How to Create an Out-of-body Experience

Credit: Arvid Guterstam

Neuroscientists have created an out-of-body illusion in participants placed

inside a brain scanner. They then used the illusion to perceptually 'teleport' 

the participants to different locations in a room and show that the perceived

location of the bodily self can be decoded from activity patterns in specific

brain regions.

While significantly more expensive than my favorite method for experiencing an out of body experience, my technique can be used anywhere a solid brick wall is found.  Head butting a solid object doesn't cost much (if you exclude medical costs) but you are limited to how many times you can achieve this illusion before the top of your head is permanently flat.

Here's the story.  I'm off to look for a really beefy, well-built wall.  Ciao.

Brain scan reveals out-of-body illusion

The feeling of being inside one's own body is not as self-evident as one might think. In a study from Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, neuroscientists created an out-of-body illusion in participants placed inside a brain scanner. They then used the illusion to perceptually 'teleport' the participants to different locations in a room and show that the perceived location of the bodily self can be decoded from activity patterns in specific brain regions.

The sense of owning one's body and being located somewhere in space is so fundamental that we usually take it for granted. To the brain, however, this is an enormously complex task that requires continuous integration of information from our different senses in order to maintain an accurate sense of where the body is located with respect to the external world.

Studies in rats have shown that specific regions of the brain contain GPS-like 'place cells' that signal the rat's position in the room -- a discovery that was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. To date, however, it remains unknown how the human brain shapes our perceptual experience of being a body somewhere in space, and whether the regions that have been identified in rats are involved in this process.

In a new study, published in the scientific journal Current Biology, the scientists created an out-of-body illusion in fifteen healthy participants placed inside a brain scanner. In the experiment, the participants wore head-mounted displays and viewed themselves and the brain scanner from another part of the room.

From the new visual perspective, the participant observes the body of a stranger in the foreground while their physical body is visible in the background, protruding from the bore of the brain scanner. To elicit the illusion, the scientist touches the participant's body with an object in synchrony with identical touches being delivered to the stranger's body, in full view of the participant.

"In a matter of seconds, the brain merges the sensation of touch and visual input from the new perspective, resulting in the illusion of owning the stranger's body and being located in that body's position in the room, outside the participant's physical body," says Arvid Guterstam, lead author of the present study.

In the most important part of the study, the scientists used the out-of-body illusion to perceptually 'teleport' the participants between different places in the scanner room. They then employed pattern recognition techniques to analyze the brain activity and show that the perceived self-location can be decoded from activity patterns in specific areas in the temporal and parietal lobes. Furthermore, the scientists could demonstrate a systematic relationship between the information content in these patterns and the participants' perceived vividness of the illusion of being located in a specific out-of-body position.

"The sense of being a body located somewhere in space is essential for our interactions with the outside world and constitutes a fundamental aspect of human self-consciousness," says Arvid Guterstam. "Our results are important because they represent the first characterization of the brain areas that are involved in shaping the perceptual experience of the bodily self in space."

One of the brain regions from which the participants' perceived self-location could be decoded was the hippocampus -- the structure in which the Nobel Prize awarded 'place cells' have been identified.
"This finding is particularly interesting because it indicates that place cells are not only involved in navigation and memory encoding, but are also important for generating the conscious experience of one's body in space," says principal investigator Henrik Ehrsson, professor at the Department of Neuroscience.

Story Source: Materials provided by Karolinska Institutet.  Arvid Guterstam, Malin Björnsdotter, Giovanni Gentile & Henrik Ehrsson. Posterior Cingulate Cortex Integrates the Senses of Self-location and Body Ownership. Current Biology,, 30 April 2015

Read More

How to create a sense of awe in your fiction

                                                                                                                                                                 (Watterson, 2005, Vol. 3, p. 370)

After reading this study, I tried to think of things in film, television or print that awed me, i.e., made me feel I was in the presence of something greater than myself.  I suppose I'm in awe of Benjamin Franklin, the ultimate American.  I was awed by the redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge, especially in the 1952 English film of the story. Awed also by the altruism of Rick at the end of Casablanca, surrendering his great love for the greater good.

Strangely, or perhaps not, I am in awe of the talent of Stan Laurel, the silent and early talkie film maker.  Simple ideas exquisitely executed. 

This is something to ponder, and I will. 

But the point is how does a writer create a sense of awe in the reader or viewer?  With a bigger explosion or grander special effect?  Or by simple human growth over the course of a story arc?  I vote for the second.

Here's the story.

Awe may promote altruistic behavior

Awe induces a feeling of being diminished in the presence of something greater than oneself.

Inducing a sense of awe in people can promote altruistic, helpful and positive social behavior, according to research. Awe is that sense of wonder we feel in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world. People commonly experience awe in nature, but also in response to religion, art and even music.

"Our investigation indicates that awe, although often fleeting and hard to describe, serves a vital social function. By diminishing the emphasis on the individual self, awe may encourage people to forgo strict self-interest to improve the welfare of others," said Paul Piff, PhD, assistant professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine. He was lead author of the study, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Awe is that sense of wonder we feel in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world. People commonly experience awe in nature, but also in response to religion, art and even music.

In the article, Piff and his colleagues outlined a series of five studies. In the first, the researchers asked a representative sample of over 1,500 people from across the United States to complete a questionnaire that measured how predisposed they were to experience awe. The subjects were then asked to participate in a game where they were given 10 raffle tickets and had to decide how many, if any, to share with another participant who did not have any tickets. Researchers found a significant association between the tendency to experience awe and generosity.

In the other four experiments, the researchers asked groups of people (ranging in size from 75 to 254) to participate in an activity (e.g., watch a video or gaze at something in their environment) designed to elicit awe, a neutral state or another reaction, such as pride or amusement. The participants then engaged in an activity designed to measure what psychologists call pro-social behaviors or tendencies. (Pro-social behavior is positive, helpful and intended to promote social acceptance and friendship.) In every experiment, awe was significantly associated with pro-social behaviors.

The researchers said they believe that awe induces a feeling of being diminished in the presence of something greater than oneself. It is this diminished sense of self that shifts focus away from an individual's need and toward the greater good, they wrote.

"When experiencing awe, you may not, egocentrically speaking, feel like you're at the center of the world anymore," Piff said. "By shifting attention toward larger entities and diminishing the emphasis on the individual self, we reasoned that awe would trigger tendencies to engage in pro-social behaviors that may be costly for you but that benefit and help others."

While the findings supported the researchers' initial hypothesis, the scientists were surprised at how consistently different types of awe and different elicitors of awe were able to promote cooperative behavior. In one experiment, they elicited awe by showing droplets of colored water falling into a bowl of milk in slow motion. In another, they elicited a negative form of awe using a montage of threatening natural phenomena, such as tornadoes and volcanoes. In a final experiment, the researchers induced awe by situating participants in a grove of towering eucalyptus trees.

"Across all these different elicitors of awe, we found the same sorts of effects -- people felt smaller, less self-important, and behaved in a more pro-social fashion," said Piff. "Might awe cause people to become more invested in the greater good, giving more to charity, volunteering to help others, or doing more to lessen their impact on the environment? Our research would suggest that the answer is yes."

Story Source:  Materials provided by American Psychological Association (APA).  Paul Piff, PhD et al. Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, May 2015

Read More

We're running out of water - and global warming IS NOT the major cause.

livetoday.online

How to sound the alarm about a possible future crisis without being a Jeremiah?  Stand up and rant and rave and most people tune you out.

Future problems are something that the writers of fiction and non-fiction can address without being totally off-putting.  We all know that, so the trick for a working writer is to stay current on possible issues and weave these possibilities into your stories.  Besides, some of these potential crises offer some pretty cool possibilities.

What's interesting in this study is that global warming isn't blamed, though it certainly is playing a part.  For example, rather than having snow in the mountains of California, they're getting rain.  Snow provides water through the dry season; rain runs off into the ocean creating a water shortage despite the total precipitation level remaining constant.

A link to the full study is found in the story source.

*  *  *  *  *

Affordable water in the US: A burgeoning crisis

"Water rates have increased 41 percent since 2010."

If water rates continue rising at projected amounts, the number of U.S. households unable to afford water could triple in five years, to nearly 36 percent, finds new research by a Michigan State University scholar.

Elizabeth Mack said a variety of factors, ranging from aging infrastructure to climate change to population decline in urban areas, are making residents' ability to afford water and wastewater services a burgeoning crisis. Published online Jan. 11 in the journal PLOS ONE, her study is one of the first nationwide investigations of water affordability.

"In cities across the United States, water affordability is becoming an increasingly critical issue," said Mack, an assistant geography professor who analyzed water consumption, pricing and demographic and socioeconomic data for the study.

Spending on water and wastewater services combined should make up no more than 4.5 percent of household income, the Environmental Protection Agency recommends. Based on that criteria, some 13.8 million U.S. households (or 11.9 percent of all households) may find water bills unaffordable -- a hardship that hits poor families particularly hard, Mack said.

Water rates have increased 41 percent since 2010, and if they continue at that pace over the next five years the number of households that cannot afford water and wastewater services could soar to an estimated 40.9 million, or 35.6 percent of all households.

Aging infrastructure
One driving factor is aging infrastructure. Experts say it will cost more than $1 trillion to replace World War II-era water systems over the next 25 years. Another pressure is climate change, as more intense weather events fuel a need for improvements to wastewater facilities. Making such adaptations will cost the United States more than $36 billion by 2050, according to estimates.

Shrinking urban populations
Further, shrinking populations in major cities such as Detroit and Philadelphia means fewer people to pay for the large fixed cost of water service.

1. Some 227,000 customers in Philadelphia, or 4 out of 10 water accounts, are past due, 
2. while 50,000 delinquent customers in Detroit have had their water service terminated since the start of 2014, the study says.
3. Households in Atlanta and Seattle are paying more than $300 a month for water and wastewater services (based on a family of four).

Ultimately, the study says, governments, utilities and consumers will need to work together to solve the growing affordability problem.

"Water is a fundamental right for all humans," Mack said. "However, a growing number of people in the United States and globally face daily barriers to accessing clean, affordable water."

The United States remains a relatively understudied country in international work on water affordability issues, she noted.

"The hope is that enhanced awareness of this issue in the developed world will highlight the severity of the issue, which is not isolated to people in the developing world," Mack said.

Story Source:  Materials provided by Michigan State University.  Elizabeth A. Mack, Sarah Wrase. A Burgeoning Crisis? A Nationwide Assessment of the Geography of Water Affordability in the United States. PLOS ONE, 2017

Read More

Einstein, Santa Claus, and Relativity.

Mysteries of Father Christmas/Santa Claus 'solved' by relativity theory

The mystery of how Father Christmas (Santa Claus) can deliver presents to 700 million children in one night, fit down the chimney and arrive without being seen or heard has been 'solved' by a physicist at the University of Exeter.

Santa and his reindeer zoom around the world at such speed that -- according to relativity theory -- they would shrink, enabling Father Christmas and a huge sack of presents to fit down chimneys.

Dr Katy Sheen, a physicist in the Geography department at the University of Exeter, has also found a scientific explanation for why Santa is not heard arriving by children, and why they rarely catch a glimpse of him on Christmas eve.

Santa and Special Relativity
She recently explained to children at the University of Exeter that Santa's stealth delivery is partly explained by special relativity theory devised by Albert Einstein, whom Dr Sheen thinks bares a passing resemblance to Santa.

Was Einstein really Santa Claus?

Ever see them together, at the same

time, 

in the same room?

Relativity theory explains how Father Christmas can fit down the chimney. At the speeds he needs to travel to deliver presents to every child, Father Christmas shrinks -- or gets thinner -- in the direction he is travelling. And he has to be careful not to stop for a mince pie in a chimney, or he could grow back to full size!

Dr Sheen told children at the University of Exeter's Science of Christmas Festival on Dec. 14 that relativity also explains why Father Christmas appears not to have aged throughout the ages, because relativity can slow down clocks.

When Dr Sheen was seven years old she wrote a letter to Father Christmas asking why he never got any older (letter attached). She received a response in shaky handwriting telling her it was 'all magic'. But the budding physicist was not convinced and wanted a rational explanation -- which 26 years later she has now found.

As evidence of how Father Christmas's enormously fast delivery round has kept the years off him, she will present a picture of St Nicholas from 1901 and a photo from this year to the children at her talk.

The physicist has calculated that Santa and his reindeer would have to travel at about 10 million kilometres per hour to deliver presents to every child expected to celebrate Christmas in 31 hours (taking into account world time zones).

Santa, the Rainbow-coloured Blur
If millions of children have been good, and deserve bigger stockings, he may need to travel even faster. Such speed would make him change from red to green and, at greater speeds, he would disappear! Children would not be able to recognise him as he would appear as a rainbow-coloured blur, eventually disappearing to the human eye.

Travelling at more than 200,000 times faster than Usain Bolt, the world's fastest man, the laws of physics explain why Father Christmas is rarely seen by children while delivering presents.

The Doppler effect would make Santa change colour because the light waves he releases would get squashed at such a high speed.

The Doppler effect also explains why children cannot hear Father Christmas arrive. As Santa and his sleigh approach, the sound of bells and his deep 'ho, ho, ho' would get higher and higher (like when an ambulance siren whizzes by) and then become completely silent, because he would move beyond human hearing range. Even the sound of Santa urging on Rudolph would become unrecognisable, and then inaudible to the human ear.

Santa's Sonic Boom
If children hear a bang on Christmas night, it may not be the sound of Santa dropping his presents, landing on their roof in his sleigh, or sliding down the chimney with a plop. Santa's reindeer could have broken the speed of sound, resulting in a 'sonic boom.'

Dr Sheen, a physicist working in the University of Exeter's Geography department, is not planning to present her research to a peer-reviewed journal (it's prepared with the festive spirit in mind), and has done the calculations in her own time to interest children in science and physics.

Sheen will demonstrate the impact of the Doppler effect -- which would make Santa able to deliver his presents without detection -- by letting the children listen to the sound of a speeding ambulance, even though it is much slower than Father Christmas and his sleigh.

The Doppler effect is responsible for making a siren, such as on an ambulance or a police car, increase in pitch as it comes towards you and lower pitched as it drives away. This is because the wave length changes when it moves towards and away from you.

Dr Sheen calculated how fast Father Christmas would have to travel by working out the number of households likely to be celebrating Christmas around the world, along with the number of children likely to be in them. She hopes her explanation for Santa's stealth delivery system -- and therefore his very existence -- will inspire children to take a greater interest in physics, and put a science kit on the list of presents they want in their stockings.

"Visiting around 700 million children in 31 hours would mean he would have to travel at 10 million kilometres an hour if he is to deliver presents to every child," Dr Sheen said. "How does Santa manage to reach these phenomenal speeds? Well that's magic! However, he would certainly need a lot of fuel -- so don't forget his glass of sherry, a mince pie or two and some carrots for the reindeer!"

Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Exeter. "Mysteries of Father Christmas/Santa Claus 'solved' by relativity theory." ScienceDaily, 14 December 2016. 

Read More

Opposites attract -- unless you're in a relationship

Do I think I'm sexy? 

If we are in a relationship we are more likely to be attracted to faces resembling our own, but for single people, opposites attract. Relationship status affects who and what we find attractive. Relationship status affects who and what we find attractive, found a study published in Frontiers in Psychology.

Dr Jitka Lindová of Charles University in the Czech Republic and her team showed a series of photographs of faces to university students and asked them to rate their attractiveness. The photographs were digitally manipulated so that the resemblance to the student was modified.

Images were of an individual of the opposite sex, whose face had been manipulated to look either more or less similar to the student. They were also presented with images of a same-sex individual manipulated in the same way.

"We found that single participants, those not in relationships, rate dissimilar faces as more attractive and sexy than self-resembling faces;" stated Lindová.

This was observed when participants rated both same-sex and opposite-sex faces.

"For the first time, we have observed how our partnership status affects who we find attractive;" she added.

"Our interpretation is that attractiveness perception mechanisms that give us a preference for a genetically suitable partner may be suppressed during romantic relationships," explained Lindová; "This might be a relationship maintenance strategy to prevent us from finding alternatives to our own partner, or perhaps self-resemblance becomes more important in terms of the social support we expect receive from relatives, which are known as kinship cues."

Little research has been carried out about how our perceptions change when we enter a relationship. These findings have important sociological and biological implications that require further study.

In addition, Lindová pointed out that this work may be of interest to the applied psychological sciences.

"For example, as those not in a relationship were not influenced by kinship cues and our findings might help to explain social phenomena such as parent and adolescent disaffection;" she said.

Story Source:  Materials provided by Frontiers.  Jitka Lindová, Anthony C. Little, Jan Havlíček, S. Craig Roberts, Anna Rubešová, Jaroslav Flegr. Effect of Partnership Status on Preferences for Facial Self-Resemblance. Frontiers in Psychology, 2016.

Read More

Tired of poor eyesight? Try taping batteries to the back of your head.

Credit: © blackday / Fotolia

Brain stimulation temporarily improves visual acuity, according to new research.

As one who wears glasses, I know the dislocation experienced when I put on glasses with a new prescription.  It takes a bit of time to get used to the new vision.  Rather, it takes your brain a little time to reprogram itself to the new visual input.

If your brain can adapt rather quickly to this new experience, what can't the brain simply be stimulated to correct your vision without the need for lenses?

It can.  Using mild electrical stimulation to the visual cortex at the back of your head, researchers have learned that for several hours after the stimulation, people see better.  And, think better as well.

See where this is going?

Are we going to be able to implant devices inside the skull that permanently improve brain function without necessarily altering function?

Looks like it.

Here's the report with a link to the study in the attribution.

*  *  *  *  *

A little spark for sharper sight

". . .those with worse vision see the most improvement."

Stimulating the visual cortex of the brain for 20 minutes with a mild electrical current can improve vision for about two hours, and those with worse vision see the most improvement, according to a Vanderbilt University study published this week in Current Biology.

"It's actually a very simple idea," said co-author Geoff Woodman, associate professor of psychology. "This kind of stimulation can improve cognitive processing in other brain areas, so if we stimulate the visual system, could we improve processing? Could we make someone's vision better -- not at the level of the eye, like Lasik or glasses, but directly at the level of the brain?"

Twenty young, healthy subjects with normal or near-normal vision were asked to evaluate the relative position of two identical vertical lines and judged whether they were perfectly aligned or offset. The test is more sensitive than a standard eye chart, and gave the researchers are very precise measurement of each subjects' visual acuity.

75 percent showed measurable improvement following the brain stimulation
The researchers then passed a very mild electric current through the area at the back of the brain that processes visual information. After 20 minutes, the subjects were asked to perform the test again, and about 75 percent showed measurable improvement following the brain stimulation.

The researchers performed several variations of this experiment to test the effects of different intensity levels, current directions and electrode placements. This third experiment was important because it confirmed that the electrodes had to be positioned specifically over the brain's visual processing center in order to affect the subjects' eyesight -- that the effect wasn't simply a response to stimulus anywhere in the brain.

They also measured how the stimulus changed the speed with which the brain processed visual information and whether the stimulation also improved the subjects' contrast sensitivity -- their ability to differentiate between multiple shades of gray.

The contrast experiment was notable because they found that the stimulation only improved contrast sensitivity at frequencies also associated with visual acuity, indicating that it was just the subjects' visual acuity that was being affected, not the contrast sensitivity.

Lead author Robert Reinhart, an incoming assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University who conducted this research as a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt, said this finding had interesting implications for future basic science. "Now we have a new tool that could be valuable for researchers investigating fundamental questions about how the visual system works," he said.

For their last experiment, the researchers wanted to see if the improvement they saw in the first experiment was significant enough to translate into a real-world task -- reading a standard eye chart.

They found that the stimulation effects improved the subjects' vision by an average of 1 to 2 letters, though Reinhart noted that there was significant variation between subjects. "We saw that those who came in with poorer vision, who might be on their way to needing glasses, had these big leaps, while others who came in with excellent vision showed no change."

Reinhart speculated that these findings could be explained in several different ways.

• The prevailing belief is that the current might simply be boosting the visual signals so certain neurons can process them more rapidly, but Reinhart thinks it's also possible that the current essentially injects white noise into the visual system, which drowns out extraneous information and enables the brain to capture visual information more easily.

The researchers stress that much more research needs to happen in a clinical setting in order to confirm the safety of the procedure and that members of the public should never attempt to replicate the experiment at home.

Story Source:  Materials provided by Vanderbilt University, original written by Liz Entman.  Robert M.g. Reinhart, Wenxi Xiao, Laura J. Mcclenahan, Geoffrey F. Woodman. Electrical Stimulation of Visual Cortex Can Immediately Improve Spatial Vision. Current Biology, June 2016

Read More

How the lives of Georgian gaolbirds and highwaymen shaped modern Britain

Writing historical fiction requires solid research of available materials and databases.  The key word here is available.  

So news of a new publicly accessible database that allows an author to research a very interesting past era is priceless almost beyond words.  

I expect some exciting fiction to come out of this announcement.

Here's the story, with a link to the source in the attribution.

*  *  *  *  *

London Lives, a landmark project led by Professor Bob Shoemaker from the University of Sheffield and Professor Tim Hitchcock from the University of Sussex, has uncovered a mass of extraordinary new evidence which reveals how the lives of thousands of 18th-century poor and criminal Londoners helped shape modern Britain.

Based on evidence made available in a publicly available database, the study sheds new light on the everyday lives of thieves, prostitutes, vagrants, highwaymen, con-men, paupers and jailbirds, revealing how their daily fight for survival led to the making of modern Britain.

The story of "Mary Ellenor, 

1684-1708,  

Servant and 

Murderer of her Bastard Child"

from the London Lives archive.

The evidence shows that paupers used their limited written and oral skills to cajole and embarrass parish elites, leading to the creation of a more comprehensive welfare system. Meanwhile the courtroom strategies of street robbers laid the foundations for the rise of the adversarial trial -- a legal system used by common law countries such as the UK and US which allows legal representation to both parties.

Criminals who illustrated the failure of justice through constant escapes and charismatic leadership forced the state to build a new world of prisons but also gave hope to some in the wider working classes, according to the historians.

Professor Bob Shoemaker from the University of Sheffield's Department of History, said: "The London Lives project has uncovered a fascinating new insight into lives and experiences of hundreds of thousands of Londoners in the 18th century. They found themselves submerged in poverty or prosecuted for crime but the way they responded forced the authorities to fundamentally transform social policy and the criminal justice system.

"The study shows that celebrity highwaymen, prison escapees, expert manipulators of the poor relief system, lone mothers and vagrants played the system to the best of their ability in order to survive. In their acts of desperation, the poor and criminal exercised a profound and effective form of agency that changed the system itself."

Co-author Tim Hitchcock from the University of Sussex said: "We began by digitizing the records of the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, and the records of poor relief and other criminal courts held at London's Metropolitan Archives. We then created a website which allowed us to chart the experiences of everyday Londoners who found themselves submerged in poverty or prosecuted for crime.

"What we uncovered was extraordinary: thieves, paupers, prostitutes and celebrity highwaymen, who, again and again, through their cunning, courage, and resourcefulness, forced the pace of change in the evolution of the criminal justice system and the system of poor relief."

The database assembled in order to conduct the study can be accessed online in a database created by Sheffield's Humanities Research Institute. It is available via http://www.londonlives.org.

Link:  London Lives

Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Sheffield. "Georgian jailbirds and celebrity highwaymen shaped modern Britain." ScienceDaily, 29 January 2016.

Read More