Sleep Can be a Good Thing

A new technique makes it possible to sleep away your fears. The research, which was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, showed for the first time that the power of emotional memories — specifically, fearful ones — can be weakened with sleep-based tactics, which offers hope that something as simple as a good night's slumber may reduce phobias and symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The new study suggests we may be able to hack this mechanism to fight troubling memories — and get closer to one day sleeping them off. This idea might look good on paper but not so much in practice. Clearly there may need to be more research is the way of PTSD and other phobias such as video conferencing or talking in front of an audience. Another question to be asked here is if people are able to get a good night's sleep in the first place.

Global Brain

The internet has changed the way people interact, this is no secret. Just look at internet phones and social networks. For the large majority of time all of the human bands, tribes, chiefdoms, kingdoms, etc. were completely unaware of the actual extent and dispersion of all other humans on the planet. Today we are not only aware of each other, but we are able to build and maintain social groups with each other regardless of geography. As long as you have access to the Internet, you have access to almost everything the human mind has produced. What an amazing thought. This leads me to the next question: where is the internet going to be in the next couple years or decades? The more information that it has, it will be able to model and eventually predict events or behaviors. This is taking intelligence to a completely new level.

Capture Happiness

Scientists are increasingly finding ways to use mobile technology to capture snapshots of our daily behaviors and mindsets. In the latest demonstration of such, researchers at Princeton University have found that cell phones can be useful tools in recording our dips and peaks in happiness in relation to our different environments.Interestingly enough, context matters a lot in relation to the question of whether someone is happy at that particular moment. Mobile applications have definitely expanded into new territory and there have been great new uses found for it. Have you asked yourself if you are happy lately? Maybe this weekend might be a great time to just relax and even reflect. Just because summer is coming to an end does not mean that you need to get in a slump. There are so many things to look forward to. My closest friend has always told me that you can't just live a little, you have to make sure that you live a lot.