Pooja Sri

Parapsychology  is a field of study concerned with the investigation of  paranormal  and psychic phenomena which include  telepathy ,  precognition , clairvoyance, psychokinesis,near-death experiences,  reincarnation , apparitional experiences, and other paranormal claims. It is often identified as  pseudoscience . Parapsychology research is largely conducted by private institutions in several countries and funded through private donations, and the subject rarely appears in mainstream science journals. Most papers about parapsychology are published in a small number of niche journals.    Parapsychology has been criticized for continuing investigation despite being unable to provide convincing evidence for the existence of any psychic phenomena after more than a century of research. parapsychologists study a number of ostensible paranormal phenomena, including but not limited to: Telepathy : Transfer ...

Why Your Brain Actually Works Better in Winter By  Christian Jarrett It was terrifyingly cold in New York this weekend, and this cold snap occurred right as we’re entering the postholiday doldrums. It’s around the time of the year when people start to talk about seasonal changes to their mood and energy level — most commonly, seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. While SAD is a relatively new condition — it stems from research in the '80s — it has become a huge part of how we in the colder climes discuss winter. Everyone knows how winter affects certain people: It lowers their mood, makes them more prone to depression, and, in some cases, slows their mind to a crawl. There’s a reason for the popular image of someone wanting to just curl up in bed to wait out the duration of a frigid February afternoon. But scientists are coming to realize that this might not be quite right. A pair of new studies challenge many of the popular assumptions about the psychological effects of...

At the beginning of a new love relationship, we may find ourselves in a beautiful fantasyland. Finally, the struggle to find peace and happiness is over… ‘I am saved. I am safe. I am lovable. I am desirable. I am acceptable. I belong. I am overflowing with love to give and joy to share. I am so incredibly alive. We are a perfect match.’ And then reality sets in… ‘He leaves his wet towel on the bed.’ ‘She is constantly texting.’ ‘He is always late.’ ‘She is always working.’ ‘He drinks too much.’ You may wonder, ‘Who is this person I thought I knew?’ ‘She’s changed.’ ‘He’s different.’ ‘You complete me’ spirals down into ‘You deplete me.’ Despite our hopes for perfection, romantic love relationships, like every aspect of life, are complicated, continually changing and confusing. While our fantasy is that the ‘right’ romantic relationship will relieve us of our pain, fear and longing, the truth is that our romantic relationships stretch us to the limits of our emo...

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is recognized internationally as a violation of the human rights of girls and women. February 6th is International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation. Ending FGM by 2030 is one of the UN Global Goals. It is what my grandmother called the three feminine sorrows. She said the day of circumcision, the wedding night and the births of a baby are the triple feminine sorrows. Feminine Pains (poem, 1998) -Dahabo Ali Muse, Somali. Because a woman is cut open on all these three occasions. We are here talking about female circumcision, variously known as female genital mutilation (Rose Odlfield Hayes), khafḍ (Arabic), asbolokoli (Mali) and so on. The terminology underwent changes with time. Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is defined by the WHO as “all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons”. While the exact number is not known a ...

Anyone who has ever driven home after a red-eye flight or sat through an important but interminable lecture will know the feeling: You’re commanding your brain to stay awake, yet your eyelids feel heavy as lead and they just keep falling shut. Now a team of neuroscientists based in Singapore has documented what’s going on in the brain when the battle to stay awake is momentarily lost. Ju Lynn Ong and her colleagues put 18 healthy participants in a sleepy state by keeping them awake all night in a psych lab. After being awake for 22 straight hours, the participants were asked to lay in the dark inside a brain scanner for two six-minute scans — and to keep their eyes open the whole time. Needless to say, the participants' eyes frequently drifted shut, and whenever that happened they were prompted by recorded messages to keep their eyes open. The researchers looked specifically at the patterns of activity in the participants’ brains in those moments that their eyes fell inv...

An unlucky few families throughout history have apparently been cursed with what’s known as “familial fatal insomnia” — that is, as science writer David Robson phrases it in a piece for the BBC this week, “a kind of waking coma that ultimately [ends] in death.” It's a (very) rare form of insomnia that kills, in other words, usually  within a few years after the onset of symptoms. Those symptoms come on slowly, but those within these families have learned to recognize them early after watching their loved ones succumb to the strange disease. A man in his mid-50s named Silvano, for example, felt the first signs of FFI on the dance floor of a cruise ship. Robson writes: But while on the ship’s dance floor one evening, he was embarrassed to find that his shirt had become drenched in sweat. Concerned, he examined himself in a mirror, only to find that his pupils had shrunk to two tiny black pinpricks. It was the same glassy-eyed stare that had afflicted his father and two siste...

Call it the  Pygmalion effect , or the   anticipatory principle , or even   self-fulfilling prophecies , either way,  what we expect, is usually what we experience . Moreover,  the way in which people  view you influences how you behave. That is, the expectation of events or behaviour can actually cause them to happen! The expectation does not need to be true at the time for it to occur, but becomes true when people act on the belief. What you focus on you grow—our beliefs literally create our reality. Our beliefs are self-fulfilling prophecies.  Sociologists have discovered that we create images of our future via our hopes, dreams and imagination—and in large part, the stories we tell in our day-to day dialogue—and we then act to bring those images about in every area of our lives. Thus our successes and failures are strongly linked to the images and stories we tell about ourselves and our future.[1] What we can learn from the story of Pygmalion...