Derren Brown's Blog, page 41

Religious Leader in India Has 39 Wives, 94 Children

As the leader of the "Chana" sect and the head of a family that includes 94 children and 33 grandchildren, Ziona and his family believe in "Kum Sang Rorel," or "the rule of 1,000 years by Jesus Christ on Earth" found in the Book of Revelations. The "Chana" sect allows polygamy, and when combined with the particular bizarre belief structure will seemingly result in Ziona and his massive family hanging out with Jesus returns.

You'd think some type of mental strain would be seen in Ziona, but he's apparently happier than ever. "Today I feel like God"s special child. He"s given me so many people to look after. I consider myself a lucky man to be the husband of 39 women and head of the world"s largest family."

Yahoo

 

Sight Gets Repurposed in Brains of the Blind

In the brains of people blind from birth, structures used in sight are still put to work — but for a very different purpose. Rather than processing visual information, they appear to handle language.

Linguistic processing is a task utterly unrelated to sight, yet the visual cortex performs it well.

"It suggests a kind of plasticity that's even broader than the kinds observed before," said Marina Bedny, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's a really drastic change. It suggests there isn't a predetermined function an area can serve. It can take a wide range of possible functions."

In a study published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bedny's team monitored the brain activity of five congenitally blind individuals engaged in language-intensive tasks.

Immense neurological plasticity was suggested by research conducted in the late 1990s on "rewired" ferrets — after their optical nerves were severed and rerouted into their auditory cortices, they could still see — but such studies, already ethically troubling in animals, would be unconscionable in humans.

Instead, researchers have used brain imaging to study plasticity resulting from natural sensory deprivation in people. They've found that the visual cortices of blind people become active as they read Braille. It wasn't clear, however, whether this was a function of Braille's spatial demands, which overlap with the spatial aspects of sight, or a radical repurposing of supposedly specialized areas.

Wired Science

Photo of Stevie Wonder by Al Satterwhite

The 'wolf child' delighted to be named the world's hairiest girl

Her nicknames may include 'wolf girl' and 'monkey face'.

But 11-year-old Thai girl Supatra Sasuphan today insisted that she was after being officially recognised as the world's hairiest girl.

Although the schoolgirl from Bangkok has faced merciless teasing at school, Supatra says being given a Guinness World Record for her hair has helped her become extremely popular.

'I'm very happy to be in the Guinness World Records! A lot of people have to do a lot to get in,' she said. 'All I did was answer a few questions and then they gave it to me.'

Supatra is one of just 50 known sufferers of Ambras Syndrome – caused by a faulty chromosome – to be documented since the Middle Ages. Before the disease was understood, sufferers were branded 'werewolves.'

Full Story at The Mail

 

Dogs Can Hear How Big You Are

Lots of animals are well aware that bigger means scarier. In stressful or aggressive situations, for example, the hair or fur of chimpanzees, rats, cats, and even humans stands up on end (in humans, given our lack of fur, this results in goose bumps) in an effort to dissuade a potential attack. Elephant seals use a display called "rearing up" to make themselves look bigger – as if they need to look bigger in the first place!

Since some animals tend to be good at looking bigger than they truly are, visual cues may not actually be a reliable method of sizing up another individual. In addition, using vision alone to determine body size is error-prone due to distance and visibility. It would seem prudent, then, that some animals would need an alternative mechanism to use in determining body size. It seems as if domestic dogs have just such a method: they listen.

Full article at The Thoughtful Animal

 

 

New Derren Brown Store Launched!

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The new store has now officially launched, head over to http://derrenbrown.co.uk/store/ to get your hands on some exclusive Tour merchandise and a few other bits and pieces.

You'll find Tour posters, T-shirts, mugs, and plenty more.

Please note the store is currently only available for United Kingdom, Channel Islands and Isle of Man residents. We are working on a European version!

Paranormality – Why we see what isn't there – Richard Wiseman

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Britain's most charming and lovely psychologist Richard Wiseman will not be a stranger to the people on this blog. He's appeared on several of Derren's shows and his last book is a constant reference for all of us.

For the past twenty years, he's immersed himself in the weird world of supernatural science; testing telepaths, spending nights in haunted castles and attempting to talk with the dead.

In Paranormality he cuts through the hype and goes in search of the truth behind extraordinary stories of poltergeists, possession and second sight.  And along the way he shows us some really rather remarkable things about how our brains work, how it is possible to have an out-of-body experience or lucid dream of our own, and just why we feel the need to believe. .

Following up from his extremely successful 59 Seconds Wiseman has tapped in to the reasons why our minds dictate reality to us even when the message it's giving us has no scientific basis.

As usual it's written in standard bullshit-free Wiseman style but manages to tap in to fairly complex ideas and subjects with beautiful ease. Throughout the book are various QR codes linking to external content and untrusting exercises and the short sharp chapters make it very easy to pick up and delve in to, or just read from front to back. Learning psychology isn't supposed to be this much fun, Mr Wiseman's managed to make it so.

Covering subjects such as fortune telling, out-of-body experiences, talking to the dead and ghost hunting, it's also the perfect skeptics guide with solid science to back it up. For me the obvious favourite is chapter 6 about the world's second greatest mind reader – Washington Irving Bishop. There's even a little guide in there on how to read minds and tips on how to play tricks on your friends and get in to some light-hearted but effective mind trickery.

95% of all pop-psychology books can easily be reduced down to a fraction of the content without losing any of the message, often there's a lot of fluffing around these subjects to prepare you for the really meaty bits in the middle and you can find yourself switching off a little after 20 pages and 19 repeats of the same message. But like Quirkology and 59 Seconds, Wiseman has managed to visit multiple topics, look at them from several angles and make this an invaluable book with plenty of content.

59 seconds took me 2 reads. One to get through it and the second to go back and absorb the content in detail. I've only just finished my first read of Paranormality and will be going back through it again to try out some of the tests myself. It's certainly one to leave on the coffee table and is a guaranteed conversation starter anywhere.

Available now from Amazon – Click Here

Ketamine reveals truth about the out-of-body experience

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A popular "club drug" promises to open a scientific window on the strange world of out-of-body experiences, researchers say.

Recreational users of a substance called ketamine often report having felt like they left their bodies or underwent other bizarre physical transformations, according to an online survey conducted by psychologist Todd Girard of Ryerson University in Toronto and his colleagues.

Ketamine, an anesthetic known to interfere with memory and cause feelings of detachment from one's self or body, reduces transmission of the brain chemical glutamate through a particular class of molecular gateways. Glutamate generally jacks up brain activity. Ketamine stimulates sensations of illusory movement or leaving one's body by cutting glutamate's ability to energize certain brain areas, the researchers propose in a paper published online Feb. 15 in Consciousness and Cognition.

"Ketamine may disrupt patterns of brain activation that coalesce to represent an integrated body and self, leading to out-of-body experiences," Girard says.

Full article at WiredScience

 

Chinese Man Lives With Blade in Face For Four Years

Doctors in China examined a patient complaining of headaches and a bad taste in his mouth – and found a 4ins blade buried in his face.

They say it had been in Li Fu's face for four years without his knowledge, since he was stabbed in a robbery while working as a cab driver. Doctor Xu Wen, vice-director of stomatology at Yu Xi City People's Hospital, said: "We were amazed to see such a long blade in his face.

"And it's even more amazing to think that the blade had been there for more than four years and the patient was still living without too many problems." He is now recovering after surgeons removed the blade, which had penetrated his tongue root, muscles and brain, in a complicated four hour operation.

Li, 37, of Yuanjiang County, Yunnan Province, was stabbed in September, 2006, after he resisted a knifepoint robbery. He was treated at a local hospital where doctors cleaned his wound and gave him disinfectant shots.

"The wound healed up gradually and I didn't have any other symptoms, so I didn't think of having further checkups," said Li.

Police later caught the criminal and found the broken knife handle – but they never found the blade until Li was x-rayed at a county hospital. Doctors there referred him to Yu Xi City People's Hospital which agreed to waive some of the £5,000 fees for the complex operation.

Orange News

The Greatest Unsolved Problems

In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute published a list of seven unsolved problems in mathematics called the Millennium Prize Problems. There is a prize of US$1,000,000 for solving each problem.One of these problems has already been solved. In 1900, David Hilbertpublished a list of 23 unsolved problems in mathematics. Looking at the status of these problems on Wikipedia, only five of them remain unresolved.

Although there are many unsolved problems in science and mathematics, we have been making steady progress in solving open problems. Fermat's Last Theorem was conjectured in 1637 and was solved in 1995. The four color theorem was stated in 1852 and proven in 1976. Throughout human history we seem to be systematically progressing and accumulating scientific knowledge.

5 important problems are as follows:

1) Theory of Everything, 2) Intelligence, 3) Dark Energy and Dark Matter, 4) One-way Functions, 5) Abiogenesis.

Full article over at Byron Knoll

Pope asks doctors to deny abortions

Pope Benedict XVI has urged doctors to protect women from the "deceptive" thought that an abortion might be a solution to social or economic difficulties or health problems.

The Pope reaffirmed the Catholic Church's firm opposition to abortion in a speech to members of the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Vatican's bioethics advisory board.

He argued that women are often convinced, sometimes by their own doctors, that abortion is a legitimate choice and in some cases even a therapeutic act to prevent their babies from suffering.

Saying "abortion solves nothing", he called on doctors not to give up their duty to defend the consciences of women from such "deception".

Catholic Church teaching holds that human life begins at conception.

Full article via Independent (IE)