The voice in your head, what it is and how to make it a friend?

The resting-state 

It is 1 am, but your pounding heart keeps you awake. Judgmental voices in your head discuss your faults. You toss and turn, trying to shush the chatter, but the voices cannot be silenced; only complete exhaustion spares you from the internal battle when finally, you fall asleep.

The resting state is a wave of slow activations occurring between functionally related brain regions. These activations give rise to continuous self-talk. Stimulus halts this self-centered flow of thoughts to direct focus onto your daily tasks. However, this constant self-talk always returns to fill your downtime with personal vignettes, evaluations, and endless chatter.

The quality of your internal dialog depends on your mental state. When you are happy, then your mind generates a constructive and pleasant internal dialogue. Anxiety generates quarreling voices in your head, which castigate and diminish you. You must seek diversions to spare yourself from being alone. You spend time with friends or online, using drugs, cigarettes, anything that helps you escape, or at least postponing their onslaught. But these are fake solutions, which make the problem only more acute.

Why does the brain form a resting state at all? The resting-state weaves current events into the fabric of our lives. The resting-state combines your past into your present moment. The resting self-talk formulates your convictions, beliefs, loves and hates, the emotional foundation of your personality. A healthy personal anchor provides a secure grounding. It provides instant response to millions of problems during the day, whether you should accept the extra assignment from your boss or join your friend for a drink after work.

What is the quality of your self-talk? Do you have demons in your head? Watch my video: Mental Congruence: TheSecret Ingredient of Success. You will learn how to develop persistence and determination to move forward and reach your goals. Instead of constant sources of mental torture, your past mistakes and sins can become tools of learning and self-betterment.

You have only one life; live it well.  

More information on the resting state of the brain: Resting-State fMRI: A Review of Methods and Clinical Applications 

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Are we close to an answer on consciousness?

 

Revolutionary theories in science require scientists to depart from the accepted point of view. Consciousness science is no exception. The millennia-old mystery of the nature of consciousness may need an outsider's approach.

Looking at another quality of consciousness is our difficulty regulating our thoughts and emotions. The more we try to control what we think, the more unsuccessful it becomes, to the point that emotions can cause mental and bodily problems. During meditation, you watch your thoughts pass by or temporarily orient your focus through an active process. The difficulty arises because emotions represent energy, the fundamental force of motivation. This insight may remind you of the photon, the particle of material interaction. Emotions are analog to photons. Photons make an electron faster or slower. Likewise, emotions make you feel more or less energized. 

You probably remember learning about the electron in secondary school. It is indivisible, constant (never changes no matter what you do to it), and cannot be destroyed. Likewise, the most fundamental qualities of the mind are unity, indivisibility (we always have a unified perception), and constancy from birth to death. So electrons (and their nuclei) build matter in space, which you can hold, but the mind exists in time, which you cannot control.

The fermionic mind hypothesis recognizes the mind as the smallest unit of intellect and an organic and necessary part of the physical world. Our bodily and mental needs, even hunger or thirst, spur interaction with our environment. An intelligent response to a stimulus depends on the intuition of the physical laws, such as gravity. Thus, the brain operates by physical principles. The energetic nature of emotions shows their role in intelligence, morality, and mental health. 

The fermionic mind hypothesis is a paradigm shift in consciousness science; watch my video. How do you explain consciousness? on YouTube.

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Decision making ability is a reliable marker of emotional stability

 

A common factor called "decision acuity" underpins diverse decision-making abilities. Decision acuity reflects a facility for sound decision-making. High decision acuity reflected fast learning, considering outcomes in the distant future, reward sensitivity, trust in others, and a low tendency for retaliation. Crucially, decision acuity and IQ had dissociable brain signatures. Independent of IQ, decision acuity predicted performance in the decision-making tasks was higher in older subjects and increased parental education. 

Decision acuity may be necessary for understanding mental health, inferior social function, and aberrant thought patterns. Decision acuity increased with age and was associated with mental health symptoms independently of intelligence. It was associated with distinctive resting-state networks, particularly in brain regions typically engaged by decision-making tasks. Decision acuity is reliable and stable over months and even years later. Therefore, stable, functional connectivity underpins decision-making ability. 

These results may be necessary for understanding mental health, inferior social function, and aberrant thought patterns. Decision acuity is reduced in individuals with low general social functioning. Decision acuity was decreased in those with deviant thinking and low general social functioning. 

Image: Rodin, The Thinker

Read the original article: A generic decision-making ability predicts psychopathology in adolescents and young adults and is reflected in distinct brain connectivity patterns

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The psychological consequences of emotions

Time representation of emotions Positive emotions come from slow oscillations, which expand time perception (top left). Negative emotions carry a lot of information, which contracts time perception (Bottom left)  

 

Neurons transfer information by electric means, forming brain frequencies. Although emotions represent the unlimited colors of the human experience, they only have positive or negative energy signatures. Therefore, emotions represent energy imbalances, the fundamental motivations of the mind. The brain's self-regulation produces a response that restores the equilibrium position or resting state. The resting state is the spontaneous fluctuations of the inactive, resting brain.

The need for air, water, food, and mating modulates between urgency and relaxation, turning time into a subjective mental experience. In the words of Einstein, "When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it's only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it's two hours." Einstein's insight shows that even minutes and seconds trigger impatience when we are suffering; the painful misery makes the clock seem to tick slower. In addition to hot stoves and pains, positive experiences also slow the perception of time. We feel the transience only in retrospect. When spending time with a nice girl, or boy for that matter, time seems to stand still.

Information processing builds on the mental state; fast oscillations permit greater information transmission, but their significant energy needs tax the brain's energy cycle. Positive and negative emotions have contrasting energy needs and mental and health consequences. The increasing time perception in both cases suggests the trigonometric (wavy) origin of emotions; positive emotions expand, and negative emotions contract the wave. 

Fast oscillations are deterministic, leaving their residual energy on resting activations. They constrict focus and create psychological heaviness. They recreate the past via rumination and repetitive thinking. Negative emotions are also information-rich. The excess information has to go somewhere. There are two possible paths to channel their pent-up tension. In the first case, aggravation, critical tendency, and physical brutality radiate into the environment. In the second case, negative emotions are internalized, wreaking havoc on the hormonal system via anxiety and depression. Both possibilities induce adverse hormonal and psychological consequences, as shown in my YouTube video, where psychological tightness is represented by lines drawn closer together. Where do the pressure and tightness of negative emotions go? 

Watch Understanding and Managing Emotions. 

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How does the brain produce the mind?

 

The nature of the mind is an age-old question. The most puzzling aspect of consciousness is its autonomy. The difficulty of meditation indicates the precarious nature of conscious mind control. We have a hard time regulating our thoughts, let alone suppressing them; our emotions, particularly our negative feelings, tend to spill into every aspect of our lives. 

Animals can only find food and escape danger if they provide an intelligent answer to stimuli. They can walk, swim, fly, run, climb trees, and even hunt with incredible precision. How do they do it? Every move is a teaching moment about gravity, distance, weight, and force. The intuition of the physical environment ensures survival. Sensory organs turn the spatial information from our three-dimensional world into a complex temporal rhythm, forming the basis of decision-making and memory. Adopting the physical laws integrates the organism into the environment. Intellect is the ability to adapt to the physical laws of nature through memory and learning. The birth of the non-material mind enables comparisons and associations based on emotions.

The brain relies on the body for its extensive nutrient needs, but it only connects with the outside world through the sensory system, which channels information to the cortex. The internal mirroring of the environment makes it possible for the mind to orient between birth and death. Therefore, the mind is a temporal compass, which can maintain its purpose automatically without conscious intention. Stimulus unbalances successive regulatory layers of the brain, but an internal mechanism generates a response that restores a ground condition, the so-called resting state. The brain’s intuitive ability to maintain the resting state is particle-like self-regulation.

Watch the video; where do emotions come from? 

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The Higgs boson and the Higgs field

 

The Higgs boson is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field. The Higgs boson was proposed in 1964 by Peter Higgs, François Englert, and four other theorists to explain why certain particles have mass. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland confirmed its existence in 2012 through the ATLAS and CMS experiments. 

The Standard Model predicts only massless particles, contradicting our experience. The solution was the Higgs boson, which can provide mass. The Higgs boson is the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, which takes a lower non-zero than a zero vacuum expectation value. This non-zero value supposes to break electroweak symmetry, giving mass to the weak force.

Questions about the Higgs hypothesis:

1, The Higgs boson lends mass to the weak force, electrons, and quarks by bumping into them. However, Einstein's general relativity tells us that mass is a permanent particle quality. Therefore, mass can turn into energy by the equation. 

E = M C^2

If the mass is an acquired quality, energy is just a figment of the Higgs boson. 

2, In the months leading up to the discovery, the media was awash in buzz for the so-called "God" particle. The discovery of the Higgs boson was supposed to solve fundamental questions in physics about our world's structure. Nevertheless, many years after the discovery, we are still waiting... 

3, The Higgs boson, with a mass of 125.35 GeV, is too light to form mass-giving interactions with other particles. To solve this problem, supersymmetry was born. Supersymmetry predicts the existence of extra particles, which would cancel out their Standard-Model partners' contributions to the Higgs mass, allowing a lighter mass Higgs boson. Thus, supersymmetry extends the Standard Model by predicting a super-partner particle for each known particle. These new particles, which could fix the Higgs boson's mass, explain the Higgs mass problem.

Unfortunately, no supersymmetric particles were observed in collisions at the LHC. However, physicists are very clever and can solve their problems. In the absence of supersymmetry, they proposed the existence of multiverses. According to this idea, the Higgs can take any mass. Therefore, each universe of infinite universes would contain a specific mass Higgs particle. It's reasonable to assume that if there were an endless number of universes, one of them might have a Higgs with the observed mass, and we are lucky to live in the universe with the correct mass. 

Another proposed solution to solve the light-mass Higgs problem is yet another field, the axion field. The Higgs mass would depend on the hypothetical axion field's numerical value, which permeates space and time. Axions could relax the value of the Higgs mass to its observed value. 

4, The Higgs boson is a massive particle, around 125 GeV – about 130 times the proton's mass at rest – with zero electric charges and spin. Where is Higgs boson mass coming from? At one point, the Higgs field turned on. Conveniently, the Higgs field has a non-zero value, so it can spontaneously break down to give mass to the elementary particles. The idea of the Higgs has only kicked the can down the road. What is your view? Is there a Higgs boson or a Higgs hoax?  

A 2014 paper by Belyaev, Brown, Froadi, and Frandsen is a reminder that the Standard Model is unsettled and the discovery of the Higgs Boson is not 100% certain. 

Image credit: CERN for the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations

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Can we examine the mind as a physical system? Social consequences of the fermionic mind hypothesis

 

My latest paper connects basic research in neuroscience with psychobiology, clinical diagnostic, and therapeutic insights. Sensory processing can increase or decrease synaptic complexity and cognitive potential. Thus, we can calculate the energy associated with intellect.    

Positive psychology recognizes the close relationship between social climate and resource availability. The social environment is an effective determinant of the behavior of animals and people. In the late nineteenth century, the Russian scientist Peter Kropotkin studied species from bacteria and fish to mammals and birds in various supply settings. A biological richness and supply abundance allow ants, bees, falcons, swallows, gazelles, buffalos, herds of wild horses, tribes of dogs, wolf packs, and communities of people to form cooperation and generosity. Positive environments encourage generosity and collaboration by supporting security, trust, and confidence. Desirable population structures promote cooperation.

However, generosity disappears when the reduction of supplies reaches a tipping point. Defections sweep through the population, causing animals and people to abandon charity. The lack of resources inflicts a cognitive burden, negatively affecting IQ in people. The poor's lack of generosity originates in mental exhaustion rather than personality defects. The above considerations also explain poverty's role in negative personality transformations. Personal uncertainty can lead to conspiracy theories, terrorism, and crime. Moreover, the insecurity manifests as a widespread distrust of governments, public institutions, and even science. Therefore, basic social safety promotes security and improves cognitive performance.

Read the whole article in the Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal.

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