Date:8/4/2010

l and Mohammed Milad from Harvard Medical School will use $200,000 to find out if meditation helps people conquer their fears. Mindfulness meditation impacts the structure and function of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, hippocampus and amygdala, brain regions that are also part of the neural circuits critical for deactivating conditioned fears.

Psyche Loui from Harvard Medical School was awarded $180,000 to study how the brain enables artistic genius. Loui will study neural connectivity in musicians with absolute pitch and people with synesthesia to better understand supernormal perception.

Jason Mitchell and Jamil Zaki from Harvard will study the relationship between doing good and feeling good and how both can be amplified within and between people. Sharing happiness may double your pleasure.

India Morrison from the University of Gothenburg will study how pleasurable touch affects the way we understand and relate to others. Touch is more than skin deep because skin is a social and emotional organ. Touch carries affective meaning, enhances social bonding and shapes our beliefs about what it feels like to be in another person's skin. Morrison will focus on a recently discovered type of nerve fiber that transmits the pleasure of gentle touch, and she will examine a people with a rare genetic mutation resulting in a severe reduction of those nerve fibers.

Stephanie D. Preston from the University of Michigan and Tony W. Buchanan from St. Louis University will study the neural differences between sensing that someone is in pain or danger and taking action to help them. Empathy is bodily response. Research shows that, when people feel another's pain psychologically, they also resonate physically in heart rate, facial muscles, skin response, neural activity and pupil dilation. Even so, people frequently fail to help those in need and sometimes even cause their distress.

Laurie Santos from Yale University will inves
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Contact: Jordan Reese jreese@upenn.edu 215-573-6604 University of Pennsylvania Source:Eurekalert

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