La Salleño Vol. 22 Issue 1

DISCOVER

The burnout book Daydreaming types Tip of the tongue

SCIENCE

Mind reading Music and the mind Mental disorders clarified

SECRETS

Breaking brain myths Asian psychological thrillers Heads & tales

VOL. 22 NO. 1 | AUGUST 2015

at the fringe

The thin line between ingenuity and madness

the great ignition: intelligence

The evolution of the human mind

LOGGING OFF into the dying mind

BRAIN & MIND ISSUE

LA SALLEÑO

Features magazine of the Heraldo Filipino EDITOR Patricia Mae Estenoso COORDINATOR Cerisse Madlangbayan WRITERS Denise Anne Valentino, Daniella Shaira Cortez, John Paul Gonzales, Cerisse Madlangbayan, Jessone Purificacion, and Anri Ichimura CONTRIBUTORS Katya Milad and Levin Sanchez ARTISTS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS Chandler Belaro, Art Director Ricardo Martin Cabale, Chief Layout Artist Patricia Loise Lucero, Chief Photographer Lynoelle Kyle Arayata, Wenchie Tacate, Lexzene Dela Cruz, Jeff Treat Dimaano, John Felix Malicsi, Roxanne Valerie Rasco, Kathelyn Ann Bravo, Jerome Quinto, Rigel Almira, Camille Joy Gallardo, Christian Mateo, Pamela Joven LAYOUT ARTISTS Ricardo Martin Cabale Camille Joy Gallardo Christian Mateo

The Official Student Publication of De La Salle University-Dasmariñas Founded: June 1985 Member, College Editors Guild of the Philippines EDITORIAL BOARD AY 2014-2015 Crisselda F. Robles, Editor in Chief Denise Anne A. Valentino, Associate Editor Sheena Faye G. Lopez, Managing Director Daniella Shaira T. Cortez, Copy Editor John Paul R. Gonzales, Office Supervisor Florence Rio D. Bistoyong, News Editor Patricia Mae M. Estenoso, Features Editor Maria Anthonette B. Gadon, Literary Editor Krizza Mae M. Bautista, Sports Editor Chandler M. Belaro, Art Director Ricardo Martin O. Cabale, Chief Layout Artist Patricia Loise A. Lucero, Chief Photographer SENIOR STAFF Katherine Anne Aboy, Danielle Vince Capuno, Jeff Treat Dimaano, Mary Jo Lara, Fernan Patrick Flores, Pamela Joven, Cerisse Madlangbayan, Chelsea Ann Montilla JUNIOR STAFF Rigel Almira, Ishiel Aniñon, Lynoelle Kyle Arayata, Kathelyn Ann Bravo, Lexzene Dela Cruz, Patricia Anne De Leon, Carl Andrew Diaz, Yngwie Eusebio, Camille Joy Gallardo, Anri Ichimura, Christian Paul Macapagal, Felix Malicsi, Queenee Manaog, Christian Mateo, Nishtha Nigam, Jerome Quinto, Roxanne Valerie Rasco, Wenchie Tacate, James Fidel Tan, Enrico Paolo Topacio, Erika Uy Dr. Lakandupil C. Garcia, Adviser The Heraldo Filipino has its editorial office at Room 213, Gregoria Montoya Hall (Administration Building) De La Salle University-Dasmariñas, Cavite, Philippines 4115.

Telephone: +63 2 8447832, +63 46 416 4531 local 3063 Email: officialheraldofilipino@gmail.com Contributions, comments, suggestions, and signed letters should be addressed to the Editor in Chief.

About the cover

The mind is made of illusive branches—sometimes detached, mostly chaotic, and always perplexing.

Cover art Jerome Quinto, Alphonse Leonard Topacio, and Ricardo Martin O. Cabale

Editor's note

The human brain is like the ocean. Just as only five percent of the Earth’s waters are claimed to be explored, we are yet to discover more about our brain’s nature. Perhaps one of the reasons why some questions remain unanswered lies on the vast fields that encompass brain study and its nature. And for this 22nd volume of the La Salleño, we are going to discover some of the answered and unanswered questions about the human mind that baffled scientists for years.

This issue will keep your mind’s engines working as you detect factors that distort time perception, explore how our brains evolved over time, distinguish what separates a genius from a madman, discover how the tip of tongue moment happens, and determine what kind of daydreamer you are.

While these are only a few of the concepts that have been unlocked about the human brain, this issue will definitely make you understand that your brain is both an amazing (and scary) organ that governs your body’s system.

Patricia Mae Estenoso

contents FEATURES 8 18 24 32 35 44

At the fringe The great ignition: Intelligence Bogus or brain-boosting The clarity in a crescendo At wit's end When brain waves speak

SPECIAL INFOGRAPHIC

22 Mind-boggling cognitive realities

06 LIST 6 13 16 29 38

Tricking the brain's acuity The burnout book Once upon a trance Logging off Mental disorders clarified

REVIEW

41 Asian psychological thrillers

LATHALAIN 46 Heads & tales

41

28

Chandler Belaro

LIST

Tricking the brain's acuity

Five factors that distort time perception

Katya Milad (contributor) and John Paul Gonzales Felix Malicsi

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minute is a 60-tick illusion. While we often have the Newtonian notion that time changes at a constant rate in all places at all times, our minds assert that time is relative. Taking note of Einstein’s theory of relativity, it's a cognitive reality that time is distorted by certain factors.

Factor #1: Age Speaking of cognitive reality, mental time can be compared to a free falling ball that speeds up as it nears the ground.

Youth may seem endless, but in our 20's, days may seem to end a bit slow. British psychologist Steve Taylor states that first-hand experiences during the younger years make time seem slow for our brains whereas routine experiences in life make time seem fast. Such phenomenon occurs because progressive familiarization with age allows individuals to think that they can immediately recognize many things, making them render a shorter attention to particulars. On the other hand, exposure to first-hand experiences allows the mind to obtain more information. According to David Eagleman, a neuroscientist in Baylor College of Medicine, USA, this knowledge will make you think events happened longer than they actually did.

Factor #2: Emotion Boredom drags time during dreary lectures, yet time ticks fast when having fun with friends. It's clear that emotions can certainly play with our perception of time.

Poisters University Professors Droit-Volet and Sandrine Gil from France found in their cognition and learning study how emotion can modify our inner clocks. Groups of students who watched different emotion-provoking films varied in their time estimation. For instance, negativethemed films stretched time while the positive ones sped up minutes.

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Factor #3: Fatigue During the final term in school, students are tasked to produce many projects and paperwork by their professors in a limited time.

Mostly, these outputs have the same deadlines, causing the students to feel burned out. Folks should not overdo things though, for fatigue has been found to have an effect on our time perception by causing time miscount.

According to Dr. Jeremy Dean, a psychologist and author at PsyBlog, our stimuli-discerning intervals become interrupted when we are exhausted. Distinct events, however, become simultaneous, sending our minds false judgments of time as fatigue entails the brain to struggle in performing its duties with most activities.

Though our mind is the real time keeper, it is still fair to provide it some time to breathe. Overdoing things will simply bungle your time count, reducing your productivity.

Factor #4: Perspective If you ever wondered why vacations can sometimes feel so fast or so slow, it’s because of a little something called the “holiday paradox.”

BBC psychology broadcaster Claudia Hammond states that normally, people do things in routine, collecting only six to nine new memories.

When we’re on a vacation however, we collect lots of new memories, which can make holidays feel like it “lasted much longer.”

Also, retrospective time concerns “recalled duration” while prospective time concerns “experienced duration.” We evaluate time using these two perspectives and they typically match up. But when we encounter new experiences, they become unbalanced, resulting to a holiday paradox.

In Hammond’s psychology textbook Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception, she emphasized that we’ll never adapt to this occasional imbalance because we continue viewing time in two directions. So try putting your perspective in the present and load every minute of it with your hobbies.

Factor # 5: Temperature

Temperature can play with our mind clock the same way it does with the thermometer. A split second can turn into an hour depending on your thermal condition.

In their research, British psychologists Wearden and PentonVoak revisited the findings of previous experiments that showed the effects of temperature to subjective time and converted each data into one relationship format. Their reviews presented that higher body temperature increases time speed perception while lower body temperature yields the reverse. According to French psychologist Henri Louis Charles Piéron, the thermal effect happens accordingly as the processes inside the body changes in response to variation and temperature. *** With profound understanding of how these aspects work, we may bring cognitive time into its optimum function. These will somehow help us to recognize the nature of time as we accomplish our everyday tasks.

SOURCES: Encyclopedia of Time by Samuel L. Macey www.keele.ac.uk www.encyclopedia.com www.spring.org.uk www.human-memory.net www.brainpickings.org www.psychologytoday.com

psycnet.apa.org research-information.bristol.ac.uk news.bbc.co.uk www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BjGWLJNPcA spectrummagazine.com psp.sagepub.com all-that-is-interesting.com

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FRINGE

The thin line between ingenuity and madness Cerisse Madlangbayan

Jerome Quinto and Roxanne Valerie Rasco

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ilms and TV series have long painted insane people as artistic recluses, creative geniuses, and seemingly normal nextdoor neighbors who have a knack for building toy houses.

Perceptibly, this is not far from the truth. If you searched for possibly crazy geniuses on the Internet, you’ad get an endless list of well-known people from artists (Van Gogh) down to writers (Edgar Allan Poe). The list goes on; and it’s apparent that the relationship of the creative genius and insanity is closer than you’d think.

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Insanity redefined From the heydays of Greek mathematicians and Renaissance painters thrives the age-old thought of whether creative people are prone to mental illnesses or mentally ill people prone to creativity.

Although their exact connection has not been scrupulously explored, many have tried to find the intersection between the two.

In fact, researcher Dr. Simon Kyaga’s study in Sweden reveals that there’s a significant chance that relatives of those who are in a creative profession may have mental illnesses or disorders.

Journalist William Lee Adams defines schizotypy in his CNN article The dark side of creativity: Depression + anxiety x madness = genius? as a mild form of schizophrenia.

Results from neuroscientist Andreas Fink and his team’s study shows that creative people and those with schizotypy both seem to absorb “more information.” Apparently, creativity and mental illnesses also share a process that Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson calls “cognitive disinhibition.”

Writer Eric Jaffe’s article What Neuroscience Says About The Link Between Creativity And Madness on fastcodesign.com defines cognitive disinhibition as that “failure to keep useless data, images, or ideas out LA SALLEÑO

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of conscious awareness.” This failure can make schizotypal people prone to delusions and even creativity. It is mentioned by psychology Professor Oshin Vartanian in her thesis Cognitive Disinhibition and Creativity for the University of Maine that it’s been assumed that cognitive disinhibition can cause processes related to creative cognition (mental activities or act of thinking and knowing).

Although it’s noted by Deborah Smith Bailey’s article The 'Sylvia Plath' effect on the American Psychological Association’s website that some researchers found that creative people can be prone to mental illnesses, Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson seemingly tells us otherwise.

She says in Eric Jaffe’s article that “most creative people don't exhibit severe mental problems at all.” Many people are both creatively intelligent and smart—that does not mean though that they share the same description.

Dr. Virginia Tan-Sanfilip from the University’s Psychology Department also mentions that the correlation between creative genius and psychosis is often “misconstrued.” She further elaborates that many factors contribute to disorders, adding that they are “dependent (sic) where

it originated.” It does not necessarily follow that creative geniuses are psychotic or that psychotic people are inherently creative geniuses.

Mentally ill and creative Maybe it’s the other way around then; mentally ill people might still be prone to creativity. For one, psychosis, psychopathy, and psychoticism are all found to have links to creative genius.

Like the Ed, Edd, and Eddy of psychology, psychosis, psychopathy, and psychoticism sound like a tongue-twister and are almost always used interchangeably. However, while psychologytoday.com describes psychosis as “losing in touch of reality” (i.e. delusions and hallucinations), psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by impulsiveness and lack of empathy. Psychoticism, a newcomer in the field, is one of the three traits in German psychologist Hans Eysenck’s model of personality and was described by him as a susceptibility to becoming psychotic.

Psychopathy and creativity, according to the psychology book The Dark Side of Creativity, intersect when it comes to overinclusive thinking. This, as Gina Kuperberg and David Caplan’s article Language Dysfunction in Schizophrenia on

nmr.mgh.harvard.edu describes, is a “tendency … to use concepts beyond … usual boundaries.” Psychoticism, on the other hand, might possibly underlie or trigger creativity.

A study was made by International Center for Studies in Creativity assistant professor Dr. Selcuk Acar regarding this correlation— which included six thousand participants, plus college students—showed that psychoticism and creativity are connected, but not significantly.

Meanwhile, psychosis and madness is said to be correlated with creativity and intelligence because of a little something called genes. It seems that there are candidate genes for schizophrenia, just as there are candidates vying for a beauty queen crown.

Two of the genes commonly found in crazy people and creative geniuses are DARPP-32 and Neuregulin 1 (NRG1). The former, according to medicaldaily.com, is said to improve information processing and the thinking ability of the brain. But while it is supported by studies to be a possible link between genius and madness, the leading contender for schizophrenia susceptibility and psychosis is Neuregulin 1 (NRG1).

Gathering volunteers who were tested in terms of creativity, psychiatrist Szabolcs

Kéri’s article Mad Genius: Study Suggests Link Between Psychosis And Creativity on the journal Psychological Science reveals that NRG1 does share a link with creativity but how NRG1 influences insanity remains ambiguous.

While there is a long list of geniuses and artists who’ve gone mad, it is mentioned in the University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine’s website that these people “have those talents in spite of the illness, not because of it.” Still, columnist Sai Folmsbee’s article Folmsbee: The misconception of art, madness on the newspaper The Daily Northwestern states that studies on this particular topic is still progressing, and the connection between art and madness is something he won’t rule out just yet.

Lowdown on creativity and mental illness Hollywood practically ships creative genius and madness just as much as they do Jack and Rose. If you’ve watched Silence of the Lambs and other films about psychopaths, the crazy killer is almost always smart or creative, whether he/ she is building a doll house or making dresses out of people’s skins. In real life, that might not always be the case given that there isn’t a direct link between creative genius and mental illness,

or a thorough explanation as to how one affects the other.

“There is always something about an artist that will distinguish them from the rest of the world,” writer and musician Benjamin Carson wrote in his article on Art Nouveau magazine.

Many creative geniuses have gone to the deep end for sure, but although there are a famous handful of them, it doesn’t essentially mean that all artistic and intelligent individuals are crazy.

The head of information at the mental health charity Mind, Beth Murphy, even advises us in Michelle Roberts’ BBC news article Creativity 'closely entwined with mental illness' that we shouldn’t “romanticize” mental illnesses. Music editor Clare Fitzgerald says the same in her article It’s Time to Stop Romanticizing Mental Illness at CultNoise Magazine, adding that “society needs to educate itself,” and we should be aware that mental illness is more than just a trait or a phase.

*** The hidden, unresolved relationship of creative genius and insanity might not be on the list of the world’s greatest battles, but the tug of war between people who prove and disprove its correlation remains strong.

With further study, the relationship between creativity, intelligence, and insanity might just be mapped out for the development of the total human potential.

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LIST

THE BURNOUT I BOOK Shaking off brain drain

f stress is a tempest of burdens and expectations, then burnout is a drought—a brain drained of motivation and care. While stress is caused by overflowing demands and pressure, burnout is stress-initiated. Although it’s a condition distinct from stress, burnout is caused by exacerbated stress which results in emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion.

Anri Ichimura

Kathelyn Ann Bravo

Too often, excessive stress will fry your mental juices and wring you dry of productivity and energy—leaving a helpless, resentful cynic. To prevent that unfortunate possibility, the failsafe way is to avoid stress altogether, which would be a futile attempt. The realistic route, is to accomplish feats that can thwart and battle burnout before it takes root.

Snooze or lose If there’s one thing burnout victims are in dire need of, it’s sleep. From childhood to verging adulthood, we take sleep for granted and think it’s expendable. On average, the recommended hours of sleep for adolescents is eight. Add a 12-page paper due tomorrow to the situation though and it can easily be reduced to zero.

Sleepless nights and eye bags aren’t something to be proud of—and not something you can make up for. “Sleep bulimia,” as sleep expert Robert Stickgold calls it, refers to forgoing sleep on the weekdays to sleep binge over the weekends. As it appears, “sleep bulimia” does nothing more than disrupt your circadian rhythm (internal clock) and quash your chances of getting refreshing sleep.

Even just one good night’s sleep may result in a better mood and improved memory. Most of all, it results in a replenished mind ready to take on the day’s challenges.

The multitasking myth Students are alluded into thinking that they’re able to juggle their social life, academics, and household chores while performing at optimum level on all said tasks. Yet, the fault in this belief is that while it’s possible to multitask in a technical sense, it’s impossible to give your undivided attention to each task. By pushing your mind to take on more than it can handle, you’re more exposed to burnout.

Some believe multitasking helps them complete their tasks faster, but this is far from the truth. Proven to be a myth, multitasking is a hindrance to your mind’s performance. A research study at the University of Essex in the UK found that multitaskers have less brain density in the area of empathy and emotional control, which can explain the emotional exhaustion in burnout victims.

To prevent overextending yourself and your mind, restrain yourself from accepting every request, whether big or small.

Also, don’t take on responsibilities you know you won’t be able to complete so as to not deal with more stress from unfinished work.

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LIST Technology time-out On average, a teenager consumes electronic media for 7.5 hours a day—almost equivalent to the recommended hours of sleep. In recent years, the youth have become so technology-dependent that no Wi-Fi equates to no life. Nowadays, society’s clever trinkets have proven to be less of a benefit and more of a burden.

Technology has become an addiction. In young adults, heavy use of technology causes stress, fatigue, and depression—all indicators of burnout. For one, it was stated in a study by the University of Michigan,USA that the more the participants used Facebook, the less happy they became.

In the same way, according to a study at Ohio State University Medical Center, night owls sitting in front of a TV or a computer are more likely to exhibit changes in their hippocampus, the part of the brain consistent with depression. When those worlds collide, our minds become ripe for stress and burnout.

Some actions to thwart technology burnout include restraining your gadget use for only when they’re called for. Also, swap a TV for a newspaper, and close Facebook for some much needed human interaction. Then after turning off all your gadgets for some time, take a step back to ease your mind.

Take a breather In school, we’re expected to cram information, sometimes in a short amount of time. Topped with prolonged stress, the heavy weight of burdens can lead to burning out.

“You need to take a break, [or] some time off,” says University Psychology Professor Isabelita C. Celestino. She explains that dealing with burnout and stress are almost the same in that they both result from overthinking and heaps of pressure. She also added that although burnout is possible among the youth, “it’s more common in adults who have been doing what they have been doing for long periods of time without a break.”

When the moment arrives that you feel yourself sinking under the stress, it’s time to take a break. Take a 20-minute power nap so you can gain a new and fresh mindset when you return to your tasks.

Be happy On top of everything, the key ingredient to any issue plaguing life is a dose of happiness. Happiness and motivation are interlinked, and finding happiness in what you do will ignite your passion to pursue your goals.

Professor Celestino added that “by being happy with what you’re doing [and] by finding meaning in what you’re doing,” you’ll be led to happiness. In essence, your actions, their significance, and your happiness coordinate in a triangular transactional motion. Burnout is more prevalent in working adults who stick to routine, because repetition snuffs out a task’s meaning. Thus, you’re stuck in a cycle that feeds off your energy.

Inevitably, we’ll be in a situation where a smile is uninvited.

Nevertheless, we should focus on life’s little delights, so we might find happiness to help us stand steady under the presure. Perhaps we might even partake some happiness along the way. *** While stress can be handled well, burnout can be tricky to overcome, so it’s necessary to go beyond the ordinary measures to successfully tackle burnout. By finding and carving out the source of your stress, you can extinguish rising pressure before you find yourself burned out.

SOURCES www.time.com www.forbes.com www.huffingtonpost.com www.webmd.com www.newyorker.com

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www.wsj.com www.theatlantic.com Professor Isabelita C. Celestino, Psychology Department, CLAC, DLSU-D

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ONCE UPON A TRANCE What your daydreams say about you T Jessone Purificacion Lynoelle Kyle Arayata and Lexzene Dela Cruz

he belief that daydreaming is detrimental to the brain has long been debunked. Experts have found that mind wandering could be beneficial as it provides access to improved creativity and problem-solving skills.

Moreover, psychologists have also discovered that people’s different daydreaming styles could correspond to personal traits.

While you may engage in various daydreaming styles at times, your usual daydreaming style could tell much about you. Discover these five common styles and if their corresponding behavioral qualities seem to befit you.

Positive constructive daydreaming As its name suggests, this style involves happy and positive thoughts. According to Professor Jerome Singer of Yale University, positive constructive daydreams are characterized by good-humored and creative reflections. For one, imagining your teary-eyed parents smile as you march to the stage to finally receive that hard-earned college diploma is the kind of vision that positive constructive daydreamers muse about.

Usually, individuals who daydream of hopeful imageries adjust to changes more easily than others. Dr. Jonathan Schooler of University of California, Santa Barbara theorized that positive daydreaming serves multiple adaptive functions to people such as better organizational and creativity skills. These kinds of daydreamers have also been identified as more open-minded and keen individuals by Singer and Tang Zhiyan of the University of Pennsylvania.

Through positive constructive daydreaming, people could envision a future self. So optimistic daydreams somehow help in planning and setting goals for the future and making them happen—provided that the daydreamer has the right mind set.

Guilty-dysphoric daydreaming If you’ve ever imagined someone you hate trip downstairs or get embarrassed in front of a crowd, you’re probably a guilty-dysphoric kind of daydreamer. Beware though as individuals who usually engage in guilty-dysphoric daydreaming are more prone to depression than others. According to Singer and Zhiyan, guilty-dysphoric daydreamers are vulnerable to negative emotions.

In her article Ode to positive constructive daydreaming, writer Rebecca McMillan said that the fantasies of these daydreamers tend to be obsessive and hateful. Thoughts about failure and unfortunate occurrences could be manifestations of this kind of mind wandering as well.

Apparently, guilty-dysphoric daydreaming has been associated to neuroticism—mental condition characterized by long-term tendency to be in a negative emotional state. Psychologists also noted that hateful daydreamers suffer negative feelings such as guilt, envy, and anger more severely than others.

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Escapist daydreaming Episodes like an ex trying to win the daydreamer back or a friend begging for reconciliation are the things that an escapist mind wanderer usually dream about. In her psychologies.co.uk article, What your daydreams reveal about you, health journalist Judith Woods said that women, whom she identified as “suffering martyrs,” were the ones who are likely to engage in escapist daydreaming since they tend to ponder more on emotions.

Woods furthered that escapist daydreamers feel underappreciated so they dream of situations wherein people get to recognize their true worth. Welsh psychologist Cliff Arnal said that people engross in escapist daydreaming when they are stressed, frustrated, or dissatisfied.

While daydreaming may help people envision solutions to current problems, an escapist daydreamer uses daydreams to flee to an ideal world where the daydreamer is validated and needed.

Poor attentional control daydreaming The attentiveness of people who have this daydreaming style is comparable to a flickering bulb or some romantic relationships—it’s onand-off. One moment you’re dreaming of going to the beach, and next you’re back to your substantial surroundings, and then back to dreaming again. Dr. Scott Kaufman of New York University proposes that brains of people who experience poor attentional control get confused whether to focus on daydreams or on the external environment. Hence, the brain fails to take a solid grasp on information. Kaufman furthered that these daydreamers are usually disorganized and unsystematic.

Generally, weak attentional control is linked to low levels of conscientiousness by psychologists. So, this means that poor attentional control daydreamers tend to care less about their actions and its outcome.

Maladaptive daydreaming When someone’s mind wandering goes too far to the point of neglecting basic human activities like eating and taking a bath, it’s maladaptive daydreaming (MD).

Usually, people who experience MD miss days or hours of time daydreaming. Since daydreaming seems to be an addiction to maladaptive daydreamers, they could dream about almost anything. A Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare poster hanging on the wall for one could trigger a daydreamers’ dash to la la land and then the single– player campaign commences—all in the daydreamer’s head.

Apparently, maladaptive daydreamers prefer to have extensive fantasies over real human interaction. In her medicaldaily.com article, columnist Sabrina Bachai mentioned that people who have maladaptive daydreams are those who have undergone traumatic experiences such as physical and emotional traumas. Bachai also mentioned that maladaptive daydreamers are emotionally and physically detached from their surroundings. Generally, these daydreamers like being isolated from others. Moreover, Dr. Elis Somer noted in his Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy that problematic patients use maladaptive daydreaming as a way to cope or escape from troublesome situations.

While people who tend to daydream intensively are believed to have dissociative personality disorder (having two or more personality states), maladaptive daydreaming is still not recognized as a medical condition. There are support groups that help and bring maladaptive daydreamers together, though. *** The different styles of daydreaming and their corresponding personal traits are just another indication that too much of anything is indeed harmful. However, one must see that daydreaming is perhaps not destructive at all as long as it gives you the right boost to accomplish goals. After all, daydreams aren’t fun at all if they just leave you yearning for what could or should have been.

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The great ignition: Intelligence

The evolution of the human mind Anri Ichimura

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Wenchie Tacate

Camille Joy Gallardo and Christian Mateo

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very milestone we reach can be credited to the one thing that distinguishes us from the other creatures on Earth—our brain’s advanced intelligence. Over two million years ago, our ancestors shared more mental similarities with an ape than with Adam. That is, until other factors came into play that propelled natural selection to favor intelligence. This in turn led to the evolution of the human brain.

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FEATURE

Our future remains murky at best, but many wonder if this is as far as the human brain can evolve. For this reason, scientists persist on finding the hidden history of our minds to have an idea what the future holds in store for the human brain—for the better or worse of mankind.

human intelligence. With tool-making alive to indirectly influence food choices like a brain-enriching seafood diet, the effect was a greater surge of tool-making and primitive language in Homo habilis.

An overcast of intelligence: Extrinsic catalysts

Credit for our intelligence can also be given to the brain’s own mechanisms. For one, our brain underwent encephalization—the brain’s tendency to grow over evolutionary time. DLSU-D anthropology Professor Dr. Luis Carmelo L. Buenaventura explains that the human brain’s expansion led to man’s first

From observing other creatures of the Earth, we see that sophisticated intelligence is not necessary to survive. Natural selection favors traits fit for the creature’s survival, and in our case, that was intelligence. As man’s defining feature, intelligence has roots at the dawning age of man.

During prehistoric times, the emerging tool culture and primitive language were the facilitators of our mind’s evolution. Even so, before tool-making came into the picture, man strode on two legs. Such a simple ability we take for granted daily was actually fundamental for our mental development: bipedalism gave our ancestors a different view—looking at the world from the top, rather than from the bottom. By standing upright with an overlooking view, they gained an advantageous perspective from the ‘top’ of the food chain. Over time, the free upper body was given a chance to improve dexterity and obtain precise movements through opposable thumbs.

DLSU-D socio-anthropology Professor Phyllis Rianne A. Cañete explains that the freedom of the upper body allowed our ancestors to use their hands to manipulate the environment and invent tools. They had to adapt to their environment while maintaining stiff competition with other inhabitants. Thus, they needed to be clever and creative in order to survive and eventually, they developed tool-making. Homo habilis (aka the Handy Man) are the earliest documented tool users and developers of primitive language, another mark of growing intelligence. The result of these cumulative manifestations of human creativity was what we define as culture.

Inevitably, culture teaches us what to say, do, and eat. The food our ancestors consumed cultivated their brains in time. Numerous chewed fish bones were found beside the fossils of Homo habilis. The addition of seafood containing the brain nutrients iodine and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) correlates with the expansion of grey matter in the Handy Man’s cerebral cortex. As the area responsible for intelligence, the cerebral cortex’ growth added more fire to the flame of emerging

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Cloudy with a chance of cognition: Internal factors

“THE GREATEST MYSTERY OF THE UNIVERSE LIES WITHIN OUR HEADS; NOTHING CAN PERPLEX SCIENTISTS MORE THAN THE LABYRINTH OF OUR MINDS. IT IS NO WONDER WE SPEND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS AND INFINITE TIME STUDYING THAT WONDROUS PART OF OUR ANATOMY.” step to advanced intelligence—increasing creativity. This in turn led to man being more innovative. Without the growth of our brain mass to body ratio, we wouldn’t develop another internal factor of our intelligence: language.

No doubt, we can articulate our thoughts so well that we have a couple of synonyms for the simple word‘said’. Despite how primitive it may have been then, language was a cause— not an effect—of intelligence. In time, it has become necessary for us to develop those parts in our brain dealing with language for our intelligence to flourish. Language and intelligence are so interlinked that “[scientists] discovered that the speech [and language] gene, FOXP2 (forkhead box P2), had a direct connection to intelligence,” says Dr. Buenaventura.

Prior to all movements toward brain evolution, biological elements were present to facilitate such changes—more specifically, genetic elements. Recent discoveries show that human evolution has been linked to

the genes ASPM (Abnormal Spindle-like, Microcephaly-associated) and microcephalin.

The former, ASPM, is believed to have been apparent when language began to be common among humans in the far-flung past. Currently, however, the two genes are associated with microcephaly, which is a disease that results in a smaller brain; and thus, lesser intelligence. With the ability to grow and shrink brain size, the two genes have, to an extent, control over brain size and resulting intelligence. Thus, the genes could have influenced an increase in intelligence quotient (IQ).

Flood warning: The downside of the brain’s future

While the first models of technology contributed to our brain growth, dependency to its products has been shown to shrink intelligence. “We’re sort of dumbing it down,” says Professor Cañete. Seeing as our society provides us with technological crutches, our cognitive capacity to work at its fullest is hindered. One of these so-called crutches is the presence of search engines like Google. A study from Columbia University indicates that easily accessible information develops lower rates of information recall among individuals.

Together with that, the magazine Scientific American compared the Internet to an ‘external hard drive’ that we store information instead of our memories. The variety of gadgets at our expense also contributes to decreasing brainpower, since it encourages multitasking—which studies show results to a 10-point decline in IQ. In addition to technology, our diet is also a culprit behind IQ depletion. Professor Cañete sheds some light on the topic by expounding on the common stereotype that the poor are not as intelligent as the rich. In truth, the shaping factor isn’t the money; it’s the nutrition. In developing countries, one of the greatest health issues is deficiency in brain-boosting nutrients like iodine. Iodine deficiencies in children have been shown to result in a fall of 12 points in IQ. In sharp contrast, children of developed nations feast on fast food, which aren't mind-nourishing meals. Researchers at the University of Bristol, UK concluded that our parents’ constant nagging about eating our fruits and veggies aren’t so wearisome after all. Predictably, a child’s fatty diet can produce an IQ lower than children on a nutritious diet full of brainboosting fruits and vegetables.

To combat such dangers, scientists have been researching genetic engineering possibilities in humans. However, genetically

enhancing favorable genes like intelligence might also inhibit human evolution. The principle of genetic enhancement is to suppress unwanted traits to enhance desired traits— where we’re not certain which traits might prove advantageous to us in the long run. Instead, we may suppress seemingly unwanted traits like mutations, which could be beneficial to our evolution. Other than being unpredictable and dangerous, genetic manipulation may also hinder our intelligence rather than enhance it.

A sunny forecast for the brain

Technology has taken quite a toll on the mind, but not all human innovation is to blame.

After the recent development of man-made inventions aimed to strengthen the mind, the future doesn’t look bleak for our brains.

Although the concept may allude to science fiction, technology implants in the brain look promising. Rather than obstruct brain development like our everyday gadgets, future technology envisioned by scientists are designed to assist individuals with critical neural problems. Currently, John Donoghue of Brown University and his colleagues have developed BrainGate, a device which enables paralyzed patients to manipulate surrounding objects by using their mind. By inserting a small chip into the motor-controlling neocortex, motor signals

are sent to an external computer, which in turn passes them along to a robotic device that performs the desired movement.

Interlinked with the prospect of advanced brain technology is mind-reading devices.

Though the idea of superhuman brain powers (e.g. telekinesis) are theoretically possible, it may very well be far off in the future. For now, scientists have been constructing technology that can voice, recite, and even photograph our thoughts. Research at the University of California, Berkley has conceived a complex mathematical formula that can essentially produce a 3D depiction of a person’s thoughts with a state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Likewise, the electrocorticogram technology (ECOG) is unprecedented in its accuracy of thought recognition. The device allows individuals to have their thoughts voiced by a voice synthesizer that recognizes the brain patterns of certain words. The said innovations could mean wonders to comatose and paralyzed patients whose coherent communication is hindered by their lack of expression.

Perhaps the greatest event that our future has in store for our minds is the results of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. Simply known as the BRAIN Initiative, it is a proposal by President

Obama in April 2013. Based on the Human Genome Project, the initiative endeavors to map out every single neuron and pathway in the mind to create a thorough mental map. The prospects of the BRAIN Initiative are revolutionary; it could lead to cures for hundreds of mental disorders and conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, autism, epilepsy, depression, and other mental conditions.

Moreover, it could find the pathways in charge of our intelligence, and the possibilities rooted in that show signs of good things to come. It’s not about what evolution holds in store for the mind; it is what we ourselves can do to develop our intelligence. We have known from the start that our fate lies in our own hands, and with man's leaps and bonds, the future of human intelligence looks bright. *** The greatest mystery of the universe lies within our heads; nothing can perplex scientists more than the labyrinth of our minds.

It is no wonder we spend millions of dollars and infinite time studying that wondrous part of our anatomy. For now, its secrets remain bolted in the recesses of our minds, and the future of the human mind remains as elusive as ever.

Only time will tell what boundaries our minds can reach—or break.

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MIND-BOGGLING COGNITIVE REALITIES John Paul Gonzales

Camille Joy Gallardo

Our brain is one of the most complicated organs inside our body and as proof, scientists are still unable to unlock its full glory despite the strides that man has accomplished. Because of this, scientists and science fiction writers formulate educated assumptions. One of these brain myths suggests that we only use 10 percent of our brain implying that all individuals have not fully reached his brain’s potential and if maximized, it could unleash extraordinary skills.

In the advent of the generation where advancement in technology is fast-paced, here are some of the facts about the human brain which presents both the probability and improbability of the said myth:

Brain imaging studies show that

NO AREA OF THE BRAIN IS COMPLETELY SILENT OR INACTIVE AT ANY TIME.

The “silent” regions of the brain (which is 90 percent) are intimately involved in Detailed examining of the brain has failed to identify the ‘non-functioning’

90%

MAKING DECISIONS, DRAFTING PLANS, ADAPTING EVOLVING SITUATIONS, & ABSTRACTING REASONS.

Moreover, the evidence suggests that up to

16% of our brain cells are active at any moment.

Neurons are only

10% of the total brain cells in our brain.

90%

The other of our brain cells are called glia According to famed psychologist William James,

we're making use of only a small part of our possible mental & physical resources.

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The roles of the glia also include providing

immune system protection, regulating synapse growth & wiping up excess neurotransmitters.

In an episode of Discovery Channel’s MythBuster, host Tory Belleci took a series of mind-bending tests which include memory drills, math calculations, word associations, and image comparisons to track how much of his brain got a workout through a neuroimaging device called magnetoencephalogram (MEG).

35%

Around of Tory’s brain jumped into action over the course of the MEG exam, thus

10%

MORE THAN Of the human brain was used.

If brain space signifies the importance of a sense, then vision is the most significant.

Compared with 8 percent of neurons dedicated for touch, and 2 percent for hearing, approximately

30% of neurons in the brain’s cortex are dedicated to vision.

The modern brain accounts for about Aside from the 10 percent brain myth, five other POPULAR BRAIN MYTHS are:

2% of our body weight, but it consumes about

20% of the oxygen in our blood & we only have five senses

we use one side of our brain more than the other

25%

(think: “left and right brain hemispheres”)

of the glucose circulating in our bloodstream.

We wouldn’t have evolved such large brains if we only make use of a tiny portion of it.

the bigger the brain, the smarter you are

our brain is gray in color

and brain injury is permanent

SOURCES: Vreeman, R. C. & Carroll, A. E. (2007). Medical myths. BMJ, 33, 1288 Beyerstein, B. L. (1999). Whence cometh the myth that we only use 10% of our brains? In Sergio Della Sala. Mind Myths: Exploring Popular Assumptions About the Mind and Brain.. New York: John Wiley & Sons www.curiosity.com www.theguardian.com www.discovery.com From the study of Alexander Gourine. www.livescience.com www.medicaldaily.com www.tdlc.ucsd.edu www.channel.nationalgeographic.com LA SALLEÑO

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FEATURE

BRG S BA IN OU

O

BOOSTING The lowdown on brain games Cerisse Madlangbayan

W

Christian Mateo

hen we run into the term “exercise,” walking on a treadmill while singing “Let’s get physical…” is probably the first thing that comes to mind. But in this day an age where robotic trainers and magnetic brain stimulation are possible, it’s no longer surprising that digital brain also get as much popularity as the next The Hunger Games film.

These brain games seem to promise a lot of benefits—from boosting your memory to possibly preventing dreadful degenerative diseases—which may or may not work.

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Rise of the brain game apps One digital brain game in particular has become well-known in its field: the Lumosity. As informed by their site, it is a web app or an online training program that helps cognitive (mental activities) functions. It consists of exercises that concerns memory, attention, and problem solving, to name a few.

There’s been word that brain training apps like this can make you smarter. A research by Lumos Labs on the effects of Lumosity, for one, used more than 1200 students from 40 different schools as their participants. As informed by their website, results reveal that those who completed Lumosity training had “greater changes” in their scores in a set of “cognitive assessments” than those who did not. It seems that brain games can improve our short-term memory, but only a limited part of it, psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman states in reporter Lauren Silverman’s article Learning A New Skill Works Best To Keep Your Brain Sharp on the news organization NPR.org.

Brain games are basically rooted on the idea of neuroplasticity—that brain cells can change, regenerate, and make new connections with neurons by exercising them, according

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to freelance writer Lily Dayton’s Los Angeles Times article Brain fitness can include playing training games on computers. It plays on the idea that the brain, just like our possibly nonexistent abs, needs constant work.

Based on writer Chris Gayomali’s article Do Brainpower Apps Really Make You Smarter? on the online business magazine fastcompany.com, these exercises target key areas in the brain responsible for “fluid intelligence” or the ability used to remember things and reason out. Some have games that include many levels, and solving math problems with time limit—both possibly seeming more Herculean than the Disney movie.

Aside from allegedly helping us in our common problem of finding “x” in Algebra test papers, brain games are also meant for older people.

Alzheimer’s disease may seem as inevitable as growing wrinkles, but an app called Neuroracer may help prevent this degenerative disease.

According to alzheimers.net, a study led by the neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, showed that older players of the game gained better focus and memory.

Other studies seem to agree that brain games and exercises really do keep the brain sharp and young.

Unfortunately, the website Discovery News says that although it could “prolong” brain functions, brain games has its limitations and might not stop brain disorders and mental decline.

Doubting brain games Sitting on a comfy couch while playing a brain-boosting app sounds like a more idyllic form of exercise than running a marathon. However, just as there are a lot of researches that verify the efficiency of brain games, other researchers show otherwise.

Many scholars composed of “cognitive psychologist[s] and neuroscientist[s] from around the world” seem to agree with this as they signed a document doubting the efficiency of brain games, as reported in writer Clifton Parker’s article Scientific evidence does not support the brain game claims, scholars say on news service Medical Xpress. They found that brain games do help us improve on a specific task or on some cognitive skills, but not on more complex mental functioning like problem solving and thinking.

Journalist Gareth Cook’s The New Yorker article Brain Games are Bogus says the same, informing that brain games might not improve your reading skills or anything that you might

apply in real life. With accordance, the article No Evidence of Intelligence Improvement After Working Memory Training: A Randomized, PlaceboControlled Study by psychologists Thomas Redick, et al. on the Journal of Experimental Psychology reveals that there were “no positive transfer” or enhancements on “cognitive ability tests” in their study that included young adult participants.

There’s nothing wrong with playing brain games for fun. Obviously, apps aren’t necessarily harmful, but as Professor Zach Hambrick points out in Gareth Cook’s article, it might give people “false hope” and take away precious time from doing something possibly more productive—like actual, physical exercise.

Healthy alternatives Sauna belts and sauna suits tried—and possibly failed, for some— to make it possible for us to stay fit without actually doing the work. Brain game apps are doing the same thing for our brains sans holding a dumbbell

and making our brains do virtual situps. But if there’s anything that is commonly pointed out by medical magazines, health websites, and our parents, it’s that you can’t escape from exercise—the “Let’s get physical” kind.

DLSU-D psychology Professor Normita A. Atrillano says that aerobic exercise helps in brain fitness.

Although it is alright to play “mental exercise games,” she says that “kailangan na physically healthy ka rin … sound mind with a sound body.”

Exercise, which seems as daunting as a surprise quiz, doesn’t just keep you physically fit. The hippocampus is an area in the brain affected by Alzheimer’s disease and in a study by researchers from the Center for Brain Health on the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, an increase in the “brain blood flow to the hippocampus” was found in people who exercise with an improvement in memory. Stanford professor Laura Carstensen even suggested in the article on Medical Xpress that physical exercise is good for both body and brain fitness.

Exercise can cause the nervous system to release “serotonin and dopamine,” which are neurotransmitters that can make us happy and feel good, fitness coordinator Christin Anderson explains in the article Train Your Brain With Exercise by medical journalist Jean Lawrence on webmd.com.

Exercise isn’t the only way to a brain workout. You can do everything from learning a new language (French, anyone?), to playing board games, and even touch up on some reading.

As our parents constantly remind us, eating healthy and getting a good night sleep is good for your brain and memory too. *** Like any new celebrity on the block, brain games apps seem to receive a lot of backlash. But whether they do work or not, there is no harm in trying on an app or a series of tests just for fun. Remember though that digital brain game apps aren’t miracle workers. Solely relying on these apps might not be a good idea.

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LIST

LOGGING OFF Into the dying mind

Daniella Shaira Cortez and Levin Sanchez (contributor) Camille Joy Gallardo

S

ome movies and books would tell us of brave heroes, cowardly characters, or mediocre men who encounter death. Whether the story dwelled on their afterlife or the death’s effect to the remaining characters, we hardly encounter the in-between. Interestingly, science says that once a person’s heart stops beating and they are clinically dead, the brain is still conscious for approximately 30 seconds. When a person faces death, they get to have one last adventure within the confines of humanity.

As University students, we probably have more adventures in store for us.

But to satisfy curious minds, here’s a free pass to the departed’s last moments.

A cinematic experience While the phrase “my entire life flashed before my eyes” is almost a required quote for people at the verge of death in fictional stories, the phenomenon itself is actually non-fiction. When a person is dying, their electrical pulses and mental activity will rise because the brain’s neurons go into overdrive. Particularly, studies show that increased brain activity occurs above the brain area responsible for vision, which also explains visions of a bright light which some people with near-death experiences report. Other activities also include parts of the brain responsible for facial recognition and memory, supporting the hypothesized flashback experience that felt almost real, according to some people with neardeath experiences.

As found in mice, the brain is actually more active than it ever was after the heart has struck its final beat. Dr. Jason Braithewaite of the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom states that this is the brain’s “last hurrah”—the brain becomes overstimulated as one nears death. Sentimental as it is, our brain would give us the chance to view and emotionally relive our happiest (and darkest) moments for one last time, before we set foot in the afterlife.

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The preservation protocol Having lost heart power to circulate oxygen and necessary nutrients in the body, the brain starts to produce less energy. As a survival instinct, the brain makes efforts to preserve what little energy and oxygen it has left. As a result, a person entering eternal sleep would no longer feel basic functions such as hunger, thirst, and even the need to use the washroom—nature has another call in store.

These changes also numb the senses despite being conscious, trapping the person within their body. Being cut off from their environment, at least they are free from disturbances at the front row screening of their memories. The body is at full rest mode as the organs weaken, and the skin turns blue or gray as the oxygen in the blood decreases.

A chilly end Nearing death, even if a person died of a heat stroke, would still feel like winter has come. The decrease in blood circulation and muscle contractions due to the brain’s exhaustion will cause the dying person’s body to go cold and stiff. This is because our organs that use blood as a resource are responsible for producing body heat, so a decrease in blood circulation will also cause the organs to function slower, thus being unable to keep up the production of heat.

The reason we move around when we are feeling cold is in response for this mechanism.

We try to keep our organs active to warm ourselves, by allowing our bodies to use energy to circulate more blood through movement.

Having preserved oxygen and energy for brain usage though, at least people nearing their end could go out singing, “the cold never bothered me anyway.”

An emotional flare You would have thought that nearing death would be relaxing for the mind due to the numbed senses and dwindling consciousness, but actually the opposite occurs. The brain gets stressed and causes an emotional disturbance by means of agitation, restlessness, or confusion due to the unfamiliar experiences of the body shutting down and nature’s call for survival despite life singing its lullaby for eternal sleep.

However, as a person nearing their death gets one last trip through the life they lived, how they spent those years could still affect their emotional state, as they exit in this world. *** By now, you can probably agree that the brain continues to stay complicated and interesting even as it nears death. Research into brain death is growing just recently, with the promising 30-second consciousness findings. People are probably so curious about the world because the cause of curiosity itself is our brains. Perhaps, this justifies why zombies crave for brains.

SOURCES: www.horizonresearch.org www.bbc.com/news/science www.smithsonianmag.com/science www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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phenomena.nationalgeographic.com health.howstuffworks.com www.compassionandsupport.org www.cancerresearchuk.org

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FEATURE

The clarity in a crescendo The perks of being a music junkie Anri Ichimura

Pamela Joven and Christian Paul Macapagal

A

chord and a lyric is all you need to drastically change your day for the better or worse. For our generation in particular, music is more than an interest—it’s a lifestyle that feeds off the pleasure and fulfillment brought about by hearing a snippet of a familiar song. More often than not, elders wonder what makes the new century’s music so enthralling that we threaten our hearing when we blare it from our earphones at top volume.

The answer to that question is not simply in the song itself, but in the power music has over us. The phenomenon of music’s impact can shape and influence who we are and how we think. Although we’re still uncertain of the role music plays to our psyche, we can be sure of the potential influence music can have in our lives if we listen well. All signs indicate the power a song has over our minds—and the promising results a melody can produce.

A listener’s headset

Music is an art—and art relies entirely on perspective. How one hears a song will differ from another’s point of view. We refer to this concept as “taste in music,” or music preferences, which intertwines with determining one’s personality. Before that link between preference and personality can be found, we need to

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explore listeners’ perspective on music. There’s more to perceiving a song as good or bad. In some cases, music stimulates a sense seemingly unrelated to sound—like sight.

Upbeat music might cause irritation in some, but in others, it can bring about brighter and happier thoughts.

Cementing this notion, a joint study by universities in the United States and Mexico found that slow, sad songs are connected to duller, darker colors in the same way that upbeat, bouncy tunes are associated with bright, vivid colors. A more potent version of this sound-to-sight wonder is the condition called chromesthesia, a kind of synesthesia. Simply put, synesthesia is when one sense can stimulate another. Every case of chromesthesia differs in each person; for example, a person might see the color pink in their line of vision when a popular pop song is heard. Meanwhile, another listener of the same song might perceive a shade of bright yellow in their mind’s eye after taking note of the upbeat rhythm.

As perspective lays the ground for preferences, music preferences might predict one’s personality as discovered by researchers at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Their study found that certain personality traits were compared to music tastes, and qualities like openness to experience, extraversion, and emotional stability, were the most accurate traits to predict. Most adolescents fall under the mainstream,

chart-topping music culture, or the more obscure hipster, indie scene.

Indie fans were predicted to be creative despite having low selfesteem. Meanwhile, chart pop fans were outgoing, hardworking, but not easygoing.

Contrariwise, Dr. Joy-Alvi R. Arañas of the Counseling and Psychotherapy branch of the DLSU-D Student Wellness Center explained how music tastes can’t define a person’s personality, but one’s mood can define their taste in music. “It depends on the moods and emotions of the person—and the situation,” says Dr. Arañas. In line with that, sadness would encourage a person to listen to melancholic melodies, while a person in a gym would be more likely to listen to heart-pumping beats.

Finding wisdom in melodies Along with being linked to our personalities and emotions, music can also be a prime factor in our learning. “It enhances our mind—how we think, how we feel” says Dr. Arañas. The most popular manifestation of this is the Mozart Effect, which states how hearing classical music can result in higher intellect. The theory created such a buzz that mothers everywhere resorted to playing Mozart to their unborn babies. Although the reliability of the Mozart Effect still remains indefinite, there are many other ways that music has been proven to affect our mind— particularly, our memories.

Envision your memories stored in a labyrinth of a library. To find the memory you need without getting lost, you’d need a call number—a cue. Memory relies on cues for recall, and music has been known to be a strong cue in remembrance.

Testing the correlation between music and recall, Dr. Aimee Baird and Dr. Séverine Samson from the University of Newcastle, Australia directed the research that played 50 “Number 1 Songs of the Year” to five persons with acquired brain injuries.

After the majority responded well to

treatment, the researchers identified that chart-topping songs of a person’s lifetime effectively elicit lost memories more than a standard autobiographical interview can.

The link between music and memory can also transcend into language learning, as discovered by researchers at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Participants of their experiment were to listen and repeat Hungarian sentences that were either spoken or sang.

When the test of recall occurred 15 minutes later, those who sang scored significantly higher. The learning ease of languages embedded into songs is theorized to occur because of the melody’s role as an effective cue for recall.

“IT ENHANCES OUR MIND—HOW WE THINK, HOW WE FEEL” Aside from the cognitive benefits, playing an instrument can also do wonders for motor and reasoning skills. A 2008 study

by Harvard University and Boston College found that compared to children with no musical training, children with at least three years of music training showed higher proficiencies in auditory discrimination abilities and ambidextrous (both left and righthandedness) motor skills. They also scored higher on vocabulary and reasoning skills in terms of analyzing information and identifying relationships between patterns.

Despite this, a handful of scientists and studies contradict the effect music has on our minds.

They emphasize how music can be a distraction or deterrence to learning. “Music with lyrics is very likely to have a problematic effect when you’re writing or reading,” said Clifford Nass, former

communications Professor at Stanford University. When writing an essay or memorizing for a quiz, it’s easy to be thrown off by a song’s changing words that differs from the words you’re trying to write.

However, some might be lucky to find a cure for a clash of thoughts and lyrics by listening to classical music or instrumentals when studying, as Dr. Arañas recommends.

Healing in harmonies As much as music can stimulate, it can also relax. The method of musical therapy in the young uses “music as a tool in helping a child release his emotions and [improve] behavior,” says Dr. Arañas who’s currently doing his dissertation on the subject.

Considering how language and music are processed in almost identical brain areas, it’s safe to say that music itself can be considered a language.

This is true particularly for those who can’t communicate verbally.

Musical therapy is applied in special education to autistic children, 30 percent of whom don’t speak or can’t understand verbal commands. Listening and playing music gives children with social disabilities a medium of expression. Likewise, music therapy improves a child’s socialemotional responsiveness, compliance, interaction, and speech output. Classical music is most often used in musical therapy for those with special needs given the predictable, steady rhythm of tunes like Bach can alleviate stress and crystallize focus.

Those common effects of music therapy are the reason that it is also applied to other, more serious, mental conditions like schizophrenia. Bearing in mind that music therapy has shown no serious side effects and remains inexpensive, it’s also been proven to improve symptoms in schizophrenic patients. After a series of listening and singing sessions, schizophrenic patients at the Shanghai City Mental Health Centre exhibited signs of decreased isolation and increased sociability and interest.

This can be attributed to the presence of music therapy drowning out the noise of auditory hallucinations and grounding the patients in the realm of reality.

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Thankfully not everyone suffers from schizophrenia, yet music therapy has shown just as much progress in handling conditions more common in adolescents, like bipolar disorder and depression. Music therapy typically consists of both passively listening to music and actively playing an instrument, and both methods have shown effective results in depressed individuals. In the case of a research team from Finland and Norway, depressed patients gained more benefits from 20 one-hour music playing sessions than standard care alone. The improvement of behavior in depressed individuals was led by the music’s ability to stabilize emotions by boosting interest, energy, and empathy.

Similar results were found from a study in Mexico where passive music listening was the effective tool of music

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therapy. Lead researcher Miguel-Angel Mayoral-Chavez of the University of Oaxaca, Mexico explains that “music offers a simple and elegant way to treat anhedonia [a major symptom of depression], the loss of pleasures in daily activities.” Particularly in adolescents, music provides a sense of identity and independence that can be nurtured into self-satisfaction. The most effective type of music found to decrease anhedonia and depression symptoms were notably baroque music and Mozart.

Dr. Arañas recommends listening to music that “doesn’t deal with too many emotions” to prevent drastic emotional shifting for those with bipolar disorder.

For those with depression, “don’t listen to [melancholic] love songs.” He also recommends staying away from music that promotes violence, beauty, sex, and other topics that may feed off

of your self-esteem. Rather, listen to happy and upbeat songs. Likewise, depression associates with a low level of dopamine (the happy hormone) in the brain, and music has been found to increase dopamine levels. One should not refuse the offer of more dopamine, as one can never have too much music when it’s been shown time and again how much the mind can gain from a melody. *** Suffice to say, life would be lackluster without music. Beyond its use of being blared from speakers to a crowd of head-banging youths, music can pave the way for enriching our minds with wisdom and perspective. There’s more to music than its mundane role as a study or party soundtrack—perhaps it’s time to realize the power packed in a song and use it to your advantage.

FEATURE

AT WIT'S END

Jessone Purificacion

Chandler Belaro

Y

ou’re sitting in class, absorbed in wonderland when suddenly, the professor calls your attention and asks you a question.

Fortunately you know the answer, but it seems like some sort of force is hindering you from spitting the word out. You’d let this annoying moment pass at any other circumstance but not this time—not when you’re certain this professor wouldn’t take “I swear the answer is right on the tip of my tongue” for an answer.

Apparently, this oh-my-brain-is-lagging-again phenomenon has caught the interest of the scientific community. Hence, intensive research has been made which resulted to the emergence of different perspectives on explaining tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) moments—from brain malfunctions to the adaptive mechanism of the brain.

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Brain glitches Indisputably, these TOT moments are very frustrating.

It’s annoying that you clearly know what the word means— sometimes you could even recall how it sounds like and what the initial letter is—but not the word itself.

Dr. William James, an American psychologist, led his other colleagues to look on the perspective of memory to study TOT after describing it as an intensely active memory gap. Basically, initial researches of psychologists linked the tip-of-the-tongue state to a mere failure in retrieving words.

Roger Brown of Harvard University mentioned in a William James-inspired study that during TOT state, a person might recall words’ length in syllables, first and last letters but not the exact word that fills the “gap” in memory. Basically, Brown’s study implied that TOT is indeed an inefficiency in the brain process.

In memory point of view, TOTs occur when a person tries to say a certain word but something goes wrong so, the retrieval is hindered. Professor Gregory Jones of University of Warwick pointed out “blockers” as responsible for this failed retrieval.

In the article "Blockers" do not block recall during tip-of-thetongue on the metacognition and learning journal, Dr. Nate Kornell and Dr. Janet Metcalfe described blockers as perceived “incorrect answers” which interrupt recall and come to mind during TOT state.

In contrast, Endel Tulving of University of Toronto and other psychologists suggested that memory retrieval can’t be associated with TOT. Dr. Bennett Schwartz of Florida International University proposed that the memory retrieval process is not the same with that of the generation of TOTs. So, using memory in studying retrieval process is unacceptable. Dr. Schwartz suggested that metacognition is the most appropriate approach to study tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon instead.

Unrecognized signals From the metacognitive point of view, TOTs are “feelings” that arise whenever something has not been retrieved right away. So, in this perspective, it’s more accurate to regard TOT as an “experience” rather than a “state.”

In his article What's that name? on news website boston. com, psychology journalist Jonah Lehrer noted that human brain is like a cluttered desk that sloppily piles up paper whenever new information is gained. Basically, under normal situations, our brains can easily retrieve the information we need despite the mess on the desk. During TOT state though, the retrieval is harder. Consequently, our brains recognize this difficulty and give us the TOT experience.

Furthermore, Dr. Hideyuki Kikyo of the University of Tokyo School of Medicine and his team have determined that the regions of the brain responsible for monitoring and control of behavioral experiences were activated during successful retrieval amid a TOT experience. Dr. Kikyo and his colleagues think this finding may prove that TOT is the “experience” of failed retrieval rather than the failure itself.

Instead of seeing TOT itself as the problem (which the memory perspective proposes), metacognitive suggests that TOT is a brain monitoring mechanism which signals us that remembering the elapsed word, which hasn’t been recalled instantaneously, is possible.

To understand metacognition perspective better, consider this analogy between TOT and problem with your printer: You start printing your documents but notice that the paper jam signal is activated. The light tells you there’s something wrong but the light is not the problem per se. In the same way, tip-

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Chandler Belaro

of-the-tongue state is like the paper jam signal; it’s simply a warning that something went amiss but is not the problem itself.

On the same note, this printer analogy also shows the benefits of the TOT to us. When the paper jam signal lights, we know that we should press the jam button to fix the problem.

Likewise, whenever we are in the tip-of-the-tongue state, our brain tells us to keep on retrieving the targeted word because TOT is a precise indicator that retrieval is possible.

On the other hand, some psychologists look at TOT as moments wherein the speakers simply forget terms because of word usage factors.

Forgetting and failed recall In lexical perspective, a person experiences TOT whenever the language production process gets disrupted. Dr. Lise Abrams of University of Florida explained that when producing words, the brain look for the definition of the words to be expressed before it retrieves its phonology (“neural blueprints for the sounds that make up the word”). Abrams furthered that weak connection between words and their phonology is what causes TOTs. Cognitive psychologists Deborah Burke and Donald MacKay suggest that the deterioration of connection between words and their phonology is a result of infrequent use. Burke and MacKay explained that words which are rarely used result to weaker connections. Burke and MacKay also identified normal aging as another factor, which results to a weaker semantic and phonology link.

On the other hand, the scientific community was led to another avenue of uncertainty when TOT has been taken into language perspective. For one, debates on the experience of deaf people who communicate through ASL (American Sign Language) and the TOT-like phenomenon has been raised.

Apparently, scientists weren’t quite sure whether deaf people who use ASL experience TOT. Research comes to the rescue as psychologists discovered that ASL communicators also experience TOT-like states. Dr. Karen Emmorey, Director of the Laboratory for Language & Cognitive Neuroscience at San Diego State University has referred to this phenomenon in ASL users as tip-of-the-finger phenomenon.

In fact, Dr. Emmorey and her colleagues found that similar to people who experience TOT, ASL users could also encounter difficulty in recalling the sign languages for certain words.

While speakers could only recall the first letter of words they’re supposed to say, ASL signers only remember parts of the hand signal during tip-of-the-finger state. Query on whether bilinguals (people who speak two languages) have more TOT occurrences than those who only speak one language has been raised, as well.

Dr. Jennie Pyers and her colleagues were among those to affirm that there is an increased TOT rate in bilinguals in their research Bimodal Bilinguals Reveal the Source Of Tip-Of-TheTongue States. Dr. Pyers furthered that the reduced frequency use of words in bilinguals results to difficulty in word retrieval.

She also explained that because bilinguals know more than one language, a good amount of the words they know are not used frequently. *** The emergence of different TOT perspectives through the years shows how complex the human brain really is. This complexity is evidence that humans, indeed, have an infinite range of possibilities in them. After all, we weren't created to be ordinary.

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LIST

Mental disorders clarified Their myths and misconceptions Cerisse Madlangbayan

Rigel Almira

I

n a world where having mental disorders means you’re either inherently a crazy weird genius or possessed just like the girl from The Exorcist, it’s inevitable that disorders can get misconstrued, misunderstood, and misinterpreted. Myths crowd around mental conditions like flies to raw meat in wet markets; and while myths won’t die down fast, we can shed light on some of them.

Here is a list of common mental disorders with misconceptions we long thought were true:

Shy and speechless If you’re familiar with Melinda Sordino from Laurie Halse Anderson's novel Speak who didn’t want to talk after a traumatic event, or even Rajesh Koothrapali from the TV series The Big Bang Theory who couldn’t speak to women, then you might have unknowingly come across selective mutism. Those with this condition commonly don’t talk in certain social situations. But unlike in The Little Mermaid where the main character gets her voice stolen by a sea witch, these people (mostly children) can speak normally in other social circumstances. Since these individuals are not language impaired or inherently mute, many believe it’s simply shyness—but that is not always the case.

Shyness is a personality trait which people might have felt at some point in their lives.

Selective mutism, on the other hand, is a psychiatric disorder that the Selective Mutism Group says can interfere with everyday life, like never speaking at class or outside family members. While many think it results from trauma, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s website says that it can stem from speech and hearing problems, anxiety disorder, or self-esteem issues. Unlike a normally shy kid, children with this condition “are at the extreme end of the spectrum for timidity and shyness,” says Dr. Elisa Shipon-Blum on selectivemutismcenter.org.

Some people do outgrow selective mutism, but the website for Selective Mutism Foundation, Inc. also informs us that older children who suffered from the disorder longer than others are “more resistant to all forms of treatment.” Pressure from parents and peers might even worsen the condition, showing that being selectively mute is indeed more severe than plain shyness.

Not obsessive cleaning In a time where the term Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) has become an urban slang, it’s not shocking that the actual disorder is one of the most misunderstood mental conditions out there. For one, people like to think that only those who love cleaning have and can get OCD— and that could not be less true. Other people, the messiest individuals even, can still develop this psychiatric disorder.

If you thought OCD only involved uncontrollable, repetitive actions, then you might not have heard of its other symptoms. The disorder is also characterized by ruminations, which ocduk. org explains is an unproductive prolonged thinking, and intrusive thoughts like thinking about being violent to a certain person even though you don’t want to. OCD may also involve hoarding or the inability to throw away possessions; and contamination, where constant cleaning and washing comes in. Usually, these obsessions and compulsions are accompanied by unwanted consequences, like believing you have to do a specific action or else something grave will happen.

OCD is not just a simple obsession for arranging books in alphabetical order or the love for tidying up. As the International OCD Foundation states, this disorder “is not about logic—it is about anxiety and trying to get relief from that anxiety.”

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Not your lone wolf One might get a glimpse of the words “antisocial personality disorder (ASPD),” zoom in on the term “antisocial,” and deduce that it’s a condition for those who are too painfully shy to function. Antisocial is more than just being an unfriendly loner, with UK's Metropolitan Police Service’s website defining the term as a broad “range of unacceptable activity.” In fact, psychopathy (a mental disorder characterized by lack of empathy) is closer to ASPD than introversion or timidity could ever be.

Many might think those with ASPD just don’t like to socialize when in reality, ASPD is described by mayoclinic.org as a chronic disorder where the “person's ways of thinking … are dysfunctional—and destructive.” There’s nothing shy about this disorder as according to the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it is characterized by “impairments in personality” like deceitfulness, impulsivity, and having a lack of empathy. It can even lead to manipulative behaviors and violence or crime.

Nobody is certain what the real cause for this personality disorder, but one thing is for sure; antisocial just got a whole new meaning.

A cry for attention Eating disorders, which include binge eating, anorexia, and bulimia, are one of the many mysteries of the world, with misconceptions clinging to them like barnacles. One of the myths that shroud these disorders is that it is just a phase, a trend, or a cry for attention. Many even think that it is something that the person with the condition can just get over with. Australia’s National Eating Disorders Collaboration (NEDC) website refutes this, though, and states that an eating disorder is a “serious mental illness.” One would think that other mental conditions are more severe than eating disorder, but NEDC reports differently, stating that out of all psychiatric disorders, those with this condition have the highest mortality rate.

The misconception that eating disorders are only for attention could lead to people thinking that the individuals who suffer from eating disorder chose the condition. Dr. Elizabeth Easton from the Eating Recovery Center explains on parentfurther.com that affected individuals don’t just choose to be overtaken by a serious disorder. In fact, NEDC adds that those with this condition does the opposite of seeking attention and usually tries to hide the fact that they even have the disorder at all.

Twist and turn “Hindi ka mapakali,” Filipinos often say, especially to rowdy children and rowdier teenagers. While some of us can’t stay still for a number of causes—crushes within the vicinity or reciting in front of a somewhat attentive class—others can’t stay still because of a disorder.

Tourette syndrome, named after French neurologist Georges Gilles de la Tourette, is a disorder or brain condition characterized by tics (motor/physical and vocal) or involuntary repetitive movement. There are types of motor and vocal tics: simple and complex. While simple tics can include grunting, hissing, head or eye jerks and shrugs, webmd.com informs us that complex tics may involve repeating words and phrases to “obscene gesturing,” head banging and twirling.

Some might think these movements are just mannerisms and that people with the disorder can just stop when they want to, seemingly forgetting that Tourette syndrome is a neurological condition or a disorder of the brain, spinal column, and nerves.

While science writer Sadie F. Dingfelder’s article Nix the tics on the American Psychological Association’s website suggests the syndrome can be controlled and managed, it’s important to remember that tics are involuntary actions, and like a severe computer virus, is not easy to remove.

*** The causes for mental disorders are more elusive than a passing grade in a math subject. To sum it up as just another mental condition anyone can get or worse, as a cry for attention, are most probably the reason why disorders are misunderstood in the first place. Finding cures for these disorders is one long stride for man, and perhaps understanding them is the first giant step to stopping misconceptions.

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LA SALLEﾃ前

40 Roxanne Valerie Rasco

REVIEW

ASIAN THRILLERS Denise Anne Valentino

The Chrysalis (2012)

A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

Director: Chu-ji Qui Starring: Wei Lee, Sandrina Pinna, Quan Ren Country: China/Taiwan

Director: Jee-Woon Kim Starring: Kap-su Kim, Jung-ah Yum, Su-jeong Lim Country: South Korea

And I would do anything for love

Nothing beats the original

Everything—jumping off rooftops, motor chases, explosions—that happened in this movie were all because two women were rivaling over a guy. The Chrysalis almost had a unique plot for a psychological thriller if not for the psychotic-jealous-ex-girlfriend cliché. The film even kicks off with the ex-girlfriend, Anne, kidnapping the new girlfriend, Wenxin. But the real game begins after Wenxin was found in the middle of the road three months after she was abducted, having no memory of the past three months. While Wenxin recovers in preparation of her upcoming wedding (with the guy who caused this chain of catastrophe), she was haunted by visions of Anne. Adding to the mystery was the disappearance of Anne, and Wenxin shifting to Anne’s personality from time to time.

The spiral of events unfurled—as well as how romanticized the story was—when Wenxin investigates what really happened to Anne. The cinematography, especially with the use of colors and set lighting, could have been brilliant, but even some scenes were ridiculously romanticized because of the story. Plus, it’s like all of the characters are crazy in their own way—yet it could be one of the filmmakers’ techniques to confuse the audience on who is really having the delusions and who is telling the lies.

The Chrysalis might be more of a love story gone wrong than a psycho-thriller, but if you’re the kind who likes solving puzzles, piecing clues together, and connecting the dots while getting confused because everyone is crazy, this movie will keep you on the edge of your seat for a good hour and a half.

Later remade by Hollywood as The Uninvited (2009), the film revolves around the family’s eldest daughter Su-mi. After Su-mi returns home from a psychiatric hospital, weird things started happening in their isolated house in the rural (read: ultimate movie setting cliché). First, Sumi had dreams about a ghost-like female, then her younger sister Suyeon claimed that somebody comes in her room at night, and their father refuses to believe that their stepmother was physically hurting them despite the bruises on Su-yeon’s arms. If you’ve watched The Uninvited, then you know how this story would end and could probably identify the signs of the plot twist early in the movie.

But what makes the film better than its western remake was the direction and cinematography. It’s not really the scary faces or the sudden movement in the shadows that puts the real “horror” in finely-made horror movies. It’s the creepiness that crawls up your senses without you fully noticing—which was pulled off perfectly by the film. An example of this effect in the movie is the use of vintage wallpapers of the house as backgrounds. The repetitive pattern plays with your mind, like there was something in the design that you just can’t quite put a finger on.

The lighting and camera angles effectively added the gloomy feeling throughout the movie.

It was fascinating how Jee-Woon Kim managed to have all the scenes coordinate with each other, ensuring the absence of major story loopholes. The only reason it didn’t receive five stars was because of some ridiculous facts in the story, like how Su-mi's father had the guts to leave her home alone while knowing her condition. Still, despite these few downsides, audience with an appetite for mystery can still enjoy watching A Tale of Two Sisters.

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‘Wag Kang Lilingon (Don’t Look Back; 2006)

Confessions (2010)

Director: Jerry Lopez Sinengneng, Quark Henares Starring: Anne Curtis, Marvin Agustin, Kristine Hermosa Country: Philippines

Director: Tetsuya Nakashima Starring: Takako Matsu, Yoshino Kimura, Masaki Okada Country: Japan

Buy one, take one

Russian nesting dolls as pawns for a mental chess battle

Photos taken from the internet

‘Wag Kang Lilingon is not purely a psychological thriller—some of its horror aspects deal with the supernatural, and although the twist becomes predictable at the second part of the movie, the shots and lighting techniques are commendable compared to other Filipino horror movies that live only on screamers (a.k.a. the scary faces that suddenly jumps on the screen).

The film is divided into two parts: Uyayi (Lullaby) and Salamin (Mirror).

Uyayi’s story focuses on a hospital where many patients were being found dead from causes not related to their condition. Noticing that all the said patients were male and died at three o’ clock in the morning, Melissa, one of the hospital’s nurses, suspects the deaths were works of a serial killer.

However, disturbing apparitions of ghosts suggests the killings were done by supernatural forces, confusing both the characters and the audience.

Salamin’s story, of course, involves an antique mirror hidden in an old house where a family had just moved in to have a fresh start. The family consists of a mother who had just separated from her husband, and her two daughters who unknowingly released the spirits from inside the mirror. As the family struggle from the angry spirits now haunting them, the story gives clues on the answer to the riddles of Uyayi—why all the victims were males, and why their deaths always happen at three in the morning.

The plot twist is predictable but the story itself is quite satisfactory.

But what gave it three stars were the direction of cinematography and the attempt to make a psycho-thriller for a horror film. It is rare for a mainstream Filipino movie not to focus the camera on the actors’ faces, and even rarer to incorporate psychological thriller with supernatural fright. Admit it, most Filipino horror movies revolve around vengeful ghosts as frequent as teledramas revolve around missing children. Some scenes in the film may consist of poor acting, but the shots almost make up for it. It is also rare for a Philippine modern mainstream film to have a title that is not named after the movie’s theme song or after an object that was repeatedly shown on screen. ‘Wag Kang Lilingon means two things, one was literal (because seriously, no one would dare look behind him when he’s being chased by vengeful ghosts) and one was metaphorical (as it should be in all films), which suggests not to live in the past, because (spoiler alert) dwelling in her tragic past and its traumatic effects is what drove the main character to commit the murders.

So, if you’re a fan of buy one, take one, maybe you’ll like this film with its two-stories-in-one-movie and two-kinds-of-horror-in-onestory package.

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Originally titled Kokuhaku, Confessions follows the revenge master plan of a bereaved mother, Yoko Moriguchi, to punish whoever killed her daughter. The story was narrated through a series of confessions from Yoko’s students and from herself, making it psychologically thrilling in its own approach. It’s not the usual guess-who’sinsane or the predictable surprise-it’s-all-happening-inhis-head film—it’s a psychological warfare between the witty adult and the conceited adolescents. In fact, it was also sometimes considered as a drama mystery, since it is compelling as it is exciting.

The story is made up of different heart-breaking stories that show major character developments: from an enduring teacher turned cold-hearted enemy to an apathetic boy turned depressed. The film is a rare marriage of a dark, clever storyline and an intense but deliberate cinematography—after all, the movie was directed by the same guy who directed Suicide Girls (2004). On the other hand, the acting is not as superb as Oscar-winning actors and actress’ skills, and some lines were delivered in an overly dramatic manner. Some of the students’ confessions were unimaginable and absurd, but it just indicates how frightening a person’s thoughts may be, regardless his age and his social self-presentation.

Confession redefines the psychological thriller genre with its Russian nesting doll or matryoshka of plot twists within plot twists. It’s a break from both mainstream Hollywood psycho-thrillers and mundane Asian melodramas.

REVIEW

LA SALLEﾃ前 Jeff Treat Dimaano

43

FEATURE

When brain waves speak Stepping into the future Daniella Shaira Cortez

H

Chandler Belaro

umans once dreamed to soar among birds and we created airplanes; people once dreamed to discover the ocean and we invented submarines. Indeed, for as long as anyone can remember, technology has been transforming once-only-superpower abilities to reality. Gone are the days when authors had to imagine elaborate space accidents to induce superpowers. Now, technology is ready to redefine the phrase “thinking out loud,” in Iron Man style, with mind reading devices.

Just think how awesome it would we be if we get our hands on this technology. Whether during a test you didn’t study for, or during encounters with your crush, the excitement of mind reading has been around for centuries.

And because our bodies are so complex that our physical heart can almost never get tired, it also gives us a chance to encounter mind reading.

In the genes While receiving a bite from an exotic insect is more likely to give you poison than mindreading superpowers, our genes have already coded the ability to read minds. In fact, it’s a mechanism we encounter daily. Before trying LA SALLEÑO

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to read your classmate’s mind for test answers though, be warned that we cannot directly read thoughts yet. Instead, our current ability relies on perception. By gathering details such as tone of voice, we can make an educated guess of another’s thoughts and feelings.

Our innate mind reading ability is otherwise known as empathy—a component of social intelligence. Our ability to interpret emotion from a person’s body language is one of the key components of mind reading, according to the Psychology Today article Mind Reading by Annie Murphy Paul. The interpretation helps us understand the difference between boredom from an impatient sigh and despair from a defeated sigh. In turn, we can deal with social situations more effectively and build relationships.

Like comparing a rotary dial phone to the latest smartphone though, our mind reading abilities are still limited and can often be inaccurate based on a receiver’s sensitivity and the messenger’s ability to lie. An experiment in the article by Annie Murphy Paul revealed that strangers who made educated guesses about another stranger’s thoughts and feelings were only 20 percent accurate. Meanwhile, close friends and married couples were 35 percent

accurate, and the highest accuracy score was only 60 percent. As complex as our minds are, mental perception is only one factor to mind reading.

Deep within our genes, a special group of brain cells have been allowing us to read minds since birth.

Discovered in 1966, these cells are called mirror neurons that allow us to imitate actions by observing a movement and commanding a repetition of the observed action. According to LiveScience article Scientists Say Everyone Can Read Minds by Ker Than, these neurons can also replicate emotions that helps us relate to others. Experiments confirm that the brain circuits triggered whenever you feel pain are also triggered in us when we observe others feeling pain, according to The Neuroeconomics of Mind Reading and Empathy by Tania Singer and Ernst Fehr from the University of Zurich. No wonder extreme sports are almost as thrilling on TV and accidents induce such cringe-worthy moments.

When mirror neurons are at play, emotions are contagious and we can read others mind by ‘catching’ another person’s feelings. The key to this contagion is self-awareness to recognize these feelings and to attribute them

accordingly. As mentioned previously though, empathic accuracy is not as reliable as we would hope. We could improve our empathic accuracy through meditation, or wait for an exotic inset bite to give us superpowers, or we could do it 21st century style and rely on technology to do all the hard work for us.

Brain wave Pictionary As smartphones offer applications you can converse with, that humans falling for these applications (as seen in the film Her) is already plausible, technology is ready to step up its game by finding ways to read our minds.

One way to read minds in the future is through helmets. By attaching wires on our head that are connected to a machine, the device taps into our inner voice—the personal, private voice you can hear while reading this article.

When using your inner voice, the area in our brain that contributes to speech—the Broca’s area—is also activated, according to the article Talking to ourselves: the science of the little voice inside your head by Peter Mosely at The Guardian website. Guided by the aforementioned principle, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley recorded the brain activity of someone listening to spoken speech. This brain activity was then compared to the brain activity of someone using their inner voice, according to the article Mind reading helmet decodes ‘inner voice’ by Andy Dawson at the news website, Mirror. By doing so, several words were identified as specific brain cells are activated for specific words.

Using an algorithm of the collected data, the machine interpreted the inner voice of the participants by displaying visual representations of words on a monitor, as reported by news website Mail Online, in the article Mind reading software can eavesdrop on your secret inner voice by Mark Prigg—just like playing Pictionary.

Aside from identifying words, our thoughts also consist of images whether we recall childhood memories with family and friends, or fantasize the future with imagined spouses and jobs, for instance.

And as competitive as technology is, it has also discovered ways to identify who we’re thinking of, as proven by an undergraduate of Yale University in the United States.

The student used a computer that can recognize facial features were programmed to interpret volunteer’s brain activity when shown different faces. Afterward, the brain activity was also monitored when a new set of faces were shown to the volunteers.

By comparison of brain response to the images as if playing a matching game, the computer identified the face that the volunteer was viewing with an accuracy rate of 60 – 70 percent, according to the article Scientist explore possibilities of mind

reading by Karen Weintraub at the USA Today website.

Advancing from still pictures of faces and forms of words, scientists from the University of California Berkeley used Hollywood movie trailers as their puzzle for the computers to solve. By analyzing the brain activity and playing its matching game with algorithms and equations, the computer correctly interpreted the motion picture being viewed by the participant.

The accuracy rate was successful enough that the researchers were able to recreate the scene the participants were viewing just by interpreting the brain activity, according

THERE IS SO MUCH PROMISE IN THE RESEARCH FIELD OF MIND READING THAT FUTURE GENERATIONS COULD LOOK BACK AND FIND IT ABSURD THAT SOME SUPERHEROES' SPECIAL POWER WAS ONLY MIND READING.

to the article Mind-reading device invented by scientists to eavesdrop on ‘inner voice’

by Sarah Knapton at the website of The Telegraph. Perhaps in the future, we can rely on mind reading devices to interpret our imaginations into films, redefining the mainstream movie experience.

While technology aims to advance as if in a race against time, the studies are still limited and are not yet in full-on superpower mode as we see on the big screens. Still, it’s the building blocks on the tower of ambition that aims to read minds. While it sounds like a peek into the plot of an antagonist’s regime of mind control, scientists intend to use the technology in the field of medicine.

Toward a revolution As a superpower, scientists aim to use mind reading technology to give a voice to the paralyzed and to those who suffer from aphasia. Aphasia is a mental condition that robs a person the ability to communicate their thoughts, commonly caused by stroke and brain injuries. Due to problems in brain areas that process language, they speak random words that make no sense as a sentence. However, these people are still as intelligent as they were, it’s just that their ideas are lost within an island of words that no longer creates meaning, according to the website of the Aphasia Institute at Canada. Scientists say they can harness these brain waves to liberate the trapped thoughts of the aphasia sufferer.

Aside from granting voices to the paralyzed, some devices that monitor and interpret brain waves can be used for another superpower—telekinesis.

Manufactured by Emotiv Lifesciences, these telekinetic devices are basically compact high-resolution electroencephalogram (EEG) brain scanners that monitor brain activity in day-to-day situations, according to the article Portable brain-scan headets: 4 incredible applications by Brian Handwerk at the National Geographic website. Possibly introducing a new fashion trend, the device comes in the form of futuristic-looking headsets with different wires to connect on the head like expansive tree roots.

While the mind-reading aspect to these devices relies solely on interpreting brain waves for command, it is just as cool for paralyzed patients who can control their wheelchair with only their mind as the driver.

You don’t have to be paralyzed to enjoy these headphones though, because according to Tan Le, co-founder of the Emotiv Lifesciences company, “ … Whether you are able-bodied or not, you’re still going to be able to communicate and interact with your world in a meaningful way.” Indeed, the device also appeals to game enthusiasts. Drop your controller and use these headphones instead to make your characters jump, run, shoot— and literally anything else you can think of within the game’s command. As awesome as games are, the company also hopes to use this telekinetic feature for precise medical operations.

If you’re sentimental and crave being organized, then the neuroheadset is still your best friend. Equipped with a WiFi feature, you could connect the device’s software to your phone’s software whether in iOS or Android, to track your emotional responses when viewing digital data. In the future, the company hopes to revolutionize the way we sort our files from date taken and filename to folders organized by emotion. So whenever you need to find your happy place, you could simply tap on the Happiness folder and relive your treasured moments in years to come.

There is so much promise in the research field of mind reading that future generations could look back and find it absurd that some superheroes' special power was only mind reading. As the technology revamps our concept of human-to-computer encounters, the revolution extends toward expansive fields of leisure through games and fashion, as well as medicine and psychology toward unlocking the mysteries of the mind. As bright as the future seems, a gloomy shade of intent still poses the threat of mind control. All benefits considered though, we can only hope, then wait and see where these promising devices will take us.

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LATHALAIN

HEADS Denise Anne Valentino Jeff Treat Dimaano

&TALES A

long time ago, there was a lonely hunter living in a small village. It was located on the side of a mountain, and nipa huts lined up from the foothill upward. Each hut was far from the other that neighbors cannot see into one another’s windows.

The hunter lived in the farthest hut up the mountain. He did not like what and how his neighbors thought. And believe me when I say that he knew what and how they think. The hunter could read minds, even if he does not want to. If he got close enough to somebody, he would be able to hear their thoughts.

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When she's narrating, he didn't think his heartbeat even had a rhythm ... it sounded more like an unorganized clamor of drums being beaten by a drunk and brokenhearted guy having a catharsis.

And he hated that.

He hated hearing other people’s shallow musings.

He hated the way their dreams and nightmares kept him awake at night.

So the hunter lived far from everyone else. Besides, those were the days you wouldn’t want people to know you can read minds, with witchcraft accusation lurking just around the corner. Of course, he still has to endure coming down the mountain every day and interact with the village people to make a living out of his catch, but that was that.

Until he heard her.

He was hunting in the forest that morning when he heard someone telling a story. It was the story of how the mountain loved the sea so much that the mountain forced its soul out of itself and that soul became the river, which continuously flows to the sea. The hunter followed the string of thoughts of stories he heard, and came upon a young woman sitting on a large grey rock by the mountain stream. She had her back to him, but he did not have to see that her lips weren’t moving to know that she wasn’t talking. She was thinking.

She was thinking of how, maybe, there was a time when fishes and birds talked, and humans stole their voices by magic, just so humans can have the sole power to speak and consider

themselves powerful above all creatures. She was thinking of what if this, and what if that. She was thinking of the most beautiful thoughts the hunter has ever heard in his life.

He could have just come up to her and ask her name.

He could have just courtly asked her to tell him a story.

But he was a hunter, and she was a catch.

So he slit her throat from behind, and completely chopped her head from her body with his bolo. He took her head back to his hut. Her blood stained his bamboo floor, but he didn’t care.

He sat in front of her decapitated head until the sun went to bed, waiting for her to think, listening closely to her mind.

He waited and waited.

And waited.

And then, her eyes snapped open.

“Shit!” her brother said, almost jumping off the couch he was lying on. “This is the reason I don’t like it when you tell the bedtime story! I get nightmares instead of sweet dreams!”

“You’re fifteen,” she said, voice snappy, face expressionless, and knees tucked under her chin as she sat on the armchair. “You’re not entitled to bedtime stories for babies anymore. Besides, Grimm’s fairytales are gorier than my stories.”

“Fine,” he said. “Just finish it already. I think I need to erase that from my head before I go to bed.”

He tried his best to make his voice sound irritated, because truth be told, he actually liked her stories.

No one can tell him stories the way she could, even after he went to board a room in Manila

for college and met various kinds of storytellers from gossipers to the best professors in history.

He would hang out with his roommates late at night to tell stories in the dark, but even with the booze in his system, he could still say that his sister could have told it better. When she’s narrating, his heart thumps to the beat of Gloc9’s rap. Maybe even faster. He didn’t think his heartbeat even had a rhythm. He thought it sounded more like an unorganized clamor of drums being beaten by a drunk and brokenhearted guy having a catharsis.

He often wondered how she could do that though, considering that she hasn’t got a lot of friends and she was never the talkative type. Hell, she didn’t even know how to start a conversation.

He regretted not having told her what a cool storyteller she was, as he stood behind the podium to say the eulogy in her funeral years later. And as he stood there he hated himself for not dying first, so she could speak at his funeral, and they will know how great she was.

He didn’t wonder if he’ll ever find a storyteller like her.

He already knew he never would.

So after her burial, he paid for her casket to be dug out, her body to be extracted, her head to be chopped off and sealed in a glass jar filled with formaldehyde and methanol, and her body to be returned to the grave. Afterwards, he placed the jar on his desk in his home and sat on a chair before it.

He waited and waited.

And waited.

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LA SALLEﾃ前 Volume 22 No. 1