#brainscience — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #brainscience, aggregated by home.social.
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Apparently I get to dissect a brain. Well... virtually. 🧠 Today was the first day of my ASU neuroscience class, "Peering into the Human Brain." I find it fascinating how the brain tricks people, including myself.
When was the last time your brain assumed something was real and only later you realized it wasn't?
#Skepticism #CriticalThinking #Paranormal #Neuroscience #ParanormalInvestigation #GhostHunting #ScienceCommunication #Skeptic #BrainScience #Perception
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Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements
Abstract
It is commonly assumed that a person’s emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. This assumption influences legal judgments, policy decisions, national security protocols, and educational practices; guides the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, as well as the development of commercial applications; and pervades everyday social interactions as well as research in other scientific fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and computer vision. In this article, we survey examples of this widespread assumption, which we refer to as the common view, and we then examine the scientific evidence that tests this view, focusing on the six most popular emotion categories used by consumers of emotion research: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The available scientific evidence suggests that people do sometimes smile when happy, frown when sad, scowl when angry, and so on, as proposed by the common view, more than what would be expected by chance. Yet how people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation. Furthermore, similar configurations of facial movements variably express instances of more than one emotion category. In fact, a given configuration of facial movements, such as a scowl, often communicates something other than an emotional state. Scientists agree that facial movements convey a range of information and are important for social communication, emotional or otherwise. But our review suggests an urgent need for research that examines how people actually move their faces to express emotions and other social information in the variety of contexts that make up everyday life, as well as careful study of the mechanisms by which people perceive instances of emotion in one another. We make specific research recommendations that will yield a more valid picture of how people move their faces to express emotions and how they infer emotional meaning from facial movements in situations of everyday life. This research is crucial to provide consumers of emotion research with the translational information they require.
Maybe it’s just me, but I have always thought these findings were extremely obvious. What is obvious is not just facial expressions. The same rough analysis applies to tone of voice, word choice, gesture, body language, perceived meaning, pragmatics of speaking and everything else involving interpersonal communication. For these reasons, I developed the FIML technique. FIML reduces the ‘irreducible complexity’1 of human interactions by examining small bits of interpersonal communications in real-time, real-world situations. Perfect communication between two humans (the smallest unit) is not possible. BUT, much better communication IS. FIML is not hard to do if you have a good partner who can understand why it is necessary. The world is a lonely place and good partners are rare mainly because interpersonal human understanding is really bad, frightfully so. If you do FIML, everything will be better for you. ABN
- See A theory of FIML ↩︎
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DATE: August 20, 2026 at 07:27AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY PSYCHIATIRY FEEDTITLE: Schizophrenia’s lost brain connections follow a surprising pattern
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260820002443.htm
Specialized brain scans reveal that schizophrenia is linked to widespread loss of the synapses that connect brain cells, with the left side of the brain hit especially hard. The damage follows a surprisingly organized pattern tied to the brain’s chemistry and wiring. Researchers also identified a left frontal region that may serve as a starting point for the loss.
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260820002443.htm
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Schizophrenia #BrainScience #Neuroscience #SynapseLoss #LeftBrain #FrontalLobe #BrainChemistry #NeuralConnections #MentalHealthResearch #NeuroscienceNews
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DATE: August 20, 2026 at 07:27AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY PSYCHOLOGY FEEDTITLE: Schizophrenia’s lost brain connections follow a surprising pattern
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260820002443.htm
Specialized brain scans reveal that schizophrenia is linked to widespread loss of the synapses that connect brain cells, with the left side of the brain hit especially hard. The damage follows a surprisingly organized pattern tied to the brain’s chemistry and wiring. Researchers also identified a left frontal region that may serve as a starting point for the loss.
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260820002443.htm
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Schizophrenia #BrainScience #Neuroscience #SynapseLoss #LeftBrain #FrontalLobe #MentalHealthResearch #NeuralConnectivity #BrainPatterns #ScienceNews
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"The brain is a factory that never stops": A scientist explains why it's impossible to fully understand
Dr. Yelena Baranova, head of the Functional Diagnostics of Nervous System Diseases Department at the Federal Center for Brain and Neurotechnology, likens the brain to a huge factory that works non-stop.
She says: "The brain is like a constantly changing production factory, and it can never be fully studied and understood."
#BrainScience #Neuroscience #HumanBrain #ScienceNews #BrainResearch
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⏳ Why Does Time Feel Faster as We Get Older? The Science Behind Time Perception
Why does time seem to speed up as we age? Discover the fascinating science behind time perception, memory, routine, and why childhood felt so much longer.https://curiositysphereblog.wordpress.com/2026/08/01/why-does-time-feel-faster-as-we-get-older/
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The world doesn’t become less extraordinary with age. Sometimes our brains simply become so efficient that we stop noticing what was there all along.
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DATE: July 30, 2026 at 09:23AM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEEDTITLE: What if the brain does not create consciousness?
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260729043829.htm
Christof Koch is taking on one of science’s deepest mysteries: how the brain creates conscious experience, or whether it creates it at all. He argues that materialism has yet to solve this “hard problem” and will explore puzzling phenomena such as near-death experiences and terminal lucidity. His work points toward the possibility that consciousness may be woven into reality itself.
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260729043829.htm
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Consciousness #BrainScience #HardProblem #Materialism #ChristofKoch #NearDeathExperience #TerminalLucidity #ConsciousExperience #ScienceOfConsciousness #WovenReality
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We spend so much time searching for magic in the world that we sometimes overlook the most magical thing we carry with us every day—our brains.
#Neuroscience #DejaVu #BrainScience #Wonder #NotQuiteSuperhuman
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DATE: July 27, 2026 at 01:14PM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: Dreams Aren't Random—Your Brain Is Rewriting Reality
Source: Science Daily - Top Health
Dreams are not random mental noise. A large study of more than 3,700 dream and waking reports found that what we experience during sleep is shaped by both our personalities and the world around us. Rather than simply replaying daily events, the dreaming brain mixes memories, emotions, imagined possibilities, and familiar settings into vivid new scenarios. The findings, based on AI analyses of dream reports, appear in the journal Communications...
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Dreaming #DreamsMeaning #BrainScience #SleepResearch #DreamContent #MemoryAndDreams #MentalHealth #Neuroscience #AIinResearch #RealityPerception
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#EmbraceTheUnknown #MindsetTransformation #BrainScience #PersonalGrowth #Curiosity #ComfortZone #SelfDiscovery #NeuroScience #NeuroDivergent #NeuroCiencia #Neuro #Neurology #NeuroSurgery #NeuroPlasticity #NeuroCirurgia #NeuroDiverse #NeuroFeedback #InnerAlchemy https://mastodon.social/@biohackingpathway/116941381954961748
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Scientists Keep Teaching Life to Play Doom, But Why?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jNzI1DVqlB0&pp=0gcJCZQLAYcqIYzv
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Neuroscientists say a simple, 10-second trick will help you learn things much faster
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#anxietyrelief #mentalhealth #selfhealing #brainscience #anxietyhelp #therapy #mentalwellness #wellbeing #selfcare #anxiety #anxietyrelief #mentalhealth #selfhealing #brainscience #anxietyhelp #therapy #mentalwellness #wellbeing #selfcare #anxiety https://mastodon.social/@biohackingpathway/116843724071497580
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The Royal Society's fantastic Summer Science week kicks off in London tomorrow. One of its flagship research pieces is 'The Art of Resilience for Successful Ageing'. Led by Professor Dorina Cadar, the project presents the most in-depth study yet of cognitive resilience – and why some brains stay healthy and resilient as we age, while others suffer cognitive decline.
The results suggest a new way of thinking about age, but also life in general.
I interviewed Professor Cadar on what the results can tell us about cognitive resilience and the ageing brain, as well as tips on what we can do for the best chance of a healthy mind in later life... and how a society that prioritises grind could be storing up problems for the future. Read it here: https://www.natwest.com/premier-banking/insights/money-matters/the-secrets-to-a-happier-retirement.html #royalsociety #summerscience #brainScience #brain #neuroscience #science #aging #cognitive #universityofsussex
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Word and phrase valence as keys to understanding human psychology
Since virtually everything we do, think, and feel has some linguistic component it follows that our perceived valences of words and phrases will be reliable indicators of our psychological makeup.
This is especially true if our perceptions of these valences is “captured” in fraught contexts in real-world, real-time situations.
To be even clearer and more precise, it is fair to say that it is only possible to capture actual real valences in real-world, real-time situations.
When we do not work with real-world, real-time situations, we are capable only of working with the idea of them, a theory of them, a memory of them. And none of that can possibly capture the actual valence as it actually functions in real-life.
The theory, memory, or idea of a psychological valence associated with words and phrases occurs at a different level of abstraction or cognition from the valence itself.
Theories, memories, and ideas of psychological valences can be very interesting and are worth pursuing, but they are not the thing itself and as such have only a weak capacity to grasp the psychology exposed by actual valences in action in the real-world.
In a previous post—Words and word groups mapped in the brain—I discussed the following video, which is well-worth viewing again if you missed it the first time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k61nJkx5aDQ
I said:
From these maps we can see that word groups have idiosyncratic arrangements, associations, and emphases.
And from this we can understand how analysis of interpersonal communication details can lead to beneficial changes in word group arrangements and thus also human psychology.
The video is very helpful for visualizing how words and word groups are organized in the brain. And this illustrates how and why FIML works as well as it does.
By “capturing” actual verbal psychological valences in real-time, real-world situations, partners gain immense insight into how their psychologies actually function in the real-world, how they actually deal with real life.
Focusing on very brief real-life valences has another very large benefit: though the valences are as real as they come, they are also very small, comprising nothing more than part of the working memory load at the time.
This is a bigger deal than it might seem. Virtually all of us have been trained by years of theorizing about our psychologies to see even very small incidents of real psychological valence as aspects of some theory or story about them.
No, no, no. Don’t do that. Just see each one for what it is—a brief valences that appeared briefly in working memory; and that has been “frozen” by the FIML technique as a small snapshot to be identified and understood as it is.
First get the evidence, get the data. Those valence snapshots are the data. Get plenty of them and you may find that you do not even need any theory about what they are or what caused them.
They just are. Indeed, theorizing about them makes them different, bigger or worse, while simultaneously hiding their real nature.
Most of us do not know how to think about real-world, real-time valences because we tend to always fit them into into an a priori format, a format we already believe in. That could be a theory of psychology or a take on what our personality is or what the other person’s personality is.
In the maps shown in the video, that would constitute a whole brain response to a small valence that appeared only briefly.
By using the FIML technique, you will find it is much easier and much more beneficial to reorganize small parts of the verbal map one piece at a time than to reorganize the entire map all at once based on some idea.
In practice, FIML deals with more than just words and phrases, but the whole practice can be largely understood by seeing how it works with language. FIML treats gestures, tone of voice, expressions, and so on in the same way as language—by isolating brief incidents and analyzing them for what they really are.
#brainScience #BuddhistPractice #CommunicationErrors #FunctionalInterpersonalMetaLinguisticsFIML #psycholinguistics #psychology -
A study published in Neuroscience by researchers at Spain's University of Zaragoza scanned the brains of 100 young adults and found structural differences in those who hold authoritarian beliefs — on both the left and the right. Right-wing authoritarians had lower grey matter volume in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in understanding other people's thoughts and perspectives. Left-wing authoritarians had less cortical thickness in the right anterior insula, associated with emotional empathy and behavioral inhibition. Both groups were more impulsive in emotionally negative situations than their less-authoritarian peers.
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Memory is not reliable but changes to fit present circumstances
“Our memory is not like a video camera,” Bridge said. “Your memory reframes and edits events to create a story to fit your current world. It’s built to be current.” (source)
The unreliability of human memory is not a new topic, but this study fairly convincingly shows how our memories conform to what we are doing and/or how we have been using them.
One can plausibly extrapolate from this that humans change how they remember and understand themselves and others based on the data of now. A moment of extraneous frustration, for example, may cause us to see someone nearby us in a different light, through no fault of theirs.
If our frustration is with how we are being (mis)understood or with our difficulty in expressing our thoughts, the implications for how we understand the person we are speaking with may be even more serious.
Experienced FIML partners will surely have realized that even minor misunderstandings can lead to large acts of “reframing” events in an emotional way that can be seriously distorted.
Beyond innocent misunderstandings (which, unfortunately, can have tragic consequences), this area of shifting memories is where a good deal of interpersonal abuse occurs. In the worst cases, one (or both) partners abuse normal human malleability to lie. In less bad cases, one (or both) partners is easily excited by their own distortions and quickly comes to believe them, effectively lying to themselves as well as their partner.
In other cases, individuals or entire groups of people may decide to tell a significant lie (slanted history, for example) and then hurl their lie passionately at others. This frequently causes the person being lied to to react with shame or concern based on the liars’ emotional display and not on the facts of the matter. A person being subjected to such verbal abuse will often conclude that if the other person is so passionate, they must have a serious point that should be considered; and this can cause large distortions of well-known facts in the victim’s mind.
All of this is a major reason the Human Realm is characterized by delusion and a large part of Buddhist practice is geared toward removing delusion.
#brainScience #BuddhistPractice #CommunicationErrors #FunctionalInterpersonalMetaLinguisticsFIML #psychology -
#MemoryFormation #EmotionalTrauma #LongTermMemory #BrainScience #Psychology #MindBodyConnection #PastExperiences #MemoryScience #NeuroScience #MentalHealth #MemoryFormation #EmotionalTrauma #LongTermMemory #BrainScience #Psychology #MindBodyConnection #PastExperiences #MemoryScience #NeuroScience #MentalHealth https://mastodon.social/@biohackingpathway/116710656998641198
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Disruption of neurotic response in FIML practice
By analyzing minute emotional reactions in real-time during normal conversation, FIML practice disrupts the consolidation, or more often the reconsolidation, of “neurotic” responses.
In FIML, a neurotic response is defined as “an emotional response based on a misinterpretation.” The misinterpretation in question can be incipient (just starting) to long-standing (been a habit for years).
The response is disrupted by FIML practice and, thus, tends not to consolidate or reconsolidate, especially after several instances of learning that it is not valid.
A neurotic response is a response based on memory. The following study on fear memories supports the above explanation of FIML practice.
Memories become labile when recalled. In humans and rodents alike, reactivated fear memories can be attenuated by disrupting reconsolidation with extinction training. Using functional brain imaging, we found that, after a conditioned fear memory was formed, reactivation and reconsolidation left a memory trace in the basolateral amygdala that predicted subsequent fear expression and was tightly coupled to activity in the fear circuit of the brain. In contrast, reactivation followed by disrupted reconsolidation suppressed fear, abolished the memory trace, and attenuated fear-circuit connectivity. Thus, as previously demonstrated in rodents, fear memory suppression resulting from behavioral disruption of reconsolidation is amygdala-dependent also in humans, which supports an evolutionarily conserved memory-update mechanism.
~Disruption of Reconsolidation Erases a Fear Memory Trace in the Human Amygdala
FIML practice works by partners consciously and cooperatively disrupting reconsolidation (and initial consolidation) of neurotic memory (and associated behaviors). FIML both extirpates habitual neurotic responses and also prevents the formation of new neurotic responses through conscious disruption of memory consolidation.
FIML probably works as well as it does because humans have “an evolutionarily conserved memory-update mechanism” that favors more truth. Obvious examples of this update mechanism can be seen in many simple mistakes. For instance, if you think the capital of New York State is New York City and someone shows that it is Albany, you will likely correct your mistake immediately with little or no fuss.
Since FIML focuses on small mistakes made between partners, corrections are rarely more difficult than the above example though they may be accompanied by a greater sense of relief. For example, if you thought that maybe your partner was mad at you but then find (through a FIML query) that they are not, your sense of relief may be considerable.
#brainScience #BuddhistPractice #FunctionalInterpersonalMetaLinguisticsFIML #memory #psycholinguistics #psychology -
The Default Mode Network activates during self-referential thought. Repeated cycles of noticing attention has drifted from a present anchor - and returning without judgment - measurably reduce its activity over time, along with amygdala reactivity. Mindfulness is not a state. It is a trainable attentional cycle.
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REALITY'S FRAGILITY: THE BRAIN AS THE LENS OF EXISTENCE
Learn how the brain interprets signals to create your reality, not just see the world directly. Understand the science behind perception.
#BrainScience, #Perception, #Neuroscience, #MindBody, #Reality
https://newsletter.tf/brain-interprets-signals-creates-reality-not-direct/
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Your brain turns signals into reality. This is different from seeing the world as it truly is.
#BrainScience, #Perception, #Neuroscience, #MindBody, #Reality
https://newsletter.tf/brain-interprets-signals-creates-reality-not-direct/ -
Psychopaths don’t EXIST – and Ted Bundy was simply misunderstood, scientist claims
#brainScience #medicalScience #psycholinguistics #psychology…according to Dr Rasmus Larensis, a forensic scientist from the University of Toronto Mississauga in Canada, psychopathy might not exist at all.
The big issue, as Dr Larensis points out, is that every single claim which has ever been made about the nature of psychopaths has been systematically disproved.
Ideas, such as the notion that psychopaths don’t feel fear, have either been flat–out disproved or faltered as rigorous evidence in their support failed to emerge.
Dr Larensis even argues that famous ‘psychopaths’ such as the serial killer Ted Bundy are really just misunderstood.
Dr Larensis told the Daily Mail: ‘After decades of research, we still lack compelling evidence for the specific type of person described by the traditional psychopathy model.’
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Networks of words, semiotics, and psychological morphemes
Words and semiotics are held together in networks. “Psychological morphemes” are also held together in networks.
A “psychological morpheme” is the smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.
Of course word networks, semiotic networks, and emotional, psychological, and cognitive networks all intertwine with each other.
FIML practice is designed to help partners untangle unwanted emotions from these intertwined networks. FIML practice focuses on psychological morphemes because they are small and thus rather easily understood and rather easily extirpated from real-time contexts (when partners are interacting in real life in real-time).
The hard part about FIML practice is it is done in real life in real-time. But the easy or very effective part about FIML is that once partners learn to do it, results come quickly because the practice is happening in real life in real-time. It is not just a theory when you do it in that way. It is an experience that changes how you communicate and how you understand yourself and others.
In FIML practice partners are mindful of their emotional reactions and learn that when one occurs, it is important to query their partner about it. They are mindful of psychological morphemes and as soon as one appears, but before the morpheme calls up a large network leading to a strong reaction, they query their partner about it.
This practice leads to a fairly smooth and effortless extirpation of unwanted psychological responses. This happens because the data provided by the partner that “caused” the reaction shows the partner who made the FIML query that the psychological morpheme in question arose due to a misinterpretation. Seeing this repeatedly for the same sort of neurotic reaction causes that reaction and the psychological network that comprises it to become extinguished.
A fascinating study from the University of Kansas by Michael Vitevitch shows that removing a key word from a linguistic network will cause that network to fracture and even be destroyed. An article about the study and a link to the study (pay wall) can be found here: Keywords hold vocabulary together in memory.
Vitevitch’s study involves only words and his analysis was done only with computers because, as he says, ““Fracturing the network [in real people] could actually disrupt language processing. Even though we could remove keywords from research participants’ memories through psycholinguistic tasks, we dared not because of concern that there would be long-term or even widespread effects.”
FIML is not about removing key words from linguistic networks. But it is about dismantling or removing psychological or semiotic networks that cause suffering.
Psychological or semiotic networks are networks rich in emotional meaning. When those networks harbor unwanted, inappropriate, or mistaken interpretations (and thus mistaken or unwanted emotions), they can cause serious neurotic reactions, or serious mistaken interpretations.
These mistaken interpretations, and the emotions associated with them, can be efficiently extirpated by revealing to their holder the “key” psychological morphemes that set them off.
The psychology of a semiotic network hinges on repeated reactions to key psychological morphemes and that this process is analogous to the key words described in Vitevitch’s study.
Vitevitch did not remove key words from actual people because it would be unethical to do so. But it is not unethical for consenting adults to help each other find and remove key psychological morphemes that are harmfully associated with the linguistic, semiotic, cognitive, and psychological networks that make up the individual.
#brainScience #FunctionalInterpersonalMetaLinguisticsFIML #psycholinguistics #psychology -
Let's settle the debate with actual data: Women's voices register as louder and sharper than men's voices.
If you look closely at the science, it is a perfect cross section of physics, anatomy, and neurology.
1. The Anatomy and Vocal Cord Physics: On average, a woman’s vocal cords are shorter and thinner, measuring around 12 to 17 mm, while a man’s measure 17 to 25 mm. Because they have less mass, they vibrate much faster, roughly 200 times per second compared to a man's 120 times. This creates a significantly higher fundamental frequency and pitch.
2. The Acoustic Physics and Intensity: Higher frequencies possess shorter wavelengths. In a closed room or crowd, these shorter wavelengths do not bend or dissipate around objects easily. Instead, they pierce straight through background noise with crisp intensity.
3. The Neurological Proof and Ear Sensitivity: This is the ultimate kicker. The human ear canal is shaped like a natural acoustic amplifier tuned specifically to boost sounds between 2000 and 5000 Hz. Evolutionary biology designed our brains to be hypersensitive to this exact range so humans could hear a baby's cry or an alert from afar. A woman's vocal upper harmonics land right in this biological sweet spot.So, it is not just a guess. Human biology and physics are literally hardwired to amplify a woman's voice over a man's.
#Science #Acoustics #HumanBiology #PhysicsOfSound #BrainScience #Fediverse #DeepDive #Facts