What's in the lunchbox today...

Same lunch for both kids today: organic red & yellow pepper "swords", Snap Pea Crisps, cream cheese & jam on whole wheat (cut into hearts today...since there's probably a limited window when my sons will let me cut their sandwiches into hearts without being mortified), strawberries, and a few cinnamon graham crackers. Then my older son also has a bag of Crispy Wheats tucked in the front of his bag for a snack today.

For those who want a few more ideas, here's what I packed the first two days.

Are you fluttering your eyelashes at me or just feeling creative?

An intriguing new study has found that the rate at which students blink (as measured over six minutes using electrodes placed near the eyes) is associated with both their divergent and convergent creativity scores, but not their intelligence. Divergent creativity was measured with the 'alternate uses task', which required the students to come up with as many original uses for a brick, shoe and newspaper as possible. Lower and higher eye blink rate was associated with poorer performance, whilst medium eye blink rate was associated with superior performance at this task.

Convergent creativity was tapped with the 'remote associates test', which required the students to identify the one word that matched three other words (e.g. for 'time', 'hair' and 'stretch' the answer would be 'long'). In this case, eye blink rate was negatively related with divergent creativity - the less a student blinked the better they tended to do at this task.

Why should eye blink rate be associated with creativity? The study authors Soghra Chermahini and Bernhard Hommel explained that eye blink rate is a marker for dopamine activity and in turn, dopamine has previously been linked with creativity.

The researchers pointed to evidence showing, for example, that patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, which is associated with excess dopamine, tend to have high eye blink rates. Patients with Parkinson's, by contrast, which is associated with reduced dopamine, show low eye blink rates. They also highlighted past research linking dopamine with creativity. For example, there's evidence that positive mood - which is related to dopamine levels - can enhance creativity, although the results in this area have been extremely inconsistent.

Chermahihin and Hommel said their research adds to the literature by showing that the dopamine-creativity link is far from straight-forward. There was a negative linear relationship with convergent thinking but a positive, inverted U-shaped relationship with divergent thinking. This could help explain the inconsistent research findings linking mood with creativity, as they explained:

'Participants with a relatively low level of dopaminergic functioning would be likely to benefit from better mood, whereas people with a relatively high level of dopaminergic functioning, such as individuals scoring high in psychoticism, would actually be expected to suffer from better mood. Depending on which part of the distribution happens to be more strongly represented in a given sample, the corresponding study may find a positive, negative, or no relationship between mood and the given performance measure.'

_________________________________

Chermahini, S., & Hommel, B. (2010). The (b)link between creativity and dopamine: Spontaneous eye blink rates predict and dissociate divergent and convergent thinking. Cognition, 115 (3), 458-465 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.03.007

Bloggers behind the blogs: Neurowhoa!

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with some of the world's leading psychology and neuroscience bloggers.

Next up, 'Hesitant Iconoclast' of the NeuroWhoa! blog.

How did you become a psychology/neurosci blogger?

I was a psychology undergraduate and, in the course of my studies, was astounded at how much high-quality science content was available on the Net. I stumbled across ScienceBlogs one day and gravitated almost immediately to Mo Costandi's excellent Neurophilosophy blog, where I became a regular reader. After a few weeks of reading a selection of different psych-oriented blogs I just felt an inspiration to create a blog of my own, where I could talk about the issues that interest me as well as share the knowledge that I was and am learning.

What's your blog's mission?

I'd say a large part of it is public education as well as stimulating interest in psychology and neuroscience issues. I've come across so many misconceptions about 'the mind' and its functions that I've often felt driven to correct them in some way. For example, I have heard people suggesting that thinking too much or too long about something is a bad idea because it risks destroying valuable brain cells! Seriously. I know that's pretty wild, but it just goes to show some of the crazy ideas people can have about the most simplest of things like memory, emotions, personality, etc. And yet the fact is that the subject is so full of beautiful and illuminating examples of the ways the mind and brain really do work that we cannot know if we will fully plumb the depths. In any case, one can only wonder why we seem to only discuss these things among ourselves and not putting the knowledge 'out there'.

So that's my angle; a combination of educational and interesting things to engage with and inform the public. My own efforts may be quite small, but I trust that the motivations for doing so are quite common among the majority of science bloggers and I am confident of collegial approaches going quite far in that direction.

Are you also on Twitter - if so, how do the two outlets complement each other?

Yes, I'm @NeuroWhoa. Twitter is fantastic in the way it can make automatic announcements every time I write a new article, but especially greater is the facility to keep in direct contact with other psychologists, neuroscientists, researchers, writers - people who are both notable and knowledgeable in their fields. Not only is there the capacity to learn new things in short and snappy conversations, but the fact that almost every tweet contains a link to some new announcement or article means a great proliferation of sharing information and resources endlessly! It's popular to muse about learning something new every day, but with Twitter it's really true.

Also, it's quite possible to gauge the 'buzz' about whatever makes the news of the day and that's what gives me the ideas to write about. A lot of my posts have been inspired by something I've read via Twitter, and when it is a case of blogging about some new finding it helps to know what other people are saying about it and that in turn helps to write up a balanced view of the subject. It is great that when you are stumped sometimes, you can just ask a question and get an answer almost straightaway. I'm always grateful for the help I've received from fellow Twitterers that makes a direct contribution to whatever post I'm writing, and always try to repay that by crediting them wherever possible.

What are your weapons of choice - i.e. what blogging platform / hardware do you use and why?

I use the Blogger platform, mainly because that's the one where I've had most experience with. I've flirted with the idea of moving to Wordpress, Typepad or some other free service and have explored some of them, but in many cases I found the controls somewhat elaborate and I get the feeling I'd be spending more time twiddling knobs to prettify the blog design than writing. So in that respect Blogger suits me well - it gets the job done by simply letting you write whatever you want, and you're set!

I'm open to the possibility of a change, however. If I can be convinced that another platform has better facilities that are both user-friendly and audience-orientated then I'd be willing to give it a try.

What advice do you have for any budding psychology bloggers out there?

I'd say that, whatever motivated you to write in the first place, remember that regularly and try to keep true to it. Stick to a pace that's comfortable for you and don't feel obligated to churn out postings too fast. Sometimes quality is better than quantity, there's no substitute for a well-crafted and thoughtful post that enables people to learn something than just posting two or three lines of comment on something obscure because you feel you have to or you may lose readers. Also, make an effort to be easily understood. We all know that academic papers can be hard to read, so it is essential to strike a balance between transmitting valuable information and keeping the jargon to a tolerable or minimum level. This is a skill to be learnt in time and with experience, however.

What blogs do you read (list up to five)?

Mind Hacks is my daily fix, with Neurophilosophy coming a close second. I like to be eclectic in my science reading so as to be informed of developments elsewhere. So aside from a few other neuro-blogs like Neurocritic and Neurologica, I also skim through Pharyngula, Why Evolution Is True, and Respectful Insolence.

What books or other traditional media are you reading at the moment? (up to five)

Ha! It's good that you ask me to list up to five because I always tend to have my nose buried in several books at a time! At this moment I'm reading David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives. Eagleman is a neuroscientist and, while I don't believe in an afterlife, it's interesting to approach the subject from forty different and interesting scenarios of 'what could be'. I'm also reading Theodore Millon's Masters Of The Mind, which is a general history of mental illness and how definitions and treatment have changed throughout history. Other items on my reading list include Antonia Fraser's The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and D.J. Enright's Oxford Book of Death.

And finally, what blog post of yours are you most proud of and why?

I've written many posts that I'm proud of so it's hard to pick, but I guess What Is Self-Transcendence? was good in that I did something different than the usual. This post referred to a recent paper that reported how neurosurgery performed on certain brain structures effected personality changes in patients which made them feel more 'spiritual', giving further credence to the idea of spirituality having a neurobiological origin. The study drew interested comment from various quarters when it was released, but my curiosity was piqued by the mention of a personality construct called Self-Transcendence (ST), the increase and manifestation of which was said to be the evidence of increase of spiritual feelings. I wanted to know about the measurements involved in determining this construct and what its essential elements were. It involved hunting down papers from 1993 in a bid to track the development of ST as a concept and discovering the actual items of ST that were used to determine the personality changes of the neurosurgical patients. To display the ST items and comment on how they could properly define spirituality (or not, as was the case) made the whole thing a detective story of sorts, so I was a little pleased with myself for managing to find an interesting angle and doing some real investigation for a change instead of doing what everyone else was doing and blogging about the study itself.

I guess if I could find more such angles in papers that highlight the studies in a different and interesting way, I would be that much more satisfied with my writings and hopefully my readers will too!

Bloggers behind the blogs: Neuroskeptic

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with some of the world's leading psychology and neuroscience bloggers.

Next up, Neuroskeptic of the Neuroskeptic blog.

How did you become a psychology/neurosci blogger?

I'd long had an interest in science communication. Growing up I was a big fan of the great science writers like Stephen J Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Carl Sagan, but until I started blogging I'd never written much beyond occasional pieces for student newspapers. My main inspiration to start came from Ben Goldacre's blog (and book) Bad Science - because it showed me that the print media coverage of science was very often terrible but more importantly that they really had no interest in making it good. So it's often up to amateurs to do it right.

And I was struck by something Ben said at a talk he was giving: someone asked him for advice in doing the same kind of thing in another country and his advice was 'just go ahead and do it'. So I did. I started reading a lot of science blogs at around that time, and really admired them, so I tried to get in on the act.

What's your blog's mission?

Well I write about what interests me, I think that's the only thing you can do really - your mission should be to tell people about what interests you in a way that makes them interested in it too. But I suppose my mission is to show that there are lots of really interesting things in neuroscience, and you don't need to be a neuroscientist to understand them.

How does your blogging affect your day job?

I think it improves it. On the one hand it takes some time out of the day, though not very much, but it means I read papers I wouldn't otherwise have, it's improved my writing skills enormously (which is very useful for writing papers, proposals and grant applications ) and it's given me contacts.

What are your weapons of choice - i.e. what blogging platform / hardware do you use and why?

I use Blogger just because it was the first one I found when I typed 'blog' into Google... and I've stuck with it because it does the job. I think Wordpress is probably objectively a bit better, you can do more with it, but I see no reason to move.

What advice do you have for any budding psychology bloggers out there?

Start off by reading blogs, read them for a couple of weeks, decide which ones you really like and try to work out why. Then 'Just go ahead and do it' sums it up I suppose - if you're thinking of starting a blog or thinking of writing about something in particular, go for it. Of course you need to know your stuff before you do, but don't be put off by the idea that someone must have already done it, or that someone will come along and do it better than you. That held me back for a long time. I was overestimating 'someone'! There's loads to write about and most interesting science doesn't get blogged about at all.

What blogs do you read (list up to five)?

I read the 'big' neuroscience/psychology/psychiatry blogs but here's 5 that are perhaps less well known:

[Citation Needed]
Wiring the Brain
The MacGuffin
Women's Mag Science
Providentia

What books or other traditional media are you reading at the moment? (up to five)

At the moment I'm reading Daniel Carlat's Unhinged, for a review. Also embarrassingly I am about to read The Da Vinci Code.

And finally, what blog post of yours are you most proud of and why?

I'm very pleased by how fMRI in 1000 words turned out - because it took me hours of head-scratching to understand fMRI when I first read about it a few years back, but I managed to compress it into 1000 words that will be, hopefully, useful to people learning about it for the first time. I can see it being useful to me if I had had it back then! It's proven very popular so I think it turned out well.

Birthday Surprise for Baby (Part 2) - Scenery

Short Note:Been having a bit of sickie lately. Hence the delay in posting. PMS getting more and more serious these few years. Sigh.


Continue from Part 1.

Where were we?

O. Yes. So baby started packing while I just waited patiently, hoping that the taxi would arrive on time. I booked the taxi a day earlier and even made the call to confirm that everything was alright and that the taxi would arrive at 8:45am sharp.




Which is why I am telling you right now never book this site that claims itself to be LCCT taxi online. It's a fake! STUPID taxi didn't bloody show up.

But thank god I have my car with me so after 15 mins of no show, we drove to the airport.

Luckily nothing was to go wrong since that little incident. I was worried that a bad start could lead to many bad followings along with the surprise.


Then my baby started getting paranoid and throwing me with tons with questions like:

"Where are we going? I didn't change any money. What currency do we need?"

"Are you sure we didn't need anything?"

"Omg. This is crazy. OMG OMG OMG"

etc.


Where to every single question I replied with a confident: "Don't worry. Everything is taken care of (by me)."

Haha. First time feel damn in control.

Well I should. I've already taken three weeks to make sure I have everything with me. Foreign currency (yep meant the expense would be all on me), itinerary, and even adapters for phones.

We arrived at the airport in 45 mins time, where I led him to the international departure check-in counters where he would, for the first time, see his surprise destination.




So before that, I casually moved him to chill with me at Chocolate Lounge, you know, pretending that I needed to rest for a while.

Where I asked him to open his second stack of cards.











"555" in Thai are pronounced at Ha Ha Ha. Something he learnt from his last trip.


Yep. The check-in counter displayed: BANGKOK.


Now my baby has only ever been to Bangkok once in his life and it was with me, and he loved it. It then became his favourite city of all time and always wanted to go back there.

But the thing is, if the surprise was so predictable, it wouldn't be called a surprise would it?


blur blur baby, hehe


So while he was shouting: "No way! No way!" and leaping everywhere in joy thinking that he's visiting Bangkok, I was holding it in with a smile plastered on my face.

It's hard to control not to blurt out everything you know.

By 10:30am, we boarded the plane.

11:00am. Plane departed.

At this point, I think he said something like: "OMG we are really doing this, aren't we. OMG we are flying. OMG OMG OMG."


12:30pm. It was cue for 3rd stack of cards.

I was beginning to like this game.

It read:










And it did. As planned, pretty Noi-Nha arrived no sooner had we stepped out of the arrival hall of the Bangkok International airport in her car, with her driver.

Noi-Nha informed us that the journey would take 3 hours (which I already knew) and even then, baby still has NO IDEA where we were heading to. Muahaha.

2 hr 30 mins later. We were crossing through a secluded area that looked like a jungle.




Baby was beginning to doubt the surprise, so he whipped out his phone to check on the GPS location. Turning out we were heading straight towards the Burma border, east direction away from Bangkok.

He even laughingly joked that I was bringing him to Burma to sell, but I could see that he was really worried if that was true.

As the car made a turn, an vast field of endless green swept into view, as if we never drove through jungle-like road before.







The car brought us, pass the farm house, straight to the cutest reception one would ever lay eyes on.




We had our welcome drink here while waiting for the keys to our villa.




By now, baby was just going with the flow, flattered by the beauty of the green field but didn't look too impressed.

But then we hopped onto a buggy which chauffeured us right to this little greek-style modest looking villa, where I led him open the door for his ultimate surprise.




Now this was where it took his breath away, almost literally.

The interior view... of our villa.


the living area - where you find a flat screen, ipod dock, mini bar, food menu, etc.



our bed, overlooking the field






bedroom view at night


The villa was designed in such that it's always Christmas season around here.




Then I took him to see the toilet.




Where you'd find a corridor...




... connecting to the main piece of the villa - the biggest home jacuzzi I've ever sat in.





Don't be fooled by the wide-angled photo, but a 5'7"adult could lie on the bottom of the jacuzzi flat from head to toe.


Roses and red wine in bucket was prepared for us.




That's not all. I then brought him outside the villa, where one would find a stone staircase next to the door.




He climbed up to find a root-top rest place.




A hammock for leisure, a bed for... er... outdoor activity :p , a dining table for your daily meals and a BBQ set.

Not only that, the root top was also overlooking the vast green field, which was actually a farm, with only two cows.




Folks. This place is Scenery. Almost the most amazing boutique villa resort I have ever been in my entire traveling life. Located in the most unusual place, far away from the city, hidden in total seclusion (location to be revealed). Nothing can beat a better romantic getaway location.


What I loved about this place was the attention to details the owner has put in.

How everything was perfectly cute, perfectly convenient, and perfectly comfortable.







Just bring your own Ipod and you can play your favourite list of songs.


As for my baby, well, I think it's safe to say that he died and went to heaven.



By now he turned to me and said: "I can't believe just a few hours ago I was just sleeping soundly on my bed back in Malaysia! This is like a dream!".

I don't know about you, but I think that's the most flattering comment a "surpriser" can ever receive. Made me wanna *gloat*


It was time for his fourth stack of cards.






















The surprise didn't end there (like I would let it end just like that). In fact, it was just about to begin.


Behind the resort, you'd find this really cute natural stream where you can play on swings and splash around the water,




or even go for sauna or outdoor jacuzzi.




The stream (rather than river) really added to the quaintness of the place.




That evening, we dressed up in proper dinner wear (just for shits) and had our first dinner in Thailand - Thai Western fusion cuisine.




Now I know it sounded cheesy to have fusion menu, like almost every other restaurants these days are of fusion or some sort, and more often than not, they failed terribly to produce really compatible dish that were fit to be called fusion.

If there's ever one place I would recommend combining an Asian cuisine with western style, it's definitely here - Honey Scene Restaurant.





buggy dropped us off at the entrance.


We chose a table next to the farm so we could enjoy the evening view.




Which was quite spectacular.





baby xoxo



emo pic


Since I've come here and tried and tested the food before, I knew exactly what to order.


Thai Milk Tea (I have to have this every time I hit Thailand) & Beer (the man's drink)


I loved most of the dish served in Honey Scene, but my two all time favourites have to be:

Salmon Tom Yum Gung



trust me on this one, it WILL BLOW YOUR MIND


And Pork Chop.


this would blow your pants off if your mind has been blown off with the first dish


(if you're ever here, don't bother asking the waitress for recommendation, they don't speak a lot of English, just order what I just mentioned, you won't regret it)


Dinner ended with lots of kisses and hugs, as we promptly left the restaurant and walked back to our villa hand in hand. (Decided to walk back under the stars)


Honey Scene evening view from the farm


Back at the villa, the fifth stack of cards awaited to be opened.










:)

(to be continued in Part 3 of birthday surprise)
(location of resort revealed here)

PS// The best has yet to come. ;)