Scientists are exploring the use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD to treat a range of ailments from depression to cluster headaches and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Interesting to see the mainstream research into hallucinogenic drugs starting again. LSD is said to be really useful for treating depression and alcoholism. I’d always prefer to go down a route that uses our bodies own capacity to create feel good substances (endorphins etc.) but don’t think it should be illegal for people to alter their consciousness in any way they want to.

It’s always funny to see people relying so much on substances to change their mood. For example caffeine and alcohol in the combination of Vodka – RedBull (RedBull is a brand of ‘energy’ drink based on
sugar and caffeine amongst other things).

It’s a popular drink in clubs and pubs. I guess the alcohol is there to lower your inhibitions and the caffeine and sugar to get you to feel energised and happy.

In my opinion the same effect can be reached by jumping up and down for a couple of seconds or dancing. And that’s usually how I do it when I go out.

Read the article at the Guardian: Clinical trials test potential of hallucinogenic drugs to help patients with terminal illnesses

Breaking news! Reliving past traumas over and over as practised in many talk-therapies might not be such a good thing after all!

Following the latest study showing that some anti-depressant drugs are of little clinical benefit for most patients, more and more individuals are likely to seek treatment through various forms of psychotherapy, which collectively have come to be known as “the talking cure”. However, a recent article in the Psychologist journal, entitled When Therapy Causes Harm, cautions that approximately 10% of people get worse after starting therapy.

Read the rest at the Guardian: When it’s bad to talk

Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review released today.

Prozac, used by 40m people, does not work say scientists

Yet another story about the power of the Placebo. Now I don’t mean to be negative picking up on these stories all the time. It’s just funny to me that people question that science is social construct when things like this occur all the time. Some scientists say Prozac works one way, the others say something else, and at the end of the day it’s down to what the individual believes.

Don’t get me wrong I think modern science is great. But you’d think that by now we’d realise to what extent science is a social construct, then again the concept of a scientific paradigm is still largely outside the current paradigm. Everyone uses the phrase but few know what it really means. It’s like someone acknowledging that people’s perceptions are biased because of their upbringing, beliefs, culture and mood, except thinking they themselves are exempt from those influences.

Maybe a lot of us just need a sugar-pill to make ourselves feel better, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Look at Dumbo, he had a magic feather to make himself feel better!

In a classroom in South Tyneside, a small group of 11-year-olds is considering the finer points of Stoic philosophy. The teacher, Mrs Carrahar, points helpfully at the blackboard. “Come on now, kids, remember your ABC: Adversity, Belief, Consequence. Sometimes how we feel about things depends on … what? It begins with P … Yes, Darren?” “Perspective, miss!” says a small child. “Very good, Darren!”

Read the rest here: Teaching happiness: the classes in wellbeing that are helping our children

Main stream Psychology continues to forge into bold new territories. Some people are starting to realise that it might be a good thing to focus on what we want to move towards and not just what we want to get away from.

Women who undergo IVF increase their chances of pregnancy if they are also treated with acupuncture, a new analysis suggests.The benefits may be large — a 65 per cent increase in the chance of becoming pregnant, and a 91 per cent increase in the number of live births.

Read the rest here: Course of acupuncture may raise success of IVF treatment by 65%

I only started to become interested in acupuncture after I started using EFT which is sometimes referred to as an acupressure technique. One of the explanation for EFT is that it involves manipulating the energy that flow through meridians which are pathways in your body. I don’t know if that’s how it works. But it’s interesting to note the similarities.

An interesting side note is that in the Chinese martial arts I practice we are sometimes shown nerve points which are very sensitive and hurt a lot if you happen to get pocked or prodded there. That knowledge must come from Chinese medicine.

With regards to the above article; what baffles me time and again is how some of these phenomenon are dismissed as a mere placebo. Fine, but what is this amazing placebo affect and shouldn’t we be investigating it?

If you are on FaceBook you can join the new Meme Weaver group I’ve created. Then you’ll be able to meet other Meme Weaver readers and share your own ideas, thoughts, videos and articles.

If the above link doesn’t work just type Meme Weaver into the FaceBook search engine.

“We said we are going to do the opposite: rather than see what the relationship is between the eye movement and the solution right before you solve the problem, we said we’re going to see if we can force people to think differently and, without conscious awareness, move their eyes in different ways and influence their thought patterns,” Lleras said.As reported in their paper, titled “Moving eyes and moving thought: On the spatial compatibility between eye movements and cognition,” the researchers were able to manipulate eye movement in order to guide participants to the problem’s solution.”So it’s not just the case that people who are going to get the solution are moving their eyes in a given way, but that the people who might not have gotten the solution, if you have them move their eyes in that way, then they actually can solve it,” Thomas said.

This is amazing stuff. Once again you can read the full article at Science Daily.

I wonder what could be done with this information. Maybe it would be possible to find out which strategies are common to those people that are good at solving problems and ‘model’ that strategy. Then we could teach it to others to improve their performance.

Oh wait… this is what Richard Bandler and John Grinder were doing 30 years ago. They call it Eye Accessing Cues.

For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, wild animals generally represented either a food source or a potential danger. Detecting an animal’s immediate presence and then monitoring its movements was vital to the physical safety, nutrition, and well-being of stone-age families.Now a team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara has identified a nonconscious attention system, which still exists in the human brain, that maintains awareness of non-human animals and tracks changes in their location, behavior, and trajectory.

It’s strange to think that paying more attention to moving animals than moving cars is hard-wired into the brain, but that seems the case according to this study.

Read the rest at ScienceDaily.

A paralysed man in the US has become the first person to benefit from a brain chip that reads his mind.

Read the article at the BBC.

No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years. But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.

Read the rest at Discover Magazine.