All done trick-or-treating, and the Globe candy tastes like shit (been that way for a while now?)!
"It is a tradition that harkens back to a more trusting time.... the holiday never feels like work.... a nice way to create memories”
Who wants to remember and relive scary things?
"Northeastern researchers experiment with fear at Newton haunted house" by Carolyn Y. Johnson | Globe Staff, October 25, 2013
NEWTON — A squad of elite fear specialists will descend into the slightly musty basement of a Victorian house Friday night to take up haunting positions. Their preferred instrument of terror? Insights from the science of emotion.
The monsters and ghouls in this unusual haunted house are Northeastern University psychology researchers who spend their days generating emotional responses in the laboratory, to probe what’s happening in the brain when people experience visceral feelings.
The haunted house experience of frightening children and adults — and observing their reactions — has helped the masked scientists sharpen ideas for research questions to test back in the laboratory.
People respond powerfully to uncertainty, research has shown, so in this haunted house the monsters hold still as long as possible to prolong the doubt about whether they are alive or not. Experiments have also shown that we pay close attention to the whites of people’s eyes, which can convey fear, said longtime skeleton and postdoctoral researcher Maria Gendron.
“You open your eyes really wide and follow the person with your eyes, and then eventually when they’re sort of sure that you are animate, at that point you do a very subtle movement,” she said.
The annual haunted house — the scientists sometimes refer to it as a “fear induction” — is a charity event that raises more than a thousand dollars each year for the Greater Boston Food Bank.
Like any experiment, the haunting has been tweaked since psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett started the tradition at her home nine years ago, at the suggestion of her now-teenage daughter, Sophia.
Gee, Jews promoting fear. What else is new?
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Barrett’s laboratory doesn’t specifically study how to scare people. In fact, human beings have a pretty good intuition for how to creep each other out: haunted houses, horror movies, and spooky stories haven’t needed scholars’ insights to elicit shrieks of fright. But the haunted house gives researchers an interesting way to generate and witness emotions outside the lab — sometimes reinforcing their own findings.
The Northeastern team has shown that facial expressions, which have long been interpreted as a readout of internal emotion, are far more complex and are highly dependent on context. That’s on display as the ghouls watch their victims proceed through the maze of rooms.
“Half of them are laughing, half of them are flat face, no expression, some are screaming, some are crying,” Gendron said. “They do things we wouldn’t associate with a prototypical fear response — there are some really nice parallels to things we find in the lab.”
Barrett said that speaking to people about their experience in the haunted house raised another question: She found that people vividly remembered certain rooms or certain monsters, which made sense. Yet incidental details were also strongly imprinted in their memories.
“People would comment on, ‘You’re not wearing that silly hat that you wore last year,’ or ‘You’re wearing the same earrings as last year,’ . . . what you would call neutral memory,” Barrett said. “That got me wondering. When people are aroused, they’re physically activated and aroused, do they actually just encode information better? Even neutral information, will they remember that information better?”
She wondered whether a part of the brain, the amygdala, classically thought of as the fear center, could be important for neutral memory and began to design experiments. The early results, she said, are backing up the observations from the haunted house.
Suzanne Oosterwijk, a former postdoctoral researcher, said the haunted house was more than just a fun time — it put on display a behavior that she had long been interested in: the ways in which curiosity can draw people toward things that disgust or repulse them.
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Now a researcher at the University of Amsterdam, Oosterwijk recently received a grant to systematically explore the behavior and try to understand the dynamic way in which people respond to negative experiences, sometimes seeking them out.
The biggest value of the experience of playing scary monsters for one night may be that it builds social bonds crucial for science to work.
“It actually helps the scientific process,” Barrett said. “If people trust each other and spend time together outside the lab doing tasks, they get to know each other and be a little tougher on each other in the lab, and nobody gets upset.”
Why would anyone get upset about trying to find the truth?
The haunted house will be held Friday, Oct. 25, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at 18 Washington Park, Newtonville. A visit costs $5 per person.
It truly is an agenda-pu$hing jewspaper.
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Related: Is Scary Mary’s house really haunted?
"Halloween scene too realistic for some" by KRISTI EATON | Associated Press, October 18, 2013
MUSTANG, Okla. — One man lies on his stomach in the driveway. Blood is splattered along the garage door that smashed his head and presumably killed him. Another man lies a few feet away, run over by a truck.
The two accident victims are in fact dummies, created as part of a family’s vivid Halloween display to shock and frighten. And it certainly has. At least one woman has called 911 to report that a man’s head had been shut into the garage door.
Jennifer Mullins said she got the idea for the macabre scene from a website and showed her husband, Johnnie, who was happy to scare up a display. Mullins knew it would raise some eyebrows, but she’s surprised by just how much attention it’s received.
A police spokeswoman said no crime was committed in the false-alarm 911 call.
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Also see:
Security heightened for Halloween events
Safety tips for Halloween trick-or-treating
Maine towns offer alternative Halloween events
Sampling of creepy reads for Halloween
Scary good parties to stretch out your Halloween
The history of Halloween
I'll bet the candy company profits taste good after this agenda-pu$hing. Plus it's cheap food that is easy to prepare and will keep you hungry for more but going full tilt!
Now for something really scary:
"Pentagon agency to spend $70m on brain implant research; Devices are used in medical care" by James Gorman | New York Times, October 25, 2013
Worldwide, 100,000 people have electrical implants in their brains to treat the involuntary movements associated with Parkinson’s disease, and scientists are experimenting with the technique for depression and other disorders.
But today’s so-called deep brain stimulation does not monitor its own effectiveness, partly because complex ailments like depression do not have defined biological signatures.
The federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, announced Thursday that it intended to spend more than $70 million over five years to jump to the next level of brain implants, either by improving deep brain stimulation or by developing new technology.
I that that was kind of important. The Manchurian Candidate is real.
Justin Sanchez, DARPA program manager, said that for scientists now, the goal is improving the technology.
“There is no technology that can acquire signals that can tell them precisely what is going on with the brain,” he said. “DARPA is trying to change the game on how we approach these kinds of problems.”
The new program, called Systems-Based Neurotechnology and Understanding for the Treatment of Neuropsychological Illnesses, is part of an Obama administration brain initiative that is intended to promote innovative basic neuroscience. Participants in the initiative include DARPA, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.
The announcement of DARPA’s goal is the first indication of how that research agency will participate in the initiative. The money is expected to be divided among several teams, and research proposals are now being sought.
DARPA’s project is partly inspired by the needs of combat veterans who suffer from mental and physical conditions, and is the first to directly invest in researching human illness as part of the brain initiative.
The National Institutes of Health, which has not decided on its emphasis, appears to be aiming for basic research, based on the recommendations from a working committee advising the agency.
Dr. Helen Mayberg, a neuroscientist at Emory University School of Medicine who has pioneered work on deep brain stimulation and depression, praised the new program.
“DARPA’s initiative says in no uncertain terms that we want to concentrate on human beings,” she said, adding that she was particularly pleased with the emphasis on deep brain stimulation.
“This adds to a growing recognition that this approach to brain disease is a promising strategy,” she said.
Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University, one of the leaders of the health institutes committee dealing with the direction of that agency’s work under the brain initiative, also applauded the direction of the DARPA research.
“It plays to their strength in brain recordings and devices, and it addresses psychiatric issues that are major concerns for the military,” she said.
DARPA’s goal would require solving several long-standing problems in neuroscience, one of which is to develop a detailed model of how injuries or illnesses like depression manifest themselves in the brain.
The next step is to create a device that can monitor the signs of illness or injury, treat them appropriately, and measure the effects of the treatment. The result would be like a highly sophisticated pacemaker for a brain disorder.
Then they can really tell you what to think! They won't have to rely on the propaganda pre$$!
DARPA is asking for teams to produce a device ready to be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for approval within five years.
“Is it overambitious? Of course,” said Mayberg, adding that working with the brain was “a slow process.” But she said that it was an impressive first investment and that the clear emphasis on human illness was “stunning.”
Whether or not the goal is fully achieved, Sanchez said, the endeavor was worthwhile.
“We’re going to learn a tremendous amount about how the brain works,” he said. “And we’re going to be developing new medical devices.”
The testing of any such devices would involve both animals and human subjects, and Sanchez said DARPA had set up an ethics panel for the program and other DARPA neuroscience work. A presidential bioethics commission also oversees all aspects of the brain initiative.
Oh, that makes me feel at ease.
The Obama administration is budgeting $100 million for the first year of the brain initiative.
In this time of austerity and food stamp cuts?
A committee of the health institutes produced a draft report in September that indicated that the agency would concentrate its $40 million share on systems or networks in the brain, not individual cells and not the whole brain.
DARPA is allocated $50 million this year under President Barack Obama’s brain initiative. The agency would not specify precisely how much it would spend in the first year, and all the numbers depend on the final federal budget.
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Time for me to shut my brain down for a while.
I hope you got enough candy and treats by today's Globe Grab Bag, readers.
