School Bullying

“Bullying was satisfying.  It gave me more confidence. 
And I kind of felt powerful.”
             - Daniel Harrison, Age 15 (Former Bully)

Last week, I was away in Alabama when I tuned into CNN’s program on bullying. The progam shared ideas from Dr. Phil, and showed a new Public Service Announcement (PSA) titled “Stop Bullying, Speak Up." These are all solid starts to elevating the collective consciousness about bullying, but in my opinion they just aren’t enough.

Going Deeper

Bullying is simply a symptom.  It is a “warning sign” that a school system is sick. Akin to a child with Lyme disease that has chronic headaches, if you solely treat the headaches perhaps you’ll make some progress, but the real issue  – the underlying problem--isn’t the headaches but the Lyme disease. You must treat the underlying cause in order to create a healthy system (body, school, community). 

So much of our current “solutions” are merely treating the symptoms of bullying. New school reporting policies, anti-bullying task forces, screening new students for clinical depression and passing laws are a solid start. My suggestions for going deeper include:  

Measure and Promote Positive Schools (communities / cultures)  

Is this school one of inclusion?  Does it value differences?  Are the teachers attentive to student’s problems?  Is basic emotional and social health taught to educators?  Are we measuring how effective a school is at creating a culture of inclusion, character and meaning?  Is there a place for a depressed or abused child to seek confidential help?  Are we honoring children’s different capabilities, interests and strengths or seeking to make “cookie-cutter” kids?  Is there a no tolerance policy relative to bullies?  Are their clear consequences for inflicting abuse on school peers (emotional, physical, mental)?  Are we teaching kids the proper use of their personal power?  I believe schools need to be measured as to the extent they create "healthy" environments versus the opposite - then we need to reward healthy school systems.   

Mandating Emotional Education 

No longer can we rely upon parents being the sole educators of a child’s emotional life.  The rates of childhood abuse, loss and trauma continue to be high – so it is up to the traditional school systems to not only value teaching the core courses of math and science but also teach emotional health from K-12.  Bullies are primarily created through lack of knowledge and poor environments (role models).

Parent Enrichment Classes

Parents don’t get a manual and often parent the way they were parented (which may have included bullying, addiction, abuse) so requiring one annual meeting of parents so that everyone can be on the same page in terms of what raising an emotionally and socially health child means is essential. 
Ultimately, we need to shift our focus from “anti-bullying” to the real problem. The real problem being that these ill systems have focused upon getting students to pass tests, grades and get decent academic standings versus educating their hearts. And that children aren’t given any tools of emotional and social health so they do the best they can with what they’ve got – the problem being that so many kids just don’t have a lot.

The Cure

Curing the bully crisis in America isn’t simple.  It is commingled with unfit parents, poor role models, mental health problems in children’s homes and environments along with school systems that focus nearly exclusively on grades versus cultivating kindness.  I believe a huge shift needs to occur from stopping bullying to growing healthy kids.  At the crux of the recent bully induced suicides are students who weren’t 100% healthy and felt they had nowhere to go – no other options, no other solutions.  

There is this old Native American saying that the cure is in the wound. I believe this is true. And let’s not let the wound of Taylor Clementi, Phoebe Prince, Seth Walsch, Asher Brown, Billy Lucas and all the other kids who have taken their lives teach us nothing.  It is there choices that call our country, our educational pioneers and everyday parents to stand up and say – enough is enough. There is better way to bring up our kids today.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/creative-development/201010/school-bullying

http://www.psychologytoday.com/

A Scientific Explanation Of Homosexuality

This question asks for scientific explanations rather than religious or moralistic answers. 

Unfortunately, there is not yet a conclusive study which tell us exactly what causes homosexuality. Many studies show correlations, but there is not an accepted scientific consensus on the cause of homosexuality. 

All credible scientific organizations state that sexual orientation is influenced by biological factors and environmental factors (scientifically speaking, the hormonal environment of the womb is considered an "environmental factor'), and that it cannot be changed, as it is innate and set at birth. 

In studies with twins, researchers have found that far more of them are likely to share the same sexuality than with siblings that do not share the same DNA; however, the number falls short of 100%. These results show that there is a high correlation with a person's genetic makeup and their sexuality. Neurologically speaking, gay men tend to have brains similar in structure and function to that of straight women, and lesbians tend to have brains similar to straight men. Certain neurological responses, like the startle response, also show this correlation. The same is also present in other species (yes, many animals exhibit bisexual or even primarily homosexual behavior.) There have been other trends documented, such as the fact that the more older brothers a boy has, the more likely he will identify as gay, and this is true even when the boy is not raised with his older brothers. Gay men are also more likely to be left-handed. The ratio of the length of the index finger to the ring finger, which is caused by hormones in utero and does not change as one grows older, also shows correlations between gay men and straight women, and lesbians and straight men. Some theories include that the hormonal balance of the womb, which influences sex development (whether or not the child is a boy or girl or intersex), influences a child's predisposition to a certain sexual orientation. 

If a female and a male are twins, sometimes the testosterone from the male affects the female embryo's development. Females thus affected are more likely to develop lesbian tendencies than other females. Considering the 26th pair of chromosomes in humans, due to particular rare genetic factors, some people born with XX chromosomes become males as opposed to females and some people born with XY chromosomes become females as opposed to male. These people are more likely to exhibit homosexual behaviour. 

So "nature" determines one's overall predisposition to a certain orientation, but "nurture" (the environment and experiences of one after birth) may influence other aspects of one's sexual preference, like ideal traits in a partner, fetishes, etc. However, this is a highly complex question, and there is still much more research to be done. Scientific studies on different aspects of this question are being released all the time in journals. 

As far as why homosexuality is a healthy trait for a species (and is thus encountered in nearly every animal species on our planet), there are several theories, but to make this point one needs to clarify the difference between a survival behavior and a cultural behavior. 

For instance, in current United States culture one of the larger causes of teen suicide is the hatred and rejection shown to homosexuals. This is a cultural behavior. The current United States culture chooses to show disdain and pass judgment on people who have a sexuality outside the cultural norm. This results in some teenage homosexuals committing suicide. Homosexual behavior in a society that has not condemned or sanctioned sexual behavior is considered normal and entertaining. This is still true in some modern countries and tribes, but the culture that most people will be familiar with is that of the ancient Romans and Greeks. 

The Greeks believed that men who were in love would fight more fiercely for one another and honored their love in poems and theater. The most famous of these pairings was between Patroclus and Achilles in Homer's Illiad. Their culture believed that love was plural and that a man should love his wife and his friends. By their standards, someone who was only interested in women or only interested in men would be strange (though not despised). 

So the scientific explanation may simply be as simple as this: Our bodies have evolved to give us pleasurable feelings when we enact the act of reproduction whether it be to reproduce or not. Therefore, the scientific explanation for homosexual behavior is the same reason for heterosexual behavior or masturbation. . . it feels good. That is not a flippant or intentionally funny answer either. Most human behavior can be reduced to two main goals: avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. 

As with all aspects of human nature, the origin of homosexual behavior must stem from evolution. Evolution leads to instinct, which in turn leads to the experiences of pleasure (to encourage us to do things) and pain (to ensure we do not harm ourselves). Although homosexual behavior has been observed among many species of animal, it is primarily (if not exclusively) found among social animals. So it fair to assume that being a social animal allows for homosexuality to exist as others within social groups as others can continue the species' survival. Within social groups there can be diversity, and this diversity can boost a species' survival. 

Human sexuality differs also from, say, a dog. A male dog would not be aroused by a female bitch unless she is in 'heat'. Humans do not follow this pattern of behavior as straight men may find women attractive even when they are not ovulating at the time. In fact, only three species on Earth have heterosexual sex outside the 'optimum' period for reproduction: chimpanzees, dolphins and humans; these three species are often regarded as the most 'intelligent' species on the planet. This indicates that some time in our evolutionary past a 'break' occurred between sex and reproduction and this proved, from an evolutionary point of view, highly successful. 

So it is possible to see that homosexuality was part of a broader evolutionary past and this led to the richness of diversity of human nature today, of which one of the results was homosexuality.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_scientific_explanation_for_homosexual_behavior

http://www.answers.com/

Neuroscience Of The Criminal Mind

The latest neuroscience research is presenting intriguing evidence that the brains of certain kinds of criminals are different from those of the rest of the population.

While these findings could improve our understanding of criminal behavior, they also raise moral quandaries about whether and how society should use this knowledge to combat crime.

The criminal mind



In one recent study, scientists examined 21 people with antisocial personality disorder – a condition that characterizes many convicted criminals. Those with the disorder "typically have no regard for right and wrong. They may often violate the law and the rights of others," according to the Mayo Clinic.
Brain scans of the antisocial people, compared with a control group of individuals without any mental disorders, showed on average an 18-percent reduction in the volume of the brain's middle frontal gyrus, and a 9 percent reduction in the volume of the orbital frontal gyrus – two sections in the brain's frontal lobe.
Another brain study, published in the September 2009 Archives of General Psychiatry, compared 27 psychopaths — people with severe antisocial personality disorder — to 32 non-psychopaths. In the psychopaths, the researchers observed deformations in another part of the brain called the amygdala, with the psychopaths showing a thinning of the outer layer of that region called the cortex and, on average, an 18-percent volume reduction in this part of brain.
"The amygdala is the seat of emotion. Psychopaths lack emotion. They lack empathy, remorse, guilt," said research team member Adrian Raine, chair of the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., last month.


In addition to brain differences, people who end up being convicted for crimes often show behavioral differences compared with the rest of the population. One long-term study that Raine participated in followed 1,795 children born in two towns from ages 3 to 23. The study measured many aspects of these individuals' growth and development, and found that 137 became criminal offenders.
One test on the participants at age 3 measured their response to fear – called fear conditioning – by associating a stimulus, such as a tone, with a punishment like an electric shock, and then measuring people's involuntary physical responses through the skin upon hearing the tone.
In this case, the researchers found a distinct lack of fear conditioning in the 3-year-olds who would later become criminals. These findings were published in the January 2010 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Neurological base of crime

Overall, these studies and many more like them paint a picture of significant biological differences between people who commit serious crimes and people who do not. While not all people with antisocial personality disorder — or even all psychopaths — end up breaking the law, and not all criminals meet the criteria for these disorders, there is a marked correlation.
"There is a neuroscience basis in part to the cause of crime," Raine said.
What's more, as the study of 3-year-olds and other research have shown, many of these brain differences can be measured early on in life, long before a person might develop into actual psychopathic tendencies or commit a crime.
Criminologist Nathalie Fontaine of Indiana University studies the tendency toward being callous and unemotional (CU) in children between 7 and 12 years old. Children with these traits have been shown to have a higher risk of becoming psychopaths as adults.
"We're not suggesting that some children are psychopaths, but CU traits can be used to identify a subgroup of children who are at risk," Fontaine said.
Yet her research showed that these traits aren't fixed, and can change in children as they grow. So if psychologists identify children with these risk factors early on, it may not be too late.
"We can still help them," Fontaine said. "We can implement intervention to support and help children and their families, and we should."


Neuroscientists' understanding of the plasticity, or flexibility, of the brain called neurogenesis supports the idea that many of these brain differences are not fixed.
"Brain research is showing us that neurogenesis can occur even into adulthood," said psychologist Patricia Brennan of Emory University in Atlanta. "Biology isn’t destiny. There are many, many places you can intervene along that developmental pathway to change what's happening in these children."
Furthermore, criminal behavior is certainly not a fixed behavior.
Psychologist Dustin Pardini of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center found that about four out of five kids who are delinquents as children do not continue to offend in adulthood.
Pardini has been researching the potential brain differences between people with a past criminal record who have stopped committing crimes, and those who continue criminal behavior. While both groups showed brain differences compared with non-criminals in the study, Pardini and his colleagues uncovered few brain differences between chronic offenders and so-called remitting offenders.
"Both groups showed similar results," Pardini said. "None of these brain regions distinguish chronic and remitting offenders."

Ethical quandaries

Yet even the idea of intervening to help children at risk of becoming criminals is ethically fraught.
"Do we put children in compulsory treatment when we've uncovered the risk factors?" asked Raine. "Well, who decides that? Will the state mandate compulsory residential treatment?"
What if surgical treatment methods are advanced, and there is an option to operate on children or adults with these brain risk factors? Many experts are extremely hesitant to advocate such an invasive and risky brain intervention — especially in children and in individuals who have not yet committed any crime.
Yet psychologists say such solutions are not the only way to intervene.
"You don’t have to do direct brain surgery to change the way the brain functions," Brennan said. "You can do social interventions to change that."
Fontaine's studies, for example, suggest that kids who display callous and unemotional traits don't respond as well to traditional parenting and punishment methods such as time-outs. Instead of punishing bad behavior, programs that emphasize rewarding good behavior with positive reinforcement seem to work better.
Raine and his colleagues are also testing whether children who take supplemental pills of omega-3 fatty acids — also known as fish oil — can show improvement. Because this nutrient is thought to be used in cell growth, neuroscientists suspect it can help brain cells grow larger, increase the size of axons (the part of neurons that conducts electrical impulses), and regulate brain cell function.
"We are brain scanning children before and after treatment with omega-3," Raine said. "We are studying kids to see if it can reduce aggressive behavior and improve impaired brain areas. It's a biological treatment, but it's a relatively benign treatment that most people would accept."

'Slippery slope to Armageddon'

The field of neurocriminology also raises other philosophical quandaries, such as the question of whether revealing the role of brain abnormalities in crime reduces a person's responsibility for his or her own actions.
"Psychopaths know right and wrong cognitively, but don't have a feeling for what's right and wrong," Raine said. "Did they ask to have an amygdala that wasn't as well functioning as other individuals'? Should we be punishing psychopaths as harshly as we do?"
Because the brain of a psychopath is compromised, Raine said, one could argue that they don't have full responsibility for their actions. That — in effect — it's not their fault.
In fact, that reasoning has been argued in a court of law. Raine recounted a case he consulted on, of a man named Herbert Weinstein who had killed his wife. Brain scans subsequently revealed a large cyst in the frontal cortex of Weinstein's brain, showing that his cognitive abilities were significantly compromised.
The scans were used to strike a plea bargain in which Weinstein's sentence was reduced to only 11 years in prison.
"Imaging was used to reduce his culpability, to reduce his responsibility," Raine said. "Yet is that not a slippery slope to Armageddon where there's no responsibility in society?"

http://www.livescience.com/13083-criminals-brain-neuroscience-ethics.html

http://www.livescience.com/

What Hypnosis Really Does To Your Brain

Most people agree that hypnosis does something to your brain — specifically something that makes people make fools of themselves at hypnotist shows. But how does it actually affect the human brain? Can it make people recall events perfectly? Are post-hypnotic suggestions a bunch of baloney? What is the truth about hypnotism?

A History of Hypnosis

Nearly every culture in the world has a history of hypnotic trances. Some only considered them spiritual or eerie, but most began to make use of them as soon as they were discovered. India and China have ancient records showing hypnotic trances being used to relieve pain during surgery. The practice migrated to Europe, where in 1794 a young boy having an operation for a tumor was put under. The boy was Jacob Grimm, who grew up to write about quite a few hypnotic trances in his and his brother's book of fairy tales.

As ether and anesthesia came in, hypnosis went out. The medical community at large rejected its claims to pain reduction and hypnotic suggestions. Meanwhile, Hollywood embraced it as a plot device, adding on fantastic properties that made it seem still more outlandish to the public. It finally settled in the entertainment industry, where it does have the power to make people do extremely silly things, with extreme sincerity. (Watching some dead-serious kids give Grammy speeches as if they were Ricky Martin convinced me that hypnotism must have power over people.) But the extent of its power has always been debated.

How Hypnosis Affects the Brain

A person in a hypnotic state will appear tuned-out, and one of the marks of true hypnosis is a decrease in involuntary eye movement to the point where deeply hypnotized people will have to be reminded to blink. This gives an observer the impression that the hypnotized aren't paying attention. In fact, they're playing hyper-attention. Compared to a resting brain, many areas come online when a person is put into a hypnotic trance. All the areas that flare to life during hypnosis are also engaged when a person is concentrating on mental imagery — except one. Like many areas of the brain, the precuneus lights up during many different tasks, all of them having to do with a consciousness of self. It also deals with visuospatial aspects of the brain, letting us know where we are in space.

In essence, when we're hypnotized, people are able to concentrate intensely on self-created imagery (or imagery that suggested to them) but do not place their selves as part of that imagery. They've lost the reminder of what they personally do and what normal judgements they make, while increasing their ability to think about a whole range of imaginary situations. This explains the way adults can act out under the influence of hypnosis, or how they might remain calm and collected in situations that would otherwise terrify them. But how far does it go?

The Power of Hypnosis

One of the most incredible feats people under hypnosis are supposed to perform is the ability to remember details of a past event that a person has consciously forgotten. In movies everyone, under hypnosis, suddenly has a photographic memory (right up until they try to see the killer's face). There is debate, and some hypnotherapists claim that they have helped people retrace their steps through hypnosis and remember locations of, say, lost items or valuable papers.

But a larger study at Ohio State University cast doubt on whether hypnosis can actually enhance your memory to such an extent. When two groups of students, one hypnotized and one only relaxed, were asked about the dates of certain historical events, the groups performed equally well. The only difference was, when they were informed that there were some errors in their answers, the hypnotized group changed fewer answers than the unhypnotized group. Hypnosis got a more infamous reputation when it was used by psychologists to 'recover' lost memories, often of childhood abuse, that never happened.

But hypnosis does have the power to tap into memory in ways that other techniques do not. Most importantly, it has the ability to induce temporary, reversible amnesia. This condition is extremely rare, as many amnesiacs don't recover their memories, and some unlucky ones can't make new memories.

Although not all hypnotized patients can have their memories suppressed, and no one suppresses their memories unless they're told to, the effects can be startling. For one thing, the entire memory can be brought back with a word. This indicates that hypnosis doesn't obliterate memories, it just temporarily shuts off the retrieval system. One woman was told she couldn't remember the word 'six,' and so answered 'seven' to mathematical questions. A man forgot his own name. Any memory could be suppressed.

But the memory didn't go away. A group of students were hypnotized and told to forget a short film they had just watched. While unable to answer questions about the film, they had no problem remembering if the film was, for example, shot on a handheld camera. It was only the content that was suppressed. This ability to remember and react to the context of a thing without remembering the thing itself is the post-hypnotic suggestion. It's a suggested habit that makes sense in context (like reaching for a cell phone when hearing a ringtone) but not at that moment (if you deliberately left your cell phone at home). It just doesn't occur to the person to think of what they're reacting to before they react.

Another amazing hypnotic ability is, supposedly, suppression of pain. While it makes sense that people might feel less self-conscious, what with the part of their brain that feels self-consciousness offline, and that their perception might be altered by the part of the brain that governs perception, but pain is different. One of the primary functions of pain is to force someone out of the reverie they're in and make them pay attention to reality. Pain is the outside world breaking in.

But scientists studying perception think our experience is shaped far more by what we expect the stimulus to be than the stimulus itself. There are ten times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as carrying it up. Most people will have experienced feeling a shape in their pockets and being disoriented until they remember that it's a waded up receipt, at which point the sensations seem familiar.

More to the point, most people will remember an itching or sting that, when they see a more serious injury than they expected, will blossom into pain. A hypnotized person undergoing surgery, for example, may be able to convince themselves that they're experiencing the discomfort of a bug bite instead of a scalpel. That, along with a state of enforced relaxation, can make all the difference.

But the shadiest aspect of hypnotism — what it can make an entranced person do — is still shrouded in mystery. Most hypnotists take pains to stress that no one is enslaved when they're in a hypnotized state, and that they can't be made to do something they don't want to do. Of course, that is the line they'd take. Scientists are, understandably, reluctant to give people the suggestion to murder someone under hypnosis, and test the results. Perhaps the best test of this isn't science, but history. Although there have always been legends of people under the direction of an evil puppet-master committing unspeakable acts against their will, there have been no actual cases. So don't worry about going to those hypnotist shows. Just . . . don't sit in the front.

http://io9.com/5891504/what-hypnosis-really-does-to-your-brain

http://io9.com/

Video: Psychic Spies