Word: behavior
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...There is a very large gap between recognizing how addiction looks on a brain scan and developing therapies that are effective enough to safely abolish addictive behavior. Once a safe and effective candidate drug is discovered, a minimum of five years is needed before the Food and Drug Administration can deem it safe to administer to millions of addicts. We are at least a decade away from even starting such trials. Addiction is a side effect of the positive evolutionary pressures to respond to pleasurable stimuli by seeking repeat stimulation. Alcoholics Anonymous is one form of therapy that...
...VERY good thing. It was not enough for humans in the state of nature to know there was no lion near the family cave; they also had to be able to imagine all the other places a lion could lurk. The same is true for other eccentricities of human behavior. Our anxiety about all the ways harm may befall someone else keeps us mindful of the safety of family and community. "There's a creative, what-if quality to this thinking," says clinical psychologist Jonathan Grayson of the Anxiety and Agoraphobia Treatment Center in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. "It's evolutionarily...
...universal experience," says Judith Rapoport, author of the landmark book The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing and chief of child psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health. "I sometimes count on my fingers when I have nothing to count." The key to diagnosing whether such behavior is authentic OCD is how great an impact the behavior has on your life. "You have to show longstanding interference with function, and that eliminates most people," Rapoport explains...
Saxena, who has conducted extensive scanning research, has even come to recognize the neural fingerprint that distinguishes one less common type of OCD behavior--hoarding--from better-known ones. Hoarders who live alone have been known to crowd themselves into small areas of their home, with clear paths left from sofa to kitchen to bathroom, and the rest piled high with debris. When Saxena scanned the brains of these highly particular people, he found that they had equally particular abnormalities. Instead of hyperactivity in any area, they had reduced activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus, the part of the brain...
...long been known that sound can alter emotions and behavior. So why not use it to amplify profits? Treasure's agency acts like an audio interior designer, removing invasive noises or rescoring unappealing music. It seems simple, but while many businesses have mastered the art of influencing shoppers through sight (with alluring displays) and smell (say, by piping the odor of fresh coffee throughout a store), few have focused on the smart use of sound, says retail psychologist Tim Denison of the British Retail Think Tank. But that's changing. U.S. firm Muzak used to be the butt of jokes...