Derren Brown's Blog, page 30

Sleepy brain waves predict dream recall

ScienceBlogs: The patterns of brain waves that occur during sleep can predict the likelihood that dreams will be successfully recalled upon waking up, according to a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research provides the first evidence of a 'signature' pattern of brain activity  associated with dream recall. It also provides further insight into the brain mechanisms underlying dreaming, and into the relationship between our dreams and our memories.

Cristina Marzano of the Sleep Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of Rome and her colleagues recruited 65 students, selected on the basis of their sleeping habits. For the study, the participants slept for two consecutive nights in a sound-proof, temperature-controlled room in the lab. They were left to sleep uninterrupted on the first night, so that they would get accustomed to the new surroundings.

On the second night, the researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the participants' brain waves while they slept, and woke them up during specific types of sleep. Soon after being woken up, they were asked filled out a 'sleep and dream diary', giving details of whether or not they dreamt, how many dreams they had and, if they could remember, the contents of any dreams they had.

The researchers found that they could predict successful dream recall from the brain activity patterns recorded just before awakening. Of the participants woken  up during REM sleep, those who exhibited more low frequency theta waves in the frontal lobes were more likely to remember their dreams than those who did not.

For the full article visit ScienceBlogs/neurophilosophy

Tour so far

The last two weeks have been a delightful hiatus in Birmingham, a city I really like. It was re-vamped a while back with such pride, and the area around Brindley Place in particular boasts enough great restaurants to keep a foodie like me very happy for a fortnight. Bank Restaurant is top of the list, being where I spent pretty much every afternoon, and Loves nearby was a really excellent new find.

It's also a great city for the tour, as the staff of the New Alexandra theatre are beyond compare. We are lucky enough to have met some really excellent, super-friendly crews during our tours: the Alex bunch are a particular huge joy. Kim, the general manager, had made me an astonishing photo print as a welcome gift, which I then went and left behind and must now work out a way of getting to me. Oh dear, so sorry Kim. Thank you everyone there, it's always such a treat.

The famous Brum friendliness was evident at stage door: numbers are so large outside now that it's always a bit of a rush, but everyone was super-lovely and didn't seem to mind. We added a tiny new bit to the show that seems to be working well, on top of the improvements we made back in Oxford. The process of continually trying to improve and tweak is one of the real joys of touring, and of course helps keep the show feeling fresh for me.

I donned the classic hat and shades celebrity disguise for a day-off trip to Alton Towers one afternoon with the gang, and we soared and dipped and vomited on Nemesis and Oblivion and Air and all the rest of them. I rather like 13, for what it's worth. I like a bit of old-fashioned big dipperiness. A bit of plummeting punctuation to my rides. Nowadays it's all on the one note, all the same velocity and turny-twisty.

Last year I remember riding everything, including the hilarious and terrifying Oblivion, as many times as I could, like a six-year old high on Fanta, and found later that I had strained my throat with all the tension and nearly lost my voice. So this time I was more careful. (Also, I remember, last year we had Jennie with us, who added stage blood to our faces and blackened up our teeth with make-up so we could look horribly damaged in those mid-ride photographs they sell at the exits. I recommend this game unreservedly.)

The past weeks also brought a night where a chap fainted twice on stage (during, for those in the know, THAT bit). Twice! I'm sure it all looked like part of the show, but it provided the sort of extra excitement that I live for.

Tonight is our first of three nights in Northampton. I believe it's also home to a Torchwood convention this weekend. I wonder what sort of cross-over demographic will emerge. I'll watch out for John Barrowman costumes or sudden bursts of 'I Am What I Am' in the stalls. (Do I have that right? I honestly don't have a TV so I don't really know what I'm talking about).

Righty-ho, carry on about your business. Pleased that the Rapture hasn't affected show attendance, though I did find myself wondering at a couple of second-half empty seats in the front stalls last night.

The picture shows the rubbish collected from just ONE QUARTER of the stalls the other night. We're such a filthy bunch.

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Designer poo – coming to a toilet near you.

Synthetic biology is all about re-engineering living organisms to make them do stuff we would find useful — like eating oil spills or excreting superfuels. It's a tall order, but we're well on our way already. Still, a slightly easier tactic would be to just tweak thedesign of organisms that already exist, rather than building synthetic genomes from scratch. Designers Daisy Ginsberg and James King and their scientist colleagues at Cambridge University did exactly that with a project called E.Chromi, which turned e.colibacteria into living, color-coded sensors that can be "programmed" to secrete an array of bright hues in the presence of certain chemicals. In the future, E.Chromi-like bugs could live in your gut and give you an early-warning signal for an oncoming illness by turning your poop blue.

Via Fastcodesign

Apple causes 'religious' reaction in brains of fans, say neuroscientists

In a recently screened BBC documentary, UK neuroscientists suggested that the brains of Apple devotees are stimulated by Apple imagery in the same way that the brains of religious people are stimulated by religious imagery.

People have often talked about "the cult of Apple", and if a recent BBC TV documentary is to be believed, there could be something in it.

The program, Secrets of the Superbrands, looks at why technology megabrands such as Apple, Facebook and Twitter have become so popular and such a big part of many people's lives.

In the first episode, presenter Alex Riley decided to take a look at Apple. He wanted to discover what it is about the company that makes people so emotional. Footage of the opening of the Cupertino company's Covent Garden store in central London last year showed hordes of Apple devotees lining up outside overnight, while the staff whipped up customers (and themselves) into something of an evangelical frenzy. This religious-like fervor got Riley thinking – he decided to take a closer look at the inside of the head of an Apple fanatic to see what on earth was going on in there.

Riley contacted the editor of World of Apple, Alex Brooks, an Apple worshipper who claims to think about Apple 24 hours a day, which is possibly 23 hours too many for most regular people. A team of neuroscientists studied Brooks' brain while undergoing an MRI scan, to see how it reacted to images of Apple products and (heaven forbid) non-Apple products.

According to the neuroscientists, the scan revealed that there were marked differences in Brooks' reactions to the different products. Previously, the scientists had studied the brains of those of religious faith, and they found that, as Riley puts it: "The Apple products are triggering the same bits of [Brooks'] brain as religious imagery triggers in a person of faith."

Today is the end of the world – so what are you doing tomorrow?

Preacher and evangelical broadcaster Harold Camping has announced that Jesus Christ will return to Earth (if you're in New Zealand then thats now) Saturday, May 21,(this is his second attempt) and many of his followers are traveling the country in preparation for the weekend Rapture. They're undeterred, it seems, by Mr. Camping's dodgy track record with end-of-the-world predictions. (Years ago, he argued at length that the reckoning would come in 1994.) We've yet to learn what motivates people like him to predict (and predict again) the end of the world, but there's a long and unexpected psychological literature on how the faithful make sense of missed appointments with the apocalypse.

The most famous study into doomsday mix-ups was published in a 1956 book by renowned psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues called When Prophecy Fails. A fringe religious group called the Seekers had made the papers by predicting that a flood was coming to destroy the West Coast. The group was led by an eccentric but earnest lady called Dorothy Martin, given the pseudonym Marian Keech in the book, who believed that superior beings from the planet Clarion were communicating to her through automatic writing. They told her they had been monitoring Earth and would arrive to rescue the Seekers in a flying saucer before the cataclysm struck.

Festinger was fascinated by how we deal with information that fails to match up to our beliefs, and suspected that we are strongly motivated to resolve the conflict—a state of mind he called "cognitive dissonance." He wanted a clear-cut case with which to test his fledgling ideas, so decided to follow Martin's group as the much vaunted date came and went. Would they give up their closely held beliefs, or would they work to justify them even in the face of the most brutal contradiction?

When Prophecy Fails has become a landmark in the history of psychology, but few realize that many other studies have looked at the same question: What happens to a small but dedicated group of people who wait in vain for the end of the world?

Full story at Slate.com

Matt Berry – Witchazel

Fans of the IT crowd and The Mighty Boosh wil be happy to see Matt Berry (a.k.a Dixon Bainbridge and Douglas Reynholm) has released an album. Surprisingly it's all be made entirely in Apple's Garageband in his front room, but sounds like finely polished, melodic pop, 60′s psychadelia and folky pop.

The rather touching video above, directed and filmed by Gerard Giorgi-Coll goes to prove that in most cases, big budget, auto-tune bling can be easily undermined by a bit of good old fashioned British talent, a full beard and a pheasant.

Review the Album here.

Self-proclaimed witch says human laws don't apply to her

A SELF-proclaimed witch who says she is not subject to earthly laws is appealing against convictions for dangerous driving and recklessly causing injury after dragging a policeman by the arm for 190m.

Highton marriage celebrant Eilish De'Avalon told Sen-Constable Andrew Logan in February last year she was not subject to earthly laws because she was from another world.

"Your laws and penalties don't apply to me. I'm not accepting them, I'm sorry, I must go, thank you," De'Avalon said.

De'Avalon, 41, was jailed for two months, fined $1250 and  her licence was disqualified.

Svengali 2012: Milton Keynes and Torquay Tickets now on sale!

The following venues for Svengali 2012 are now on sale:

27, 28, 29 Feb and 1, 2, 3 March – Milton Keynes Theatre

26, 27, 28 April – Princess Theatre, Torquay

You can find a complete listing of announced tour dates so far over on the main site (click here)

3 Man Chess – the ultimate brain busting chess game

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Finally, a Chess variant board has been developed that accommodates three players, without compromising ANY of the rules, strategies, or competitive challenges that make Chess the best board game in the world.  The only changes from conventional chess are some protocol issues that must be followed to maintain order where the teams border each other, which is simple and necessary.  Also, please notice that the trajectory lines orienting from the outer rank, are simply visual aids to help guide diagonal moves passing through the center.

If the path is clear, a diagonal move starting from the outer rank can pass through the center and sweep back around to where it originated.  The complexities of the third player are infinite.  Your threatened piece may be allowed to maintain occupancy as your position is beneficial to the threatening player.  But how long can it last?  This scenario may exist all over the board.

There are multiple trust and doubt situations between all players.  An unexpected move might well result in a cascading massacre.  Defense is crucial since a diagonal move through the center, or a horizontal move around the center can sneak up behind you.  A player can be checkmated by a combination of both other players or ultimately one player can checkmate both other players at the same time.

Available at 3 Man Chess

Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story'

In a dismissal that underlines his firm rejection of religious comforts, Britain's most eminent scientist said there was nothing beyond the moment when the brain flickers for the final time. Hawking, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, shares his thoughts on death, human purpose and our chance existence in an exclusive interview with the Guardian today.

The incurable illness was expected to kill Hawking within a few years of its symptoms arising, an outlook that turned the young scientist to Wagner, but ultimately led him to enjoy life more, he has said, despite the cloud hanging over his future.

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he said. "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark," he added.

Hawking's latest comments go beyond those laid out in his 2010 book, The Grand Design, in which he asserted that there is no need for a creator to explain the existence of the universe. The book provoked a backlash from some religious leaders, including the chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, who accused Hawking of committing an "elementary fallacy" of logic.

Full Article at Guardian Science