Military stress training

Getting with the times:-) Positive psychology, energy psychology... this includes TAT and Zpoint. Great to see that even the government is catching on. Who knows, it might yet transform enough people's perception to make a big difference after all!

The Military's Growing Interest in the Brain

In "Mental Stress Training Is Planned for U.S. Soldiers", The New York Times reports that "positive psychology" techniques are now being introduced into the U.S. Army. This cultivation of emotional resiliency, based on a program that has been tested in middle schools, is hoped to reduce such mounting mental health problems as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicide that are affecting nearly 20 percent of troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. For more information on the field of positive psych, check out the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center, run by Dr. Martin Seligman.

The New York Times also reported that the military is spending more time—and money—on understanding the role that "hunches" and "gut feelings" play in helping soldiers avoid or anticipate danger ("In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable"). While it seems that acute sensory perception skills and superior brain processing are involved, no mention is made of means that don't fall easily into a neuroscientist's model. IONS' Dean Radin, for example, has been helping to pioneer the study of intuition and anticipation from a perspective that hypothesizes that consciousness transcends the everyday boundaries of space and time. The write-up of his recent study, "Intuition through Time: What Does the Seer See?", has just been published in Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing.

Dr. Radin is currently working on a new study that involves presentiment as well as nondual states of timelessness by tracking the activities of a brain during meditation before certain stimuli appear. As he describes it, "Presentiment is hypothesized as an unconscious form of precognition, which assumes that some aspect of our awareness transcends time and can thus peek into what we perceive as 'the future.' If presentiment is real, then we should be able to detect differences in brain activity prior to the randomly presented stimuli. If a meditator is genuinely in a timeless place, those effects may be stronger than when the meditator is in an ordinary state of awareness."