BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

For years I would say to people, "I can't sit/ be near you. You're giving me a headache." They'd get mad - then later I'd find out they had some horrible illness. They'd make me think I was crazy... but I'm not! If you've ever thought that you literally feel other people's pain, you may be right. A brain-imaging study suggests that some people have true physical reactions to others' injuries. Using an imaging technique called functional MRI, UK researchers found evidence that people who say they feel vicarious pain do, in fact, have heightened activity in pain-sensing brain regions upon witnessing another person being hurt. The findings, published in the journal Pain, could have implications for understanding, and possibly treating, cases of unexplained "functional" pain. "Patients with functional pain experience pain in the absence of an obvious disease or injury to explain their pain," explained Dr. Stuart W. G. Derb...

Religion And The Brain In the new field of "Neurotheology," scientists seek the biological basis of sprituality. Is God all in our heads? by: Sharon Begley with Anne Underwood One Sunday morning in March, 19 years ago, as Dr. James Austin waited for a train in London, he glanced away from the tracks toward the river Thames. The neurologist--who was spending a sabbatical year in England--saw nothing out of the ordinary: the grimy Underground station, a few dingy buildings, some pale gray sky. He was thinking, a bit absent-mindedly, about the Zen Buddhist retreat he was headed toward. And then Austin suddenly felt a sense of enlightenment unlike anything he had ever experienced. His sense of individual existence, of separateness from the physical world around him, evaporated like morning mist in a bright dawn. He saw things "as they really are," he recalls. The sense of "I, me, mine" disappeared. "Time was not present," he says. "I had a sense...

The brain scan that can read people's intentions Call for ethical debate over possible use of new technology in interrogation Ian Sample, science correspondent -- The Guardian A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act. The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists' ability to probe people's minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future. The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way. "Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there's no way you could ...