedback loop, predicts or interprets “bottom-up” sensory input as it arrives in the brain.
I believe this “top-down signal” within working memory is the reason FIML practice has such enormous psychological value.
By analyzing minute emotional reactions in real-time during normal conversation, FIML practice disrupts the consolidation, or more often the reconsolidation, of “neurotic” responses. (Disruption of neurotic response in FIML practice)
FIML optimizes human psychology by helping partners intervene directly into their working memories to access real-world top-down signals as they are happening in real-time. Doing this repeatedly reliably alters the brain’s repository of top-down interpretations, making them much more accurate and up-to-date.
The model of working memory proposed in this study also explains why FIML can be a bit difficult to do. Partners must learn to allow a FIML meta-perspective or “super top-down” signal to quickly commandeer their working memories so that analysis of whatever just happened can proceed rationally and objectively. It does take some time to learn this skill, but it is no harder than many other “automated” skills such bicycling, typing, or playing a musical instrument.
Imbalances in NAD+ homeostasis have been linked to aging and various diseases. Nicotine, a metabolite of the NAD+ metabolic pathway, has been found to possess anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective properties, yet the underlying molecular mechanisms remained unknown. Here we find that, independent of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, low-dose nicotine can restore the age-related decline of NAMPT activity through SIRT1 binding and subsequent deacetylation of NAMPT, thus increasing NAD+ synthesis. 18F-FDG PET imaging revealed that nicotine is also capable of efficiently inhibiting glucose hypermetabolism in aging male mice. Additionally, nicotine ameliorated cellular energy metabolism disorders and deferred age-related deterioration and cognitive decline by stimulating neurogenesis, inhibiting neuroinflammation, and protecting organs from oxidative stress and telomere shortening. Collectively, these findings provide evidence for a mechanism by which low-dose nicotine can activate NAD+ salvage pathways and improve age-related symptoms.
American Buddhist Net 