iNow

Incredibly likely: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/01/lobbyists-millions-obama-healthcare-reform

Considering it's been more than five months since they asked, your response will probably not be heeded.

Too bad it doesn't help people find their carriage return, or deal with social incompetencies. On another note, your beloved primal therapy is NOT the ONLY way to resolve the issues you describe. As one counter example, exposure therapy has had enormous success, as have other cognitive behavioral therapies... but hey... Why let reality get in the way of a good story which looks like spam? That's what I always say!

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Yes and no. An experiment would help, but before that can be done he must first better define what he is measuring. Without clear definitions, precise terms, and consistency his measurements won't have any meaning (not to mention that he's got a confirmation bias in his pictures, where he selects people with those traits who he thinks exhibit these personality types, and ignores people with those same facial features who do NOT have those personality types). Back to the idea of measurement, though... Right now, he's being far too subjective and vague, not validating his personality types, not looking for references and past research as to whether or not brain shape and size has any impact whatsoever on personality, he's not supporting his assertion that the different brain shape impacts facial features in the way he suggests... Honestly... there are just too many holes in what he is proposing for an experiment to yield anything useful. He needs to do far more work, and offer much more crisp definitions of his terms, and support the three underlying contentions ([1] that brain shape/size impacts personality in any way, [2] that certain cortical shapes lead to specific personalities in a consistent and measurable way, and [3] that the brain shape changes the shape of the face, and that the resulting facial features can be used as a proxy to measure the personality type) before further experimentation is warranted. On top of all of that... We don't even know if the types he's arbitrary assigned accurately reflect the people to whom he's assigned them. If I were him, I'd try to confirm that before worrying about any experimentation.

Jimmy - I'm going to copy your post from the religion and neurocortical mechanisms thread to here since thread you've created seems to encompass the topic more appropriately. I've got a few things on my plate this morning at work, but I'll try to return to this during the weekend. Hopefully, in the meantime people here will respond to some of your questions. Take care, man.

Hi Jimmy - Good to see you, mate. Let's take your questions over here: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=44494

The way it's phrased, the only thing you need to do to test it is to find a counter example. You say, "the ONLY somatic cell mutation...," hence you just need one other to prove it false. Also, I'm entirely unsure of what you mean by "whose expression could be appreciated by other humans." Appreciated like I appreciate good beer and sex?

Sleepiness is caused by the antihistamine in the product (much like you would get tired after taking Benedryl... a name brand allergy medication/antihistamine). Much more info here: http://www.drugs.com/mtm/tylenol-pm.html

Corrected.

Oh please. Give me a break. You don't know whether your personality scores which you've been assigning are even accurate. You don't know if your assigned scores would align if actual tests of personality were performed. You don't know whether differentially shaped/sized brains impact personality. You don't know which brain shapes have which influence on which personality types if there even is a correlation between shape and personality at all. You don't know if the brain changes the shape of the face in the ways you suggest. You don't know too many things for me to even bother with further analysis.

Yes, the results would VERY likely have been the same. The study shows that what we believe is considered to be true and is processed in the same areas regardless of our ideology and regardless of the topic of the belief... and.. regardless of the evidence available for holding that belief. http://www.newsweek.com/id/216551 What Harris, his fellow researcher Jonas Kaplan, and the other authors of the study want to address is the idea, which has been floating around in both scientific and religious circles, that our brains are doing something special when we believe in God—that religious belief is, neurologically speaking, an entirely different process from believing in things that are empirically and verifiably true (things that Harris endearingly refers to as "tables and chairs"). He says his results "cut against the quite prevalent notion that there's something else entirely going on in the case of religious belief." Our believing brains make no qualitative distinctions between the kinds of things you learn in a math textbook and the kinds of things you learn in Sunday school. Though the existence of God will never be proved—or disproved—by an fMRI scan, science can study a thing or two about the neurological mechanisms of belief. What Harris's study shows is that when a conservative Christian says he believes in the Second Coming as an undeniable fact, he isn't lying or exaggerating or employing any other rhetorical maneuver. If a believer's brain regards the Second Coming the way it does every other fact, then debates about the veracity of faith would seem—to the committed believer, at least—to be rather pointless. <...> "It is generally imagined," he wrote to me in an e-mail, "that scientific facts and human values represent distinct and incommensurable ways of speaking about the world. Consequently, most people assume that science will never be in a position to resolve ethical questions or to determine how human beings ought to live." Questions of gay marriage, the subjugation of women under the Taliban, a community's responsibility to its children: all these have been relegated to the realm of religion or "values." But, says Harris, the more we know, through science, about how people live—and how they think, and what makes them happy—the more real information we'll have about how best to live together on this planet. The fMRI experiments do not pertain to these largest questions, of course. But they do show (again) what neuroscientists already know. "Intuition" and "reason" are not two separate activities. They're interconnected. From the brain's point of view, religious belief and empirical data are the same. Another interesting thing about this study was how it showed the uncertainty even among the strongest and most ardent believers. This was demonstrated in their delayed reaction times to the questions regarding gods existence... Slower reaction times correspond to greater uncertainties. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Yes, I agree. Larger N is always better. It appears they had to exclude 13 of the participants after the psychological assessment, and 10 were later dropped due to technical problems with their fMRI scans, so that hurt, but the data is still solid and the error bars very tight. The probability that the result is due to chance alone is incredibly small. Also, I think that the design was really cool. Once inside the scanner, subjects were presented with a series of short statements through a video-goggle display (Resonance Technology, Inc). After reading each statement, they were asked to evaluate its truth content with the press of a button, indicating “true” (belief), “false” (disbelief), and “undecidable” (uncertainty). The presentation of stimuli was self-paced. Stimuli were drawn from two categories, religious and nonreligious. All statements were designed to be judged easily as “true” or “false” (the response of “undecidable,” while available to subjects, was not expected). <...> For the purposes of stimulus design (not presentation) we generated our statements in groups of four (true and false; religious and nonreligious): The Biblical God really exists. (Christian true/nonbeliever false) The Biblical God is a myth. (Christian false/nonbeliever true) Santa Claus is a myth. (Both groups true) Santa Claus really exists. (Both groups false) Despite the belief, and despite the response, the same area of the brain was activated and with the same magnitude.

This doesn't seem accurate in the least. It seems like a person so heavily invested in their idea that they bait people into specific responses... specific responses which only seem to support the conjectures (I'm not calling this rubbish a hypothesis) being put forth... A sort of "self-reinforcing confirmation bias" as it were.

Which speaks well to the discussion taking place in the posts above. Rep has to be earned, and really has jackshite to do with kissing up. Flattery certainly helps, though.

Well... Unless you're a massless particle such as a photon.

Or, much more likely... we over-remember the positive hits, and under-remember the negative ones. When we turn and see someone looking at us, it is much more perceptually salient than all of the thousands of other times when we turn and nobody is looking at us at all.

If the above discussion continues, can you two maybe take it elsewhere? Back to the thread topic, a recent study published by Sam Harris in PLoS ONE: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0007272 While religious and nonreligious thinking differentially engage broad regions of the frontal, parietal, and medial temporal lobes, the difference between belief and disbelief appears to be content-independent. Our study compares religious thinking with ordinary cognition and, as such, constitutes a step toward developing a neuropsychology of religion. However, these findings may also further our understanding of how the brain accepts statements of all kinds to be valid descriptions of the world.

FYI: Non-staff members cannot see who left the rep unless the person leaving the rep added their name to the accompanying comment.

Well, an EEG can be done with or without external stimulus. The lights are generally used to test something specific, to look at a specific area or region of the brain and see how it responds... Bascule is correct. What you describe is more likely to be a result of the lit stimulus, not the electroencephalogram itself. It's still cool, though.

Another potential shortfall I see with this is your (as yet) unaddressed need to demonstrate how these slight differences in neocortical size and growth patterns effect personality, and if those slight differences can be effectively tied and strongly correlated to the personality typologies with which you are currently associating the resultant facial features.

When I read the article, Pangloss, I had a different understanding. I did not see this as some attempt to scare people that Obama would be assassinated. First of all, it's a very real possibility in this culture and climate, so there's always that... But I won't base any arguments on that since every president we've ever had led the country and lived with the possibility of assassination. What I took from the article... And this couples well with many of the comments we've read here in these politics threads these last several weeks... including this one as shown above... is that this political climate is poisonous to us, and dangerous, and it's time we do something about it and stop accepting it. It goes beyond simply failing to make progress and get things done. It extends into us/them warring mentalities where facts and evidence can no longer overcome ideology and group associations. People are living with witch burning mentalities and encouraging those mentalities in others. These "burn them at the stake" mind sets are being directly reinforced, and worse, leaders of the party are not denouncing the behaviors which are caustic to us as a nation and a people. I appreciate your desire to avoid silly partisan attacks, but I truly hope it was not your intent to dismiss the change in tone and approach we're seeing as something not worthy of attention or concern. All of the wrong behaviors right now are being reinforced. People are self-selecting media and the battle drums are beating. What I take issue with here is how many of those drums are drumming as a result of blatant lies, misinformation, and dismissals of reality. From the article: Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly. <...> The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.

+1.

I think the restrictions should actually be raised (or, kept as is). The type of people who are pissed about not being able to post in Politics tend to be exactly the type of people we'd prefer not be allowed to post there until they can calm down.

Please stop spamming. This relates in no way to the thread topic.

Actually, it's a comparison, and it was me who made it, not Moo. Now THAT's a strawman.