BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

by Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW - CLICK HERE We all lie — once a day or so, according to most studies. But usually we tell little lies, like "your new haircut looks great!" And most of us can control when we lie or what we lie about. But some people lie repeatedly and compulsively, about things both big and small. In 2005, a study published in The British Journal of Psychiatry provided the first evidence of structural differences in the brains of people with a history of persistent lying. The study was led by Yaling Yang, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Southern California, and Adrian Raine, an expert on antisocial disorders who is now at University of Pennsylvania. They expected to see some kind of deficit in the brains of these liars, Yang says. But surprisingly, the liars in their study actually had a surplus — specifically, they had more connections in the part of their brains responsible for complex thinking. Finding Liars...

Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works Melinda Wenner Special to LiveScience.com If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works. Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain's emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to “let them go.” Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don't know why it works. UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues hooked 30 people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines, which scan the brain to reveal which parts are active and inactive at any given moment. They asked the subjects to look at pictures of male or female faces making emotional expressions. Below some of the photos was a choice of words describing the emotion—such as “angry” or “fearf...

This is Your Brain Praying by Louise Danielle Palmer When Andrew Newberg’s book on the brain science behind religious and mystical experience turned up on the cover of Newsweek, it sparked a lively debate about God, evolution, and the meaning of life. This “neurotheologist’s” work is moving fast, so we caught up on his personal quest to understand the mysterious workings of mind and spirit, his latest research, and its profound implications for our daily lives. When Andrew Newberg, M.D., was a little kid, he had questions so pressing that they would wake him in the middle of the night, get him out of bed, and lead him into his father’s den. How do we know God exists ? he would ask. Why is there good and evil? How do I know what’s real ? “It’s embarrassing to admit, but I was five years old when I started asking these questions,” says Newberg, co-author of the acclaimed book Why God Won’t Go Away . Not the musings of an average youngster. Then again, there is nothing average about Newbe...