Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind!!!

Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind

By Jeanna Bryner / Source: Live Science
Much of what we don't understand about being human is simply in our heads. The brain is a befuddling organ, as are the very questions of life and death, consciousness, sleep, and much more. Here's a heads-up on what's known and what's not understood about your noggin.

Dreams
If you were to ask 10 people what dreams are made of, you’d probably get 10 different answers. That’s because scientists are still unraveling this mystery. One possibility: Dreaming exercises brain by stimulating the trafficking of synapses between brain cells. Another theory is that people dream about tasks and emotions that they didn’t take care of during the day, and that the process can help solidify thoughts and memories. In general, scientists agree that dreaming happens during your deepest sleep, called Rapid Eye Movement (REM).

Slumber Sleuth
Fruit flies do it. Tigers do it. And humans can't seem to get enough of it. No, not that. We're talking about shut-eye, so crucial we spend more than a quarter of our lives at it. Yet the underlying reasons for sleep remain as puzzling as a rambling dream. One thing scientists do know: Sleep is crucial for survival in mammals. Extended sleeplessness can lead to mood swings, hallucination, and in extreme cases, death. There are two states of sleep—non-rapid eye movement (NREM), during which the brain exhibits low metabolic activity, and rapid eye movement (REM), during which the brain is very active. Some scientists think NREM sleep gives your body a break, and in turn conserves energy, similar to hibernation. REM sleep could help to organize memories. However, this idea isn’t proven, and dreams during REM sleep don’t always correlate with memories.

Phantom Feelings
It’s estimated that about 80 percent of amputees experience sensations, including warmth, itching, pressure and pain, coming from the missing limb. People who experience this phenomenon, known as "phantom limb," feel sensations as if the missing limb were part of their bodies. One explanation says that the nerves area where the limb severed create new connections to the spinal cord and continue to send signals to the brain as if the missing limb was still there. Another possibility is that the brain is "hard-wired" to operate as if the body were fully intact—meaning the brain holds a blueprint of the body with all parts attached.

Mission Control
Residing in the hypothalamus of the brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or biological clock, programs the body to follow a 24-hour rhythm. The most evident effect of circadian rhythm is the sleep-wake cycle, but the biological clock also impacts digestion, body temperature, blood pressure, and hormone production. Researchers have found that light intensity can adjust the clock forward or backward by regulating the hormone melatonin. The latest debate is whether or not melatonin supplements could help prevent jet lag—the drowsy, achy feeling you get when "jetting" across time zones.

Memory Lane
Some experiences are hard to forget, like perhaps your first kiss. But how does a person hold onto these personal movies? Using brain-imaging techniques, scientists are unraveling the mechanism responsible for creating and storing memories. They are finding that the hippocampus, within the brain’s gray matter, could act as a memory box. But this storage area isn’t so discriminatory. It turns out that both true and false memories activate similar brain regions. To pull out the real memory, some researchers ask a subject to recall the memory in context, something that’s much more difficult when the event didn’t actually occur.

Brain Teaser
Laughter is one of the least understood of human behaviors. Scientists have found that during a good laugh three parts of the brain light up: a thinking part that helps you get the joke, a movement area that tells your muscles to move, and an emotional region that elicits the "giddy" feeling. But it remains unknown why one person laughs at your brother’s foolish jokes while another chuckles while watching a horror movie. John Morreall, who is a pioneer of humor research at the College of William and Mary, has found that laughter is a playful response to incongruities— stories that disobey conventional expectations. Others in the humor field point to laughter as a way of signaling to another person that this action is meant "in fun." One thing is clear: Laughter makes us feel better.

Nature vs. Nurture
In the long-running battle of whether our thoughts and personalities are controlled by genes or environment, scientists are building a convincing body of evidence that it could be either or both! The ability to study individual genes points to many human traits that we have little control over, yet in many realms, peer pressure or upbringing has been shown heavily influence who we are and what we do.

Mortal Mystery
Living forever is just for Hollywood. But why do humans age? You are born with a robust toolbox full of mechanisms to fight disease and injury, which you might think should arm you against stiff joints and other ailments. But as we age, the body’s repair mechanisms get out of shape. In effect, your resilience to physical injury and stress declines. Theories for why people age can be divided into two categories: 1) Like other human characteristics, aging could just be a part of human genetics and is somehow beneficial. 2) In the less optimistic view, aging has no purpose and results from cellular damage that occurs over a person's lifetime. A handful of researchers, however, think science will ultimately delay aging at least long enough to double life spans.

Deep Freeze
Living forever may not be a reality. But a pioneering field called cryonics could give some people two lives. Cryonics centers like Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Arizona, store posthumous bodies in vats filled with liquid nitrogen at bone-chilling temperatures of minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (78 Kelvin). The idea is that a person who dies from a presently incurable disease could be thawed and revived in the future when a cure has been found. The body of the late baseball legend Ted Williams is stored in one of Alcor’s freezers. Like the other human popsicles, Williams is positioned head down. That way, if there were ever a leak in the tank, the brain would stay submerged in the cold liquid. Not one of the cryopreserved bodies has been revived, because that technology doesn’t exist. For one, if the body isn’t thawed at exactly the right temperature, the person’s cells could turn to ice and blast into pieces.

Consciousness
When you wake up in the morning, you might perceive that the Sun is just rising, hear a few birds chirping, and maybe even feel a flash of happiness as the fresh morning air hits your face. In other words, you are conscious. This complex topic has plagued the scientific community since antiquity. Only recently have neuroscientists considered consciousness a realistic research topic. The greatest brainteaser in this field has been to explain how processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences. So far, scientists have managed to develop a great list of questions.

Wives from North V/s South India

Wives from North:

1. At the time of marriage, a north Indian girl has more boyfriends than her age.
   
   
2. Before marriage, she looks almost like a bollywood heroine and after marriage you have to go around her twice to completely hug her.
   
   
3. By the time she professes her undevoted love to you, you are bankrupt because of the number of times you had to take her out to movie theatres and restaurants. And you wait longingly for her dowry.
   
   
4. The only dishes she can think of to cook is paneer butter masala, aloo sabji, aloo gobi sabji, aloo matar, aloo paneer, that after eating all those paneer and aloos you are either in the bed with chronic cholestrol or chronic gas disorder.
   
   
5. The only growth that you see later in your career is the rise in your monthly phone bill.
   
   
6. You are blinded by her love that you think that she is a blonde. Only later do you come to know that it is because of the mehandhi that she applies to cover her gray hair.
   
   
7. When you come home from office she is very busy watching "Kyonki saas bhi kabi bahu thi" that you either end up eating outside or cooking yourself.
   
   
8. You are a very "ESpecial" person to her.
   
   
9. She always thought that Madras is a state and covers the whole of south India until she met you.
   
   
10. When she says she is going to "work out" she means she is going to "Walk out"
    
    
11. She has greater number of relatives than the number of people you have in your home town.
    
    
12. The only two sentences in English that she knows are "Thank you" and "How are you"
    

Wives from South:

1. Her mother looks down at you because you didn't study in IIT or Madras / Anna University .
   
   
2. Her father starts or ends every conversation with " ... I say..."
   
   
3. She shudders if you use four letter words.
   
   
4. She has long hair, neatly oiled and braided (The Dubai based Oil Well Company will negotiate with her on a 25 year contract to extract coconut oil from her hair.)
   
   
5. She uses the word 'Super' as her only superlative.
   
   
6. Her name is another name for a Goddess or a flower.
   
   
7. Her first name is longer than your first name, middle name and surname combined (unless you are from Andhra).
   
   
8. When she mixes milk/curd and rice you are never sure whether it is for the Dog or for herself.
   
   
9. For weddings, she sports a mini jasmine garden on her head and wears silk saris in the Madras heat without looking too uncomfortable while you are melting in your singlet.
   
   
10. She thinks Mohan Lal is the sexiest man alive.
    
    
11. Her favourite cricketer is Krishnamachari Srikkanth.
    
    
12. Her favourite food is dosa though she has tried North Indian snacks like Chats (pronounced like the slang for 'conversation' )
    
    
13. She bursts into songs with her cousins in every movie.
    
    
14. She bores you by telling you which raaga each song you hear is based on.
    
    
15. You have to give her jewellery, though she has already got plenty of it.
    
    
16. Her thali (Mangal Sutra) weighs more than the championship belts worn by WWF wrestlers.
    
    
17. She is more educated than you.
    
    
18. Her father thinks she is much smarter than you.
    

Facts - General Knowledge

*1. Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different.*


*2. The most common name in the world is Mohammed.*


*3. The name of the entire continents end with the same letter that they start with.*


*4. The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.*


*5. Most lipstick contains fish scales.*


*6. TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using theletters on one row of the keyboard.*

*7. Women blink nearly twice as much as men!*

*8. You can't kill yourself by holding your breath.*

*9. It is impossible to lick your elbow.*


*10. People say "Bless you" when you sneeze because when you sneeze,your heart stops for a millisecond. *

*11. It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.*


*12. The "sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be thetoughest tongue twister in the English language.*


*13. If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib. If you try tosuppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neckand die.*


*14. Each king in a deck of playing cards represents great king from history.*
>Spades - King David
>Clubs - Alexander the Great
>Hearts - Charlemagne
>Diamonds - Julius Caesar.


*15. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987, 654,321 (count out the answer)*


*16. If a statue of a person in the park on a horse has both front legsin the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a resultof wounds received in battle. If the horse has a all four legs on the ground, the person died of naturalcauses. *


*17 What do bullet proof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers andlaser printers all have in common?Answer - All invented by women.*


*18. Question - This is the only food that doesn't spoil. What is this?Answer - Honey*

*19. A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.*

*20. A snail can sleep for three years.*

*21. All polar bears are left handed.*


*22. American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olivefrom each salad served in first-class. *


*23. Butterflies taste with their feet.*


*24.Elephants are the only animals that can't jump.*


*25.In the last 4000 years, no new animals have been domesticated. *


*26. On average, people fear spiders more than they do death.*


*27. Shakespeare invented the words 'assassination' and 'bump'.*


*28. Stewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand.*


*29. An ant always falls over on its right side when intoxicated. *


*30. The electric chair was invented by a dentist.*

*31. The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps o squirtblood 30 feet.*


*32. Rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over a million descendants. *


*33. Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria inyour ear by 700 times.*

Leadership Interview Questions & Answers

Q. What is the difference between Leader & Manager?

A. ....

A Manager in business terms ensures tasks are done through others..

A Leader in practical terms motivates others to do the task.

.....

A Manager who can not motivate others to a certain task is not a Leader.

......

No difference but it is the combination of both which move things forward.


Q.