Source: Http://creativesomething.net/post/54997033332/why-youre-more-creative-at-night-and-how-to

Different Sex Drive Than Your Partner? Here’s How to Manage it

You mustn’t force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.—Mary Mcarthy

Sex is a topic people get all funny talking about. For many it is awkward and uncomfortable, for some it is embarrassing, and for others, it is soul-baring and they are left feeling exposed.

Regardless of how it makes you feel to talk about it, there is one thing we all have in common regarding sex, we all do it. Of course, just like every rule, there are exceptions and we’ll save those for another time. Right now, let’s discuss the human sex drive.

A Little Sex. A Lot of Sex. What is Normal?

First, it is important to understand that having a healthy sex life is a basic human need. Not everyone has the same level of desire for sex, and that is perfectly normal. Some people do not have a sex drive at all. They are hypersexual.

Your sex drive may be low and interest in sex isn’t high on your list of priorities whereas mine may rank right up there with breathing. Neither of these is a problem by themselves. The problem comes into play when…..

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Psych2go features various psychological findings and myths. In the future, psych2go attempts to include sources to posts for the for the purpose of generating discussions and commentaries. This will give readers a chance to critically examine psychology.

Making Memories While You Sleep

Researchers have long known that the brain produces specific rhythms during sleep, and that different parts of the brain produce different rhythms. We also know that sleep is important for memory. In a recent study published in Nature Communications, UC San Diego School of Medicine researchers bridged the gap between these two schools of research — investigating how the timing of sleeping brain rhythms may influence memory storage.

The research team was led by Eric Halgren, PhD, professor of neurosciences, psychiatry and radiology, and Rachel Mak-McCully, PhD, who was a graduate student in Halgren’s lab at the time of the study. They recorded sleeping rhythms from two regions of the brain — cortex and thalamus — in three people with epilepsy who had electrodes implanted in their brains as part of their treatment.

The thalamus is a relay station for all senses except smell. This part of the brain is considered the “pacemaker” of the sleep spindle, intermittent clusters of brain waves that group cortical activity and strengthen the connections between cortical neurons that form memories. The cortex is where memories are stored permanently, and it’s known to generate slow waves during sleep.

The researchers found how the cortex and thalamus work together to time slow waves and spindles in a sequence that may optimize memory formation.

“During sleep, we usually think of the thalamus as having one conversation while the cortex is having another,” Mak-McCully said. “But what we found is they are actually having a discussion that’s important for memory retention.”

The information the team collected on rhythm timing and coordination between these two areas is important because it allows them to begin thinking about how altering those rhythms could change memory storage. The ultimate goal, Mak-McCully said, is to find ways to manipulate these sleeping brain rhythms as a means to improve, or at least maintain, memory as we age.

“It’s not just that we need more of these rhythms, we need to know when they do what they do, and for how long,” she said.

Pictured: Cartoon of the communication loop described in this study: 1) downstates in the cortex lead to 2) downstates in the thalamus, which produces a spindle that 3) is sent back to the cortex.

Brain waves reflect different types of learning

Figuring out how to pedal a bike and memorizing the rules of chess require two different types of learning, and now for the first time, researchers have been able to distinguish each type of learning by the brain-wave patterns it produces.

These distinct neural signatures could guide scientists as they study the underlying neurobiology of how we both learn motor skills and work through complex cognitive tasks, says Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and senior author of a paper describing the findings in the Oct. 11 edition of Neuron.

When neurons fire, they produce electrical signals that combine to form brain waves that oscillate at different frequencies. “Our ultimate goal is to help people with learning and memory deficits,” notes Miller. “We might find a way to stimulate the human brain or optimize training techniques to mitigate those deficits.”

The neural signatures could help identify changes in learning strategies that occur in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, with an eye to diagnosing these diseases earlier or enhancing certain types of learning to help patients cope with the disorder, says Roman F. Loonis, a graduate student in the Miller Lab and first author of the paper. Picower Institute research scientist Scott L. Brincat and former MIT postdoc Evan G. Antzoulatos, now at the University of California at Davis, are co-authors.

Explicit versus implicit learning

Scientists used to think all learning was the same, Miller explains, until they learned about patients such as the famous Henry Molaison or “H.M.,” who developed severe amnesia in 1953 after having part of his brain removed in an operation to control his epileptic seizures. Molaison couldn’t remember eating breakfast a few minutes after the meal, but he was able to learn and retain motor skills that he learned, such as tracing objects like a five-pointed star in a mirror.

“H.M. and other amnesiacs got better at these skills over time, even though they had no memory of doing these things before,” Miller says.

The divide revealed that the brain engages in two types of learning and memory — explicit and implicit.

Explicit learning “is learning that you have conscious awareness of, when you think about what you’re learning and you can articulate what you’ve learned, like memorizing a long passage in a book or learning the steps of a complex game like chess,” Miller explains.

“Implicit learning is the opposite. You might call it motor skill learning or muscle memory, the kind of learning that you don’t have conscious access to, like learning to ride a bike or to juggle,” he adds. “By doing it you get better and better at it, but you can’t really articulate what you’re learning.”

Many tasks, like learning to play a new piece of music, require both kinds of learning, he notes.

Brain waves from earlier studies

When the MIT researchers studied the behavior of animals learning different tasks, they found signs that different tasks might require either explicit or implicit learning. In tasks that required comparing and matching two things, for instance, the animals appeared to use both correct and incorrect answers to improve their next matches, indicating an explicit form of learning. But in a task where the animals learned to move their gaze one direction or another in response to different visual patterns, they only improved their performance in response to correct answers, suggesting implicit learning.

What’s more, the researchers found, these different types of behavior are accompanied by different patterns of brain waves.

During explicit learning tasks, there was an increase in alpha2-beta brain waves (oscillating at 10-30 hertz) following a correct choice, and an increase delta-theta waves (3-7 hertz) after an incorrect choice. The alpha2-beta waves increased with learning during explicit tasks, then decreased as learning progressed. The researchers also saw signs of a neural spike in activity that occurs in response to behavioral errors, called event-related negativity, only in the tasks that were thought to require explicit learning.

The increase in alpha-2-beta brain waves during explicit learning “could reflect the building of a model of the task,” Miller explains. “And then after the animal learns the task, the alpha-beta rhythms then drop off, because the model is already built.”

By contrast, delta-theta rhythms only increased with correct answers during an implicit learning task, and they decreased during learning. Miller says this pattern could reflect neural “rewiring” that encodes the motor skill during learning.

“This showed us that there are different mechanisms at play during explicit versus implicit learning,” he notes.

Future Boost to Learning

Loonis says the brain wave signatures might be especially useful in shaping how we teach or train a person as they learn a specific task. “If we can detect the kind of learning that’s going on, then we may be able to enhance or provide better feedback for that individual,” he says. “For instance, if they are using implicit learning more, that means they’re more likely relying on positive feedback, and we could modify their learning to take advantage of that.”

The neural signatures could also help detect disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease at an earlier stage, Loonis says. “In Alzheimer’s, a kind of explicit fact learning disappears with dementia, and there can be a reversion to a different kind of implicit learning,” he explains. “Because the one learning system is down, you have to rely on another one.”

Earlier studies have shown that certain parts of the brain such as the hippocampus are more closely related to explicit learning, while areas such as the basal ganglia are more involved in implicit learning. But Miller says that the brain wave study indicates “a lot of overlap in these two systems. They share a lot of the same neural networks.”

Discovery challenges belief about brain’s cellular makeup

A discovery made by Junhwan Kim, PhD, assistant professor at The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, is challenging science’s longstanding beliefs regarding the cellular makeup of the brain. This breakthrough was outlined in a study published in the journal Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry. Having a full understanding of the brain can help identify new therapies as well as develop guidelines to maintain brain health.

It has long been a belief in the scientific field that the building blocks of brain cells, phospholipids, are enriched by polyunsaturated fatty acids. When trying to prove that the brain, like other major organs, are made of polyunsaturated fatty acids, Dr. Kim and his team were surprised by the results.

“We found the opposite of what science has widely believed – phospholipids containing polyunsaturated fatty acids in the brain are lower than other major organs,” said Dr. Kim. “Knowing that there are lower amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids in the brain, we may need to rethink how this acid impacts brain health and conditions like oxygen deprivation.”

Dr. Kim and his team analyzed brain, heart, liver and kidney tissue from animals and found that only 60 percent of the brain’s phospholipids were made up of polyunsaturated fatty acids. That’s compared to other organs, where the polyunsaturated fatty acid content is about 90 percent. It has also been previously presumed that high polyunsaturated fatty acids levels in the brain were what made it susceptible to oxygen deprivation or brain injury. Further research is required to find out the reasoning for the difference in acid levels, but it could also challenge beliefs about polyunsaturated fatty acids’ impact on these conditions.

“Dr. Kim’s findings challenge basic assumptions about the brain,” said Kevin J. Tracey, MD, president and CEO of the Feinstein Institute. “This paper is an important step to defining a new research path.”

6 Reasons Why Smart People Cant Find Happiness

Happiness is the feeling of contentment and satisfaction that is craved by many but only achieved by some. Happiness is relative and subjective. But for many successful individuals, the presence of a great family life and a flourishing career is often not enough. On some occasions these do not prevent an smart individual from feeling a sense of loneliness, often sadness and melancholy.

Here are six psychological reasons why smart people have a harder time finding happiness.

1. Intelligent people over-analyze

Many individuals with high levels of intelligence often over think and analyze everything that occurs in their life and surroundings. While their ability to analyze things is a great asset, the constant analysis of everything often lead to frustrations especially when coming up with an undesired conclusion.

Being able to see through people’s intentions is a burden that most people don’t get to carry. Oftentimes, knowing how ugly the real world is like is……

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Stay Focused, If You Can

What makes some people better able to resist temptation than others? Lucina Uddin and Jason Nomi, cognitive neuroscientists at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences collaborated with Rosa Steimke, a visiting postdoctoral researcher in the Brain Connectivity and Cognition Laboratory at UM, to explore this question.

Steimke conducted a study as part of her dissertation work at Charité University in Berlin, Germany, in which participants were asked to perform a simple task: focus on one side of a screen where a letter – either an “E” or “F” – would quickly appear then disappear, and press a button indicating which letter they saw.

But before the letter appeared on the screen, an image would pop up to the right, and—this is where it gets interesting—the images were quite sensual and erotic. Not surprisingly, participants’ eyes definitely wandered to the right for a quick peek, which was captured by eye-tracking equipment.

“Using this setup, we were able to challenge participants’ self-control in the face of temptation,” said Steimke.

Adds Uddin, “This study is about individual differences in the ability to control impulses and behavior.”

According to previous research, the brain’s “cognitive control network” is typically involved in behavior that requires self-control. Here, the researchers explored another potential candidate brain system known as the “salience network.” The salience network is a collection of regions in the brain that selects which stimuli are deserving of our attention, such as a driver responding to a pedestrian running across the street or a large billboard along the highway.

The cognitive control network is related to ‘’top-down’’ effortful control of attention while the salience network is related to ‘’bottom-up’’ automatic direction of attention.

“We were interested in comparing the roles of these two networks in self-control behavior,” said Nomi.

Uddin and her team have taken a new approach to studying brain activity and its moment-to-moment variations using a method called “dynamic functional network connectivity.” Using this method, the team was able to examine whether the cognitive control or salience network was more closely linked to participants’ tendency to glance at the sensual pictures when they knew the goal was to focus on the letter.

Surprisingly, they found no links between cognitive control network dynamics and individual differences in performance of the task. However, those individuals whose brains showed a specific pattern of salience network dynamics were better able to perform the task. Specifically, for some people their salience networks were not as well-connected with the visual networks in the brain. Individuals who showed this pattern were better able to resist tempting distractors and perform the task.

“Researchers normally study connectivity using traditional approaches, but we used the dynamic approach, which gave us new insight that traditional connectivity analysis did not reveal,” said Uddin. “When we looked at the moment-to-moment, dynamic measures of connectivity we saw the relationship with individual differences in eye-gazing behavior emerge.”

The study, “Salience network dynamics underlying successful resistance of temptation,” is published in the journal SCAN.

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Happy 4th of July… From Space!

In Hollywood blockbusters, explosions and eruptions are often among the stars of the show. In space, explosions, eruptions and twinkling of actual stars are a focus for scientists who hope to better understand their births, lives, deaths and how they interact with their surroundings. Spend some of your Fourth of July taking a look at these celestial phenomenon:

Credit: NASA/Chandra X-ray Observatory

An Astral Exhibition

This object became a sensation in the astronomical community when a team of researchers pointed at it with our Chandra X-ray Observatory telescope in 1901, noting that it suddenly appeared as one of the brightest stars in the sky for a few days, before gradually fading away in brightness. Today, astronomers cite it as an example of a “classical nova,” an outburst produced by a thermonuclear explosion on the surface of a white dwarf star, the dense remnant of a Sun-like star.

Credit: NASA/Hubble Space Telescope

A Twinkling Tapestry

The brilliant tapestry of young stars flaring to life resemble a glittering fireworks display. The sparkling centerpiece is a giant cluster of about 3,000 stars called Westerlund 2, named for Swedish astronomer Bengt Westerlund who discovered the grouping in the 1960s. The cluster resides in a raucous stellar breeding ground located 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Carina.

Credit: NASA/THEMIS/Sebastian Saarloos

An Illuminating Aurora

Sometimes during solar magnetic events, solar explosions hurl clouds of magnetized particles into space. Traveling more than a million miles per hour, these coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, made up of hot material called plasma take up to three days to reach Earth. Spacecraft and satellites in the path of CMEs can experience glitches as these plasma clouds pass by. In near-Earth space, magnetic reconnection incites explosions of energy driving charged solar particles to collide with atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere. We see these collisions near Earth’s polar regions as the aurora. Three spacecraft from our Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) mission, observed these outbursts known as substorms.

Credit: NASA/Hubble Space Telescope//ESA/STScI

A Shining Supermassive Merger

Every galaxy has a black hole at its center. Usually they are quiet, without gas accretions, like the one in our Milky Way. But if a star creeps too close to the black hole, the gravitational tides can rip away the star’s gaseous matter. Like water spinning around a drain, the gas swirls into a disk around the black hole at such speeds that it heats to millions of degrees. As an inner ring of gas spins into the black hole, gas particles shoot outward from the black hole’s polar regions. Like bullets shot from a rifle, they zoom through the jets at velocities close to the speed of light. Astronomers using our Hubble Space Telescope observed correlations between supermassive black holes and an event similar to tidal disruption, pictured above in the Centaurus A galaxy. 

Credit: NASA/Hubble Space Telescope/ESA

A Stellar Explosion

Supernovae can occur one of two ways. The first occurs when a white dwarf—the remains of a dead star—passes so close to a living star that its matter leaks into the white dwarf. This causes a catastrophic explosion. However most people understand supernovae as the death of a massive star. When the star runs out of fuel toward the end of its life, the gravity at its heart sucks the surrounding mass into its center. At the turn of the 19th century, the binary star system Eta Carinae was faint and undistinguished. Our Hubble Telescope captured this image of Eta Carinae, binary star system. The larger of the two stars in the Eta Carinae system is a huge and unstable star that is nearing the end of its life, and the event that the 19th century astronomers observed was a stellar near-death experience. Scientists call these outbursts supernova impostor events, because they appear similar to supernovae but stop just short of destroying their star.

Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO

An Eye-Catching Eruption

Extremely energetic objects permeate the universe. But close to home, the Sun produces its own dazzling lightshow, producing the largest explosions in our solar system and driving powerful solar storms.. When solar activity contorts and realigns the Sun’s magnetic fields, vast amounts of energy can be driven into space. This phenomenon can create a sudden flash of light—a solar flare.The above picture features a filament eruption on the Sun, accompanied by solar flares captured by our Solar Dynamics Observatory.

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The French Netflix uploaded this on twitter…….