The Psycho Files!
Sleepless Nights Make People More Selfish and Asocial, Study Finds
A study found losing just one hour of rest could kill people's desire to help others, even relatives and close friends. The team noted that a bad night appeared to dampen activity in the part of the brain that encouraged social behavior. "We discovered that sleep loss acts as a trigger of asocial behavior, reducing the innate desire of humans to help one another," said Prof Matthew Walker, co-author of the study at the University of California, Berkeley. "In a way, the less sleep you get, the less social and more selfish you become." Writing in the PLoS Biology journal, the team suggest that a chronic sleep deficit could harm social bonds and compromise the altruistic instincts that shape society. "Considering the essentiality of humans helping in maintaining cooperative, civilized societies, together with the robust erosion of sleep time over the last 50 years, the ramifications of these discoveries are highly relevant to how we shape the societies we wish to live in," said Walker.
The team examined the willingness of 160 participants to help others with a "self-reported altruism questionnaire", which they completed after a night's sleep. Participants responded to different social scenarios on a scale from "I would stop to help" to "I would ignore them." In one experiment involving 24 participants, the researchers compared answers from the same person after a restful night and after 24 hours without sleep. The results revealed a 78% decline in self-reported eagerness to help others when tired. The team then performed brain scans of those participants and found a short night was associated with reduced activity in the social cognitive brain network, a region involved in social behavior. Participants were as reluctant to assist friends and family as strangers, the researchers said. "A lack of sleep impaired the drive to help others regardless of whether they were asked to help strangers or close relatives. That is, sleep loss triggers asocial, anti-helping behavior of a broad and indiscriminate impact," said Walker.
To determine whether altruism takes a hit in the real world, the team then tracked more than 3m charitable donations in the US before and after clocks were shifted an hour forward to daylight saving time, suggesting a shorter period of sleep. They found a 10% drop in donations after the transition. "Our study adds to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that inadequate sleep not only harms the mental and physical wellbeing of an individual but also compromises the bonds between individuals, and even the altruistic sentiment of an entire nation," said Walker. Luckily, we can catch up on sleep. Walker said: "The positive note emerging from all our studies is that once sleep is adequate and sufficient the desire to help others is restored. But it's important to note that it is not only sleep duration that is relevant to helping. We found that the factor that was most relevant was actually sleep quality, above and beyond sleep quantity," he added.
[THIS IS WHY PEOPLE W/ CFS ARE SO PISSED].
Psychedelics Help People With Alcoholism Drink Less
A combination of psychedelics and therapy appears to help people with alcoholism cut down on the number of days per month they drink heavily, according to a new study. The Verge reports: Researchers used psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, to treat patients over eight months and saw a dramatic improvement in participants' drinking habits. Using psychedelics as treatments for alcoholism was a popular idea in the 1960s and 1970s, and studies on LSD found that it reduced alcohol misuse. But the approach went quiet in the decades after, according to an editorial published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry alongside the new study.
The new research marks a "rekindling of interest," the authors of the editorial wrote. The study included 93 people with alcohol dependence. In the 12 weeks leading up to the study, the participants drank alcohol an average of around 60 days. Of those 60 drinking days, about half were heavy drinking days -- defined as five or more drinks a day for a man and four or more drinks in a day for a woman. People in the trial were randomly assigned to either take a capsule of psilocybin or an antihistamine twice over the course of the 36-week-long study. They had four sessions with therapists before the first time they took the drug, four sessions between the two drug doses, and four sessions after the second drug dose.
Everyone in the study started drinking less after the first four weeks of therapy -- the percentage of heavy drinking days dropped from around half of all drinking days to around a quarter. But that number kept falling for the people who took psilocybin. After the end of the full study, they drank heavily on around 10 percent of the days when they drank. People who took the antihistamine were still drinking heavily on around a quarter of drinking days. The effects lasted for months after the second dose of the psilocybin, study author Michael Bogenschutz, a psychiatrist and director of the NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine, stressed during a press briefing. "This suggests that psilocybin is treating the underlying disorder of alcohol addiction rather than merely treating symptoms," he said.
[DIFFERENT VERSION OF SAME STORY HERE. I'M NOT TRANSSEXUAL, I'M TRANCE SEXUAL, MAN.
Google Study Finds Psychological 'Inoculation' Can Improve Resistance to Misinformation
Are there better ways to fight misinformation? "Researchers at Google, the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol tested a different approach that tries to undermine misinformation before people see it," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.)
Instead of using the term "debunking," they're calling it "pre-bunking...." The researchers found that psychologically "inoculating" internet users against lies and conspiracy theories - by pre-emptively showing them videos about the tactics behind misinformation - made people more skeptical of falsehoods afterward, according to an academic paper published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.... The users were taught about tactics such as scapegoating and deliberate incoherence, or the use of conflicting explanations to assert that something is true, so that they could spot lies. Researchers tested some participants within 24 hours of seeing a pre-bunk video and found a 5 percent increase in their ability to recognize misinformation techniques.
One video opens with a mournful piano tune and a little girl grasping a teddy bear, as a narrator says, "What happens next will make you tear up." Then the narrator explains that emotional content compels people to pay more attention than they otherwise would, and that fear-mongering and appeals to outrage are keys to spreading moral and political ideas on social media. The video offers examples, such as headlines that describe a "horrific" accident instead of a "serious" one, before reminding viewers that if something they see makes them angry, "someone may be pulling your strings."
Beth Goldberg, one of the paper's authors and the head of research and development at Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Google, said in an interview that pre-bunking leaned into people's innate desire to not be duped. "This is one of the few misinformation interventions that I've seen at least that has worked not just across the conspiratorial spectrum but across the political spectrum," Ms. Goldberg said.
Jigsaw will start a pre-bunking ad campaign on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok at the end of August for users in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, meant to head off fear-mongering about Ukrainian refugees who entered those countries after Russia invaded Ukraine. It will be done in concert with local fact checkers, academics and disinformation experts. The researchers don't have plans for similar pre-bunking videos ahead of the midterm elections in the United States, but they are hoping other tech companies and civil groups will use their research as a template for addressing misinformation....
The effects of pre-bunking last for only between a few days and a month.... The researchers wrote that pre-bunking worked like medical immunization: "Pre-emptively warning and exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation can cultivate 'mental antibodies' against fake news."
[IRONIC, COMING FROM GLOBAL COMPANY SPONSORED BY CIA. MIND CONTROL WORKS BOTH WAYS, REMEMBER].
VIDEO: What A 15 Year Old Mass Killer Looks Like
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VIDEO: Trailer park entirely inhabited by paedophiles and sex offenders | 60 Minutes Australia
VIDEO: Exposing Jeffrey Epstein's international sex trafficking ring | 60 Minutes Australia
A study found losing just one hour of rest could kill people's desire to help others, even relatives and close friends. The team noted that a bad night appeared to dampen activity in the part of the brain that encouraged social behavior. "We discovered that sleep loss acts as a trigger of asocial behavior, reducing the innate desire of humans to help one another," said Prof Matthew Walker, co-author of the study at the University of California, Berkeley. "In a way, the less sleep you get, the less social and more selfish you become." Writing in the PLoS Biology journal, the team suggest that a chronic sleep deficit could harm social bonds and compromise the altruistic instincts that shape society. "Considering the essentiality of humans helping in maintaining cooperative, civilized societies, together with the robust erosion of sleep time over the last 50 years, the ramifications of these discoveries are highly relevant to how we shape the societies we wish to live in," said Walker.
The team examined the willingness of 160 participants to help others with a "self-reported altruism questionnaire", which they completed after a night's sleep. Participants responded to different social scenarios on a scale from "I would stop to help" to "I would ignore them." In one experiment involving 24 participants, the researchers compared answers from the same person after a restful night and after 24 hours without sleep. The results revealed a 78% decline in self-reported eagerness to help others when tired. The team then performed brain scans of those participants and found a short night was associated with reduced activity in the social cognitive brain network, a region involved in social behavior. Participants were as reluctant to assist friends and family as strangers, the researchers said. "A lack of sleep impaired the drive to help others regardless of whether they were asked to help strangers or close relatives. That is, sleep loss triggers asocial, anti-helping behavior of a broad and indiscriminate impact," said Walker.
To determine whether altruism takes a hit in the real world, the team then tracked more than 3m charitable donations in the US before and after clocks were shifted an hour forward to daylight saving time, suggesting a shorter period of sleep. They found a 10% drop in donations after the transition. "Our study adds to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that inadequate sleep not only harms the mental and physical wellbeing of an individual but also compromises the bonds between individuals, and even the altruistic sentiment of an entire nation," said Walker. Luckily, we can catch up on sleep. Walker said: "The positive note emerging from all our studies is that once sleep is adequate and sufficient the desire to help others is restored. But it's important to note that it is not only sleep duration that is relevant to helping. We found that the factor that was most relevant was actually sleep quality, above and beyond sleep quantity," he added.
[THIS IS WHY PEOPLE W/ CFS ARE SO PISSED].
Psychedelics Help People With Alcoholism Drink Less
A combination of psychedelics and therapy appears to help people with alcoholism cut down on the number of days per month they drink heavily, according to a new study. The Verge reports: Researchers used psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, to treat patients over eight months and saw a dramatic improvement in participants' drinking habits. Using psychedelics as treatments for alcoholism was a popular idea in the 1960s and 1970s, and studies on LSD found that it reduced alcohol misuse. But the approach went quiet in the decades after, according to an editorial published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry alongside the new study.
The new research marks a "rekindling of interest," the authors of the editorial wrote. The study included 93 people with alcohol dependence. In the 12 weeks leading up to the study, the participants drank alcohol an average of around 60 days. Of those 60 drinking days, about half were heavy drinking days -- defined as five or more drinks a day for a man and four or more drinks in a day for a woman. People in the trial were randomly assigned to either take a capsule of psilocybin or an antihistamine twice over the course of the 36-week-long study. They had four sessions with therapists before the first time they took the drug, four sessions between the two drug doses, and four sessions after the second drug dose.
Everyone in the study started drinking less after the first four weeks of therapy -- the percentage of heavy drinking days dropped from around half of all drinking days to around a quarter. But that number kept falling for the people who took psilocybin. After the end of the full study, they drank heavily on around 10 percent of the days when they drank. People who took the antihistamine were still drinking heavily on around a quarter of drinking days. The effects lasted for months after the second dose of the psilocybin, study author Michael Bogenschutz, a psychiatrist and director of the NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine, stressed during a press briefing. "This suggests that psilocybin is treating the underlying disorder of alcohol addiction rather than merely treating symptoms," he said.
[DIFFERENT VERSION OF SAME STORY HERE. I'M NOT TRANSSEXUAL, I'M TRANCE SEXUAL, MAN.
Google Study Finds Psychological 'Inoculation' Can Improve Resistance to Misinformation
Are there better ways to fight misinformation? "Researchers at Google, the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol tested a different approach that tries to undermine misinformation before people see it," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.)
Instead of using the term "debunking," they're calling it "pre-bunking...." The researchers found that psychologically "inoculating" internet users against lies and conspiracy theories - by pre-emptively showing them videos about the tactics behind misinformation - made people more skeptical of falsehoods afterward, according to an academic paper published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.... The users were taught about tactics such as scapegoating and deliberate incoherence, or the use of conflicting explanations to assert that something is true, so that they could spot lies. Researchers tested some participants within 24 hours of seeing a pre-bunk video and found a 5 percent increase in their ability to recognize misinformation techniques.
One video opens with a mournful piano tune and a little girl grasping a teddy bear, as a narrator says, "What happens next will make you tear up." Then the narrator explains that emotional content compels people to pay more attention than they otherwise would, and that fear-mongering and appeals to outrage are keys to spreading moral and political ideas on social media. The video offers examples, such as headlines that describe a "horrific" accident instead of a "serious" one, before reminding viewers that if something they see makes them angry, "someone may be pulling your strings."
Beth Goldberg, one of the paper's authors and the head of research and development at Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Google, said in an interview that pre-bunking leaned into people's innate desire to not be duped. "This is one of the few misinformation interventions that I've seen at least that has worked not just across the conspiratorial spectrum but across the political spectrum," Ms. Goldberg said.
Jigsaw will start a pre-bunking ad campaign on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok at the end of August for users in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, meant to head off fear-mongering about Ukrainian refugees who entered those countries after Russia invaded Ukraine. It will be done in concert with local fact checkers, academics and disinformation experts. The researchers don't have plans for similar pre-bunking videos ahead of the midterm elections in the United States, but they are hoping other tech companies and civil groups will use their research as a template for addressing misinformation....
The effects of pre-bunking last for only between a few days and a month.... The researchers wrote that pre-bunking worked like medical immunization: "Pre-emptively warning and exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation can cultivate 'mental antibodies' against fake news."
[IRONIC, COMING FROM GLOBAL COMPANY SPONSORED BY CIA. MIND CONTROL WORKS BOTH WAYS, REMEMBER].
VIDEO: What A 15 Year Old Mass Killer Looks Like
VIDEO: 10 Disturbing Interviews With Killers
VIDEO: Top 10 Disturbing Interviews With Evil People
VIDEO: Was Emperor Caligula Really A Psychopath?
VIDEO: Trailer park entirely inhabited by paedophiles and sex offenders | 60 Minutes Australia
VIDEO: Exposing Jeffrey Epstein's international sex trafficking ring | 60 Minutes Australia