PBS_Braincraft

Surprise! You're more optimistic than you think.

A halfalogue is that distracting half-of-a-conversation that you overhear. And you absolutely must know the other half. Because you're a curious human and your brain circuitry rewards you for finding out. Here's the lowdown.

It seems like some people have so many great ideas - like <a href="https://rumble.com/v31hih-did-einstein-know-the-truth-about-aliens.html" target="_blank">Albert Einstein</a>, who apart from changing everything we know about the whole of space and time, he also took a stab at fashion. Rest assured there are ways that the rest of us can be more creative, too. We explore some practical tips for boosting your creativity and generating ideas. Why do some people have so many great ideas? And how can the rest of us be more creative? Creativity is the result of large brain networks that interact with each other to generate random thoughts, change them and merge them and this happens through three mental skills: bending, breaking and blending. Bending is when we imagine things in new ways, breaking is when we take an idea and break it into pieces and blending is when we mix few things together. In 2017 study, researchers found those who score high on creativity tests have more connections between brain hemispheres and stronger communication between brain networks, and the people who come up with many original answers to a question possess a skill called divergent thinking. Remember that you are not stuck with the brain you have, your brain networks are flexible and you can practice creativity. So read more, pay more attention, visit a <a href="https://rumble.com/v45fql-museum-of-selfies-to-open-january-2018-in-glendale.html" target="_blank">museum</a>, and travel to feed your imagination. Keep generating ideas and come back to the ground with fresh eyes and hopefully fresh ideas. Don’t forget to surround yourself with interesting people. We need humans and our society for creativity to flourish.

Creativity depends on the cooperation of two competing networks: one that generates spontaneous thoughts (the default mode network) and the executive control center of the brain that governs everything else. Our random, free-flowing thoughts that are worthy of further exploration pop into our consciousness when they're recruited by the executive control network.

What's the key to happiness and life satisfaction? One study followed a group of people for more than seventy years to find out. Watch this video and find out what they discovered! Can you think of one thing that could make you happy over the course of your life, which does not include tacos and Harry Potter. Think of something that could actually sustain your happiness for many years. You can say anything you like, but to measure it scientifically we would have to study your regular integrals for most of your life. Luckily, that study has already been done. The Harvard Grant Study began in 1938 and it followed 268 male undergraduate students for more than seventy years. They planned to track them over their entire lives, so they can measure a lot of psychological and physiological traits like their personality, IQ, and the function of their major organs. Because it was so huge it had so many findings like your financial success is more dependent on the warmth of your relationship than intelligence. And cigarette smoking was the single greatest factor that contributed to the men’s deaths. When George Vaillant, the lead researcher of this study for more than 30 years, was asked what was the single greatest finding from it, he said it was the capacity of the intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of the men’s lives, concluding that happiness is <a href="https://rumble.com/v46tyd-i-love-you-do-you-love-me.html" target="_blank">love</a>. What these seventy years of research suggest is ‘love is all you need’, which is what The Beatles sang about, but it doesn’t necessarily mean having a long relationship or marriage with a partner. The study looked at the men’s relationship with their parents and how that affected them over the course of their lives. The men who had a <a href="https://rumble.com/v3ow89-5-relationship-myths-and-what-the-reality-looks-like.html" target="_blank">warmer relationship</a> with their mothers as a child earned an average of $87,000 a year more than those who had an uncaring mother. Those with an uncaring mother were more likely to develop dementia later in life. The warmth of the men’s relationship with their fathers was correlated with enjoying vacations more and having a life satisfaction at age 75. These findings are super-interesting. Of course correlation doesn’t equal causation. Watch this video and share your comments on this topic below!

Can we actually test the difference between the male and female brain? We are often told that there is a difference between male and female. Despite the most obvious reason of body parts and physique, does your gender really define you in other ways too? Is there such a thing as a male brain which can solve mathematical problems faster or a female brain that can be fluent in more languages? The fact of the matter is that it’s not that much about the gender, but rather about the size and form of the brain. Male brains are bigger in size due to men being bigger in size than women in real life but it also has a lot more holes inside while a female brain is smaller but it contains a lot more of the bundles of fiber that connect the right and left hemispheres of the brain. But when it comes to certain abilities, gender is not even remotely influencing the brain. In fact, the gender barrier is mainly imposed by society and isn’t real. <a href="https://rumble.com/v301zo-human-brains-arent-distinctly-male-or-female-study.html" target="_blank">Studies</a> have shown that both men and women perform equally as good on test when gender isn’t mentioned, compared to other groups which have been asked to state their gender. So don’t let <a href="https://rumble.com/v334vp-female-doctors-better-than-male-doctors.html" target="_blank">society’s norms</a> keep you from doing what you want to do and trying new things. It’s literally only in your head.

How is our brain put together? And where do these 'pieces' come from?

How does perceived 'personal space' impact your daily life?

These cool glasses give new hope for visually impaired people to see again.

The act of reading actually has proven impacts on your intelligence.

Do you believe in mind reading? So far, science denies its existence. At the same time, we still hear stories about telepathic experiences. Telepathy, direct transference of thought from one person (sender or agent) to another (receiver or percipient) without using the usual sensory channels of communication, hence a form of extrasensory perception (ESP). This is a great story that begins in California in the late 90’s where a group of scientist got a group of cats to watch a movie. The cats had electrodes attached to the visual area of their brains. The researchers saw how the cats experienced the outside world by hacking into and recording what their brain cells were communicating. With these bits of information, they rebuilt images from the movies- as seen by the cats. Understanding how our brains encode information and how we can crack the code- could make <a href="https://rumble.com/v3349f-6-people-with-real-superpowers-caught-on-camera.html" target="_blank">”superpowers”</a> like telepathy a reality. While it seems like science fiction, telepathy of mind reading has a scientific name- Brain to brain communication. Between the thoughts of us, humans (or cats) is a computer, a Brain-Computer Interface. It’s clunky compared to the elegant telepathy of Jedi knights. So the final answer to our question? Unfortunately, telepathy doesn’t exist, but advances in technology are bringing it closer to reality. We still need a computer interface between our brains- not as cool as <a href="https://rumble.com/v42b6n-10-greatest-star-wars-fan-theories.html" target="_blank">Star Wars</a>. If you could wear technology and communicate with a thought rather than speech what would you say?

It’s not often that we say this, but sometimes it seems that there are worse things to fear than death, and the act of forgetting sits somewhere on top of that list. Living your life with diminishing memories from day to day can feel worse than totally leaving this earth. Forgetfulness is a silent killer of spirit and it just gets worse with age, but where were we? There appears to be a positive side to forgetting after all, but in order to understand it. We need to understand how memories are lost. So we know that our brain decides to store past experiences in the form of memories in our mind, but think of it as a <a href="https://rumble.com/v3emh2-tense-moments-with-a-usb-flash-drive.html" target="_blank">flash drive</a>. It can only store so much. After a while our brain decides that memory is running short and it’s time to do a bit of clean up. There are actually two theories that explain the way memories are selected for removal. One of them is the decay theory which suggests that the brain deletes, so to say, old memories to make room for new, ant the interference theory suggests that whenever we experience a thing that is of similar value with a past memory, the new one is stacked on top of the old one, erasing the old memory in the process. In reality though, both of these theories are true. Our brain creates two proteins, Mushashi and Adducin, the first one breaking the bonds between synapses and stopping the flow of information between nerve cells and the latter repairing that bond. What this means is that we have a constant fight of these two in our brain and it is the sole reason some memories are lost in the process. The good side of forgetting comes with the fact that whenever we lose a memory, it leaves a lot open for a new one to be stored. So don’t fret too much and work hard on making <a href="https://rumble.com/v30j3x-memory-quiz-top-score.html" target="_blank">memories</a> that count!

Sometimes bad things happen to good feedback.

If you were sleep deprived, could you just fake that you got more sleep the night before? Science has some interesting answers. Imagine you wake up thinking you had a wonderful night’s sleep, you feel fantastic and you are going to wake up immediately. However, no matter how much sleep you get there is always that niggling voice inside your head that you need more sleep and you are the thing about how tired you are. But, with simply thinking about how good sleep you had can improve your brain function. In a recent study, researchers told participants that those who spent more than 25% of their time asleep in REM sleep have better cognitive functioning. Simply believing that you had a good night’s sleep, even if you didn’t, it improves performance. But can you really fake sleep? Not really. But if you could stop thinking and talking about how tired you are, and plan a nap you could improve your sleeping. Researchers say that an afternoon nap is an ideal remedy for fatigue from sleep loss. But, that’s kind of unrealistic for us who have jobs and are not as brazen as George Constanza. One solution is active rest or progressive muscle <a href="https://rumble.com/v4hhw1-uwm-class-teaches-students-the-art-of-relaxation.html" target="_blank">relaxation</a>. You focus on one muscle, make it tense and then release. This will really help. While it’s really hard to tell what the quality of our sleep was actually like, you should snooze less and nap more. Or active rest. It’s almost <a href="https://rumble.com/v39z0j-power-napping-pug-snores-through-her-doggy-dreams.html" target="_blank">napping</a>. So it seems the key to fake sleeping is actually… Fake sleep.

Feel disoriented when you wake up? One in seven people suffers from this effect called 'Sleep Drunkenness'. It is the same for everybody: you wake up to the annoying sound of your alarm clock, telling you it is another day for you to get out of your bed and go about your day, but instead you talk to the phone, thinking someone is calling you and then ‘hang up’ to go back to your sleep. It is called ‘severe sleep inertia’, a state when you wake up suddenly from your slumber and you feel groggy and disoriented, thinking how confusing life is. According to research, one in seven people experience this phenomenon, with episodes typically lasting up to 15 minutes after you are so rudely woken up. During those episodes, it is quite normal to pour your morning cereal in the dishwasher. When we <a href="https://rumble.com/v3qc5z-our-sleep-patterns-inherited-from-hunter-gatherers-says-study.html" target="_blank">sleep</a>, we cycle through three stages of light and deep sleep. The first and second stages are light, called non-REM 1 and non-REM 2 stages. During these stages, we can be woken up pretty easily. But when we hit non-REM 3, we enter deep sleep, followed by REM, which stands for Rapid Eye Movement. Yes, our eyes actually move back and forth and we are most likely to dream during this stage. Sleep drunkenness occurs when we are woken up from this REM stage, while our brains still contain a chemical called adenosine. It is a neurotransmitter that travels between nerve cells, promoting sleep and suppresses arousal. When you have your <a href="https://rumble.com/v47itx-starbucks-menu-change-could-be-game-changer-to-morning-coffee-routine.html" target="_blank">morning cup of joe</a>, the caffeine fights the morning effects of adenosine and speeds up the rate our nerve cells communicate with each other. This is especially helpful if you reach for your hot, black beverage as soon as you wake up. So, next time you find yourself talking to your alarm in the morning, remember - there could be a sleep drunkenness anonymous group somewhere if we weren’t all so far apart.

Would you experiment with your brain? Perhaps there's a Dr. Frankenstein in us all.

Is there really such a thing as your intellectual peak?

Persuasive and personalised messages are all around us.

American college students and Tamil speakers in India were given the same unusual task: to connect two meaningless words to two irregular shapes. The remarkable result was that more than 95% of people provided the same answer. The words in question were “buba” and “kiki” and the shapes were random drawings of closed lines, one of them round-edged and the other pointy. The people associated the round-shaped line with the word “buba” and the pointy one to “kiki”. The results of the experiment indicate that we can draw meaning from where there is none. Even when we are talking to someone in the same language, our body language, tone, pitch and accent convey information beyond what we tell. What about accents? We all have it, although no one seems to notice their own. Accents develop because people who live in close proximity share the way of speaking, and we have our own accent bias. Studies have shown that even one-year-old babies have a preference for the sounds of the <a href="https://rumble.com/v30jfx-english-language-quiz-renaissance-period.html" target="_blank">language</a> spoken at home. But why does the English speaking world have so many accents in the first place? After colonizing territories on all world continents the descendants of the English must have lost the English accent at some point and developed their local way of speaking. During the period of 200 years since the first settlement to the invention of sound records, accents have changed and even developed tendencies peculiar to a geographical area: the <a href="https://rumble.com/v4e4ut-buckeye-woman-wakes-up-with-british-accent.html" target="_blank">British</a> non-rhetoric (inaudible) vs. the American rhetoric (hard) “r”. The way we talk conveys information about our level of education, ethnicity, socio-economic status, maybe not always accurate but it can affect people’s perceptions. Especially about credibility: people with accent are more likely to be disbelieved, and the heavier the accent the less believable they are perceived to be. Also, people are more likely to rate a suspect as guilty if they have a regional accent vs. a London accent. However, we all have a bias towards our own accent – we like it because it belongs to our social group.

How attention and focus affects creative thinking.

They say people can always tell if you are faking a smile because your eyes are not mirroring your mouth. In reality, when you are tired or stressed, a fake facade is sometimes the only thing you can muster. But according to this explanation, even a fake smile can sometimes be better than none at all. In the mid 19th century, a French scientist by the name of Guillaume Duchenne studied <a href="https://rumble.com/v378lf-puppy-surprise.html" target="_blank">emotional responses</a> in humans by stimulating different areas on his subject’s faces with - you guessed it - good old electricity. This helped him isolate the muscles that we use to express fear, sadness and joy. But it also helped him distinguish which muscles on our faces create a fake smile, and which create a genuine smile. There are two muscles: one just under our eyes called orbicularis oculi, and another on the sides of our cheeks called zygomaticus major, that work together to give our expressions that real smile. It is also called a Duchenne smile. Charles Darwin was inspired by Duchenne and conducted his own research. In it, he suggests that our facial expressions actively influence our mood, calling it the facial feedback hypothesis. In a more recent study, subjects were given Botox shots for the corrugator muscles in their brows so they could not express sad or distressed emotions on their face. They reported that their positive mood was higher than the other participant who received different medications. The conclusion is pretty simple, although a bit controversial. If you bear through your periods of sadness and stress with a fake smile, the happiness you present will eventually catch up with you. You can always watch this <a href="https://rumble.com/v34932-cute-labrador-loves-to-smile.html" target="_blank">dog smiling on cue</a>, it always works for us.

In Iceland if somebody is very wise you say that person is “vitur”. It means they have a lot of “vit” or “sense”. And the opposite of that, when someone is not wise at all they are “vitleysingur”. It means that person does not have any “vit”, essentially they are “witless”. A recent study showed that learning new words activates the same region that is active when you do pleasurable activities like eating cake or seeing your favorite band perform. We hope you find “vitleysingur” mind-blowing. In the study researchers gave participants two tasks: one was learning new words and the other was a gambling task. FMRI scan showed that the ventral stratum, the kay area involved in reward and motivation was active in both tasks. It sorts of makes sense because communicating with people gives us pleasure. Research shows that through human <a href="https://rumble.com/v30na7-10-unsolved-mysteries-of-evolution.html" target="_blank">evolution</a> we were motivated to acquire linguistic skills and learn new language because it is tied to this reward system. We describe things as mind-blowing all the time, but what does it actually mean? The emotional aspect to learning new languages is extremely important because we need emotion to engage our learning cycle. Research shows that we are <a href="https://rumble.com/v4cks7-learning-the-language-while-you-travel.html" target="_blank">learning</a> best when we are in a state of relaxed awareness, not too aroused or totally disengaged. Learning comes best when you are in this mood and you experience awe and curiosity. When we learn new cool bits of information we activate that same reward region of our brain as when we learn new words. You feel good because you have learned something cool and you want to learn more. Curiosity is contagious and it is sort of addictive as well. Learning new words activates the reward area of our brain and, perhaps, learning surprising new bits, or “vits” of information does too.

Do you have food nostalgia? Why are our memories of food are so vivid (and delicious).

Can you see what I see? We all experience things subjectively, including how we perceive optical illusions. Back in the 1800’s, American psychologist Joseph Jastrow illustrated an animal. Some of them saw a duck, and some a rabbit- but not both at once. The image itself allows for both interpretations and switching between them involves some mental effort. And when you see the duck, do you see the same duck we see? Researchers suggest the differences in our subjective experiences are tied to the different sizes of a certain area in our brain. It’s difficult to say why exactly the size of one brain area leads to people being more easily tricked by optical illusions. It could have to do with the concentration of chemical messengers inside the visual cortex. Other studies have found that the magnitude of optical illusions differs in people with <a href="https://rumble.com/v4de91-simple-weaving-shapes-for-children-with-autism.html" target="_blank">autism</a> or in people from different cultures. Things can be constructed in many different ways. When children were shown the duck-rabbit illusion on Easter Sunday (rabbit season) more children saw the rabbit, where on other Sundays they were more likely to see the duck (duck season). Sure, what you see is what you get, but remember that things may be preserved through different lenses. <a href="https://rumble.com/v3dd3p-10-best-optical-illusions-that-will-bend-your-brain-a-listicle-of-mind-tric.html" target="_blank">Optical illusions</a> don't “trick the eye” nor “fool the brain”, nor reveal that “our brain is not working”, but they are fascinating! They also teach us about our visual perception and its limitations.

Amusiais an intriguing word, but what does it mean? Amusia is a musical disorder that appears mainly as a defect in processing pitch but also encompasses musical memory and recognition. Amusia may be present from birth or may develop as the result of an injury. Can you imagine life without music? We know we can’t. Take a look at these interesting facts and stories about some people who can't hear the music. Mrs. L was a young-looking sixty-seven-year-old woman. She was intelligent, but she didn’t know what “singing” meant. She also didn’t hear music like most of us do. In Oliver Saks’ book Musicophilia, Mrs. L described music to sound like pots and pans being thrown around the kitchen. This condition isn’t unique to Mrs. L. About 4% of the population is born with “amusia”. In some worse amusia, some people can’t even recognize musical information at all. A recent study looked at why beat deaf individuals are unable to keep a beat or tap along with <a href="https://rumble.com/v2zp92-freestyle-slalom-klaudia-hartmanis.html" target="_blank">music</a>. We are not entirely certain about what’s going on inside the brains of those who suffer from amsuia; a number of regions are involved in processing music. We do know that the ability to move along to a beat isn’t unique to the human brain. Other species with local learning abilities are able to keep a beat-think dolphins, seals, parrots and even <a href="https://rumble.com/v2zljm-parrot-singing-with-2-year-old-drummer.html" target="_blank">cockatoos</a> like Snowball, the dancing sensation.