text: The seed for Wide00014 was: 
   
   - Slash pages from every domain on the web: 
   
   
   
   
   
   -- a ranking of all URLs that have more than one incoming inter-domain link (rank was determined by number of incoming links using Wide00012 inter domain links) 
   
   
   
   -- up to a maximum of 100 most highly ranked URLs per domain 
   
   - Top ranked pages (up to a max of 100) from every linked-to domain using the Wide00012 inter-domain navigational link graph ||||| Have you ever had a voice in your head that didn't feel like your own? Or heard a voice speaking out loud that you know wasn't really there? Psychologists used to say these were signs of mental illness. But now it turns out that they aren't that unusual — and even people who hear a lot of voices have a wide range of experiences with them. 
   
   Illustration by John T Takai 
   
   
   
   A new study published this week in The Lancet Psychology is the result of an online survey and in-depth analysis of 153 people who have heard voices. What the researchers found was that there is huge variation in ways that people "hear things." For example, the stereotype of a person with schizophrenia is that they hear angry voices telling them to do terrible things — we've all seen this in countless bad movies. But many people who hear voices say that they aren't so much "voices" as they are characters, with personalities, who are trying to hold conversations. Often they are internal voices and don't say anything aloud. It's almost as if they are exaggerated of the kinds of internal dialogues we have in our heads every day, as we debate what to do after work or whether we should really blow a bunch of money on the new MacBook. 
   
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   Indeed, Durham University researcher Angela Woods, who led the study, noted that as many as 15 percent of people who report hearing voices haven't been diagnosed with any psychological disorder. She and her colleagues believe that "hearing voices" is far more complicated than anyone had ever realized — sometimes they even involve physical sensations like tingling in the hands and feet. People who hear voices say that they can be troubling, but they can also be friendly. Often, therapies can help them understand the voices as parts of themselves, cluing them into subconscious concerns. 
   
   In a release, Woods said: 
   
   We call into question the presumed auditory quality of hearing voices and show that there is an unrecognised complexity in the 'character' qualities of some voices. It is crucial to study mental health and human experiences such as voice-hearing from a variety of different perspectives to truly find out what people are experiencing, not just what we think they must be experiencing because they have a particular diagnosis. We hope this approach can help inform the development of future clinical interventions. 
   
   The implication here is that there are a wide range of experiences for people who hear voices, and that many of them don't fit the typical definitions. Woods and her colleagues believe that psychology researchers need to talk to more people who hear voices in order to understand the full range of what the experience is like — as well as how we can treat it, when needed. 
   
   The entire study is available online at The Lancet Psychology. ||||| « A Bias in Field Goals and Penalty Kicks? | Blog Home Page | Review: 'Strongest' Research Shows No Link Between Gun Ownership Rates and Higher Crime » 
   
   Posted by Ross Pomeroy 
   
   
   
   In the Biblical story of Jacob told in Genesis 28, Jacob settled down for the night when trekking through the deserts of Canaan and fell asleep: 
   
   “And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, ‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants; and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves.” 
   
   Jacob thought he received a message from God, but most modern cognitive scientists would say that's unlikely. Instead, they would proffer that his mind had manufactured vivid images, emotions, ideas, and sensations. Jacob's apparent theophany was a dream, nothing more. 
   
   In Ancient Greece and Rome, people believed that dreams were direct messages from deities. While the precise mechanism for dreams remains unknown, scientists have narrowed down their origin to somewhere in the brain, not the beyond. 
   
   Sleep is divided into four distinct stages. In the final stage, called rapid-eye movement (REM), the brain lights up with electrical activity, almost as if awake. REM sleep is when most dreaming occurs, and when they are most vivid. During this phase, in our sleeping minds, we are transported. We see, hear, and feel. We experience things we would never experience in real life. We face the otherworldly and the supernatural. 
   
   It is no wonder then that dreams have played a major role in the historical evolution of religions, says Patrick Mcnamara, a neurologist at Boston University, and Kelly Bulkeley, a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, in a new paper published to Frontiers in Psychology. 
   
   Researchers working in many different parts of the world have found that people in traditional societies treat dreams as the sources of their religious ideas, including their concepts of their gods and other supernatural beings. It is likely that ancestral populations also treated them as such. Dreams were considered proof of the gods and a spirit realm since dreams were involuntary and emotionally vivid experiences that involved the dreamer’s soul encountering other beings including long deceased relatives and so on. 
   
   Why do people occasionally prescribe sacred status to figures in our dreams? One theory from evolutionary psychology holds that humans are inclined to presume intelligence or agency in unlikely places, as doing so might help recognize patterns that might have been missed, thus granting a better chance of survival. As the intuitive argument goes, it's better to assume the sound of a snapping twig was caused by a bear or a tiger, rather than just a falling branch. And so in dreams, we might be more likely to assume that advice or warning from a talking tree or a burning bush comes from a higher being who's looking out for us -- it's not merely meaningless drivel. 
   
   Dreams offer, perhaps, the perfect setting to "converse" with a deity, Bulkeley and Mcnamara say, for three major reasons. First, dreams bring forth "mental stimulations of alternate realities." Second, they are replete with theory of mind attributions, in which we attribute mental states to other beings or entities. And third, they allow us to give value or significance to our experiences. "The neurobiology of... sleep states is now understood to involve forebrain mesocortical dopaminergic systems that directly compute value and dis-value," Bulkeley and Mcnamara write. 
   
   Considering these factors, Bulkeley and Mcnamara reach an intriguing conclusion. 
   
   "All humans are endowed with brains innately primed to daily generate god concepts in dreaming." 
   
   Source: Mcnamara P and Bulkeley K (2015). Dreams as a source of supernatural agent concepts. Front. Psychol. 6:283. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00283 
   
   (Image: Shutterstock)
target: – Religions throughout the world—and throughout history—have put dreams at the center of their belief systems, and researchers say there's a good reason for that. We do much of our intense dreaming during REM sleep, when the highly active brain acts almost like it's awake, writes Ross Pomeroy at Real Clear Science. All that activity can lead to dreamed situations that feel very real—in some cases, even religious. In a new paper in Frontiers in Psychology, a neurologist and theological scholar argue that dreams are well-suited to create experiences in which we believe we've spoken to a deity of some kind. That is in part due to the feeling of an alternative reality we get in dreams, the researchers say. What's more, in dreams, we often ascribe emotions and thoughts to those we believe we're encountering. We give them an "exaggerated degree of agency" because our dreaming brains have trouble understanding our thoughts as our own, the researchers write. The researchers also note that unclear boundaries between REM sleep and wakefulness can be linked to schizophrenia—but at Gizmodo, Annalee Newitz notes that the feeling of "hearing voices" may not necessarily mean a person is dealing with mental illness. A recent survey found that 15% of respondents who say they've heard voices have no diagnosis of disorder, and the "hearing" involved isn't necessarily auditory; the voices may not feel as though they're external at all, researchers say. (Researchers last year described schizophrenia as not one, but eight different illnesses.)