In a recent mimicking study at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France, subjects were asked to determine whether a smile was real or fake while holding a pencil in their mouth to repress smiling muscles.
And a lot of the work that we're doing, we're offering people programs that give our participants a suite of exercises that they should do daily in order to cultivate more moments of mindfulness in their life.
And the even worse news is that right now, almost everything we know about the human mind and human brain is based on studies of usually American English-speaking undergraduates at universities.
The CDC recently conducted a survey where they asked respondents simply to tell them whether they experienced significant psychological distress in the previous week.
So we set up an experiment where we put a naked volunteer in a large cage, (Laughter) and in that cage, we released mosquitoes to see where they were biting on the body of that person.
And it didn't matter if you're an extreme optimist, a mild optimist or slightly pessimistic, everyone's left inferior frontal gyrus was functioning perfectly well, whether you're Barack Obama or Woody Allen.
How does this work? Basically, I send people signals at random points throughout the day, and then I ask them a bunch of questions about their moment-to-moment experience at the instant just before the signal.
We manipulated people's serotonin levels by giving them this really disgusting-tasting artificial lemon-flavored drink that works by taking away the raw ingredient for serotonin in the brain.
Now, in order for a clinical trial to be considered ethically acceptable, participants must be given the relevant information in a way in which they can understand, and must freely consent to participate in the trial.
For example, it is counterintuitive to have an illiterate study participant, like Celine, sign a lengthy consent form that they are unable to read, let alone understand.
I think it is absolutely wrong for research to begin in the first place without a clear plan for what would happen to the participants once the trial has ended.
Now, researchers need to make every effort to ensure that an intervention that has been shown to be beneficial during a clinical trial is accessible to the participants of the trial once the trial has been completed.
OK, here what I found interesting was that taste is at four, and many respondents told me it's because of the taste of drinks, but also, in some cases, kissing is a big part of the clubbing experience.
In a study we published just a few months ago, we have an answer to this question, because what was unusual about this study is we arranged for people to have a very stressful experience.
The subjects in this study were members of the U.S. military who were undergoing a harrowing training exercise to teach them what it's going to be like for them if they are ever captured as prisoners of war.
And in a study done in Canada, researchers planted the false memory that when you were a kid, something as awful as being attacked by a vicious animal happened to you, succeeding with about half of their subjects.
By the time the subject reached the last page on the survey, the page had been dynamically updated with the 10 best matching photos which the recognizer had found, and we asked the subjects to indicate whether he or she found themselves in the photo.
We included in this information some references to some funny, absolutely legal, but perhaps slightly embarrassing information that the subject had posted online.
We brought in more than 100 pairs of strangers into the lab, and with the flip of a coin, randomly assigned one of the two to be a rich player in a rigged game.
In this experiment, individuals were shown hundreds of hours of YouTube videos while scans were made of their brains to create a large library of their brain reacting to video sequences.
Today, however, we are not just giving these drugs to other animals as test subjects, but they're giving them these drugs as patients, both in ethical and much less ethical ways.
But then he devised the critical test: He showed subjects images of food like this and compared them to images with very similar color and shape, but that weren't food, like these.
And by doing that, we converted these signals into digital commands that any mechanical, electronic, or even a virtual device can understand so that the subject can imagine what he, she or it wants to make move, and the device obeys that brain command.
MN: There was one bit of information -- big ideas start in a humble way -- but basically the brain activity of one subject was transmitted to a second object, all non-invasive technology.
So a scientist named Paul Bach-y-Rita put blind people in a modified dental chair, and he set up a video feed, and he put something in front of the camera, and then you would feel that poked into your back with a grid of solenoids.
If our sample is cherry-picked in some way -- say, we poll only urban voters, or say, in our clinical trials for treatments for heart disease, we include only men -- the results may not generalize to the broader population.
In such cases, scientists use an epidemiological study, which simply observes people going about their usual behavior, rather than randomly assigning active participants to control invariable groups.
In 2010, researchers found that subjects were much better at getting through a complex 3-D maze if they had napped and dreamed of the maze prior to their second attempt.
In one study, 65% of the participants who were all college students chose sequence B even though A is shorter and contained within B, in other words, more likely.
One study showed that when subjects were exposed to news stories that were negative about Muslims, they became more accepting of military attacks on Muslim countries and policies that curtail the rights of American Muslims.
So we take the real face of a subject, we reduce the complexity, because not everything is in your face -- lots of features and defects and asymmetries come from your life.
And so, to investigate whether this really worked, a learning psychologist did a study with 160 students -- that was from Stanford University and Technical University of Denmark.
The results show that the areas needed for visual processing are activated whether or not the participant is aware of the image, but a whole additional network lights up only when they are conscious of seeing the image.
This is a recent study by the neurobiologist Paul Thompson and his colleagues in which they -- using MRI -- measured the distribution of gray matter -- that is, the outer layer of the cortex -- in a large sample of pairs of people.
(Laughter) When we detected that people were in deep sleep, we played the deep-sleep stimulating sounds that were shown to make them have deeper sleep.
When we asked participants the next day about the sounds, they were completely unaware that we played the sounds, yet their brains responded with more of these delta waves.
And then the next day, we're going to place those participants inside an MRI scanner and we're going to have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we're taking snapshots of brain activity.
What’s wrong with this headline: "Eating chocolate reduces stress in students" It’s a stretch to draw a conclusion about students in general from a sample of ten.
It would be more feasible to scan a dead brain using an electron microscope, but even that technology is nowhere near good enough– and requires killing the subject first.
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So we've done this on eight subjects now, and we're getting all the data together, hopefully we'll have something to say about it meaningfully. 