Afraid Of Your Own Company?

Lauren Hitchings:

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Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and his colleagues wanted to find out whether letting your mind wander is a pleasant experience.

In a series of experiments, people were told to sit still and do nothing but think. The participants not only found the experience unpleasant, they also opted to give themselves mild electric shocks, possibly to relieve the boredom.


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"With the number of times in our daily lives that we have downtime, having negative thinking experiences during those times can add up to a lot of stress," Wilson says.

Indeed, says Jay Segal of Temple University in Philadelphia, if a person's mind is constantly reacting to input, the body can get tired, and that's when stress becomes a problem. Introspection is a chance to let the mind relax and get the system back to a physical and emotional balance, he says.

People actually hate thinking because it implies questioning ourselves. Sounding scripted is never boring for the majority.

Consciousness On-Off Switch Discovered Deep In Brain || newScientist

Consciousness On-Off Switch Discovered Deep In Brain by Helen Thomson:

ONE moment you're conscious, the next you're not. For the first time, researchers have switched off consciousness by electrically stimulating a single brain area.

Scientists have been probing individual regions of the brain for over a century, exploring their function by zapping them with electricity and temporarily putting them out of action. Despite this, they have never been able to turn off consciousness – until now.

Although only tested in one person, the discovery suggests that a single area – the claustrum – might be integral to combining disparate brain activity into a seamless package of thoughts, sensations and emotions. It takes us a step closer to answering a problem that has confounded scientists and philosophers for millennia – namely how our conscious awareness arises.


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In a study published last week, Mohamad Koubeissi at the George Washington University in Washington DC and his colleagues describe how they managed to switch a woman's consciousness off and on by stimulating her claustrum. The woman has epilepsy so the team were using deep brain electrodes to record signals from different brain regions to work out where her seizures originate. One electrode was positioned next to the claustrum, an area that had never been stimulated before.

When the team zapped the area with high frequency electrical impulses, the woman lost consciousness. She stopped reading and stared blankly into space, she didn't respond to auditory or visual commands and her breathing slowed. As soon as the stimulation stopped, she immediately regained consciousness with no memory of the event.


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via theLoop