Brain
Friday, August 17, 2007
Clinical depression linked to abnormal emotional brain circuits
In what may be the first study to use brain imaging to look at the neural circuits involved in emotional control in patients with depression, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that brains of people with clinical depression react very differently than those of healthy people when trying to cope with negative situations.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Managing stress cuts stroke risk
Coping well with stress can cut the risk of a stroke by almost a quarter, research shows. A University of Cambridge team based their conclusion on a seven-year study of more than 20,000 people. Those who were able to take a well-rounded approach to problems had a 24% lower risk of stroke.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Is Biofeedback in Games the Next Next-Gen?
Imagine if your heart beat or other physiological signs from your body had a direct impact on the gameplay in your favorite games. Brett Skogen, President of Beijing-based Digital Entertainment, would like to make biofeedback in gaming a reality.
Autonomic Nervous System • Brain • Creativity/Innovation • Heart Rate Variability • Productivity/Performance • Stress • Technology • (0) Comments • Permalink
Friday, August 03, 2007
This is your brain on love
Science is just beginning to parse the inner workings of the brain in love, examining the blissful or ruinous fall from a medley of perspectives: neural systems, chemical messengers and the biology of reward.
When Worry Hijacks The Brain
Even the most stable brain operates just a millimeter from madness. In such a finely tuned cognitive engine, only a small part must start to sputter before the whole machine comes crashing down. When that happens, reason and function come undone, rarely as dramatically as in the neurochemical storm that is obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Who’s Minding the Mind?
New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it. Psychologists say that “priming” people in this way is not some form of hypnotism, or even subliminal seduction; rather, it’s a demonstration of how everyday sights, smells and sounds can selectively activate goals or motives that people already have.
Brain • Productivity/Performance • Psychology • (0) Comments • Permalink
Charting new body-mind links
The link between mind and the body tends to be more the subject of New Age books or yoga workshops than respectable research. Not that this link hasn’t been subjected to scientific scrutiny. One person who is moving us closer to such an understanding is a McGill scientist named Moshe Szyf. Szyf, 52, is a pioneer in the emerging field of epigenetics. Epigenetics is the study of the epigenome—the chemical switching system that turns genes on and off, and it is radically changing how we understand the relationship between our genetics and our environment. “
Aging • Brain • Genetics • Stress • (0) Comments • Permalink
Monday, July 30, 2007
Old Memory is Key Source of Chronic Pain
Why do so many people continue to suffer from life-altering, chronic pain long after their injuries have actually healed? The definitive answer—and an effective treatment—has long eluded scientists. Traditional analgesic drugs, such as aspirin and morphine derivatives, haven’t worked very well. A Northwestern University researcher has found a key source of chronic pain appears to be an old memory trace that essentially gets stuck in the prefrontal cortex, the site of emotion and learning. The brain seems to remember the injury as if it were fresh and can’t forget it.
A Mind for Sociability
Humans are highly social, but we don’t get pally with just anybody. Before forming relationships with other people, we normally size them up to see how trustworthy they are. A new study suggests that this behavior stems from an evolutionary reorganization in a part of the brain responsible for detecting other people’s emotions.
Brain • Emotions • Relationships • (0) Comments • Permalink
Emotional recall is in your genes
Your ability to recall emotional events – such as meeting the love of your life, or the trauma of a painful car crash – is governed by a common variation in a single gene, according to a new study. We recall emotionally charged events far more than mundane ones because they tend to be advantageous in evolutionary terms. Remembering favourable or dangerous events helps our survival far more than recalling the daily commute to work, for example.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Joseph LeDoux’s heavy mental
The neuroscientist explains how music, emotion and memory shape our identities—and why he has donned a Stratocaster to keep the brain rollin’ all night long.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Army to Train Soldiers About Brain Injuries, Other Mental Health Concerns
The Army plans to begin a program today to educate every soldier about traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. The rare effort to break the perceived stigma within the military on mental health problems comes as increasingly more troops return from battle with serious but undiagnosed conditions.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Biofeedback Reinvented - New Discoveries Show that the Heart Pulses Messages that Reveal Feelings
HeartMath essentially reinvented biofeedback in 1999 when they introduced the first affordable consumer stress-reduction product using their patented heart rhythm feedback. Their focus on heart rhythm feedback provided a refreshing departure from conventional biofeedback practices, and has since been adopted by more than ten thousand health professionals worldwide as an effective and invaluable tool for patients suffering from stress-related issues. Internationally respected for their research-based stress solutions, HeartMath peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated the critical link between emotions, heart function, and cognitive performance.
ADHD • Anger • Anxiety • Appreciation • Autonomic Nervous System • Brain • Cardiovascular Health • Cognition • Creativity/Innovation • Education • Emotions • Happiness • Heart Rate Variability • HeartMath • Hypertension • Pain • Productivity/Performance • Psychology • PTSD • Science • Stress • Technology • (0) Comments • Permalink
Mild stress in the womb may worsen risk of cerebral palsy
Chronic mild stress in pregnant mothers may increase the risk that their offspring will develop cerebral palsy—a group of neurological disorders marked by physical disability—according to new research in mice. The results may be the first to demonstrate such effects of stress on animals in the womb.
Brain • Children • Reproduction • Women • (0) Comments • Permalink
Saturday, July 07, 2007
The Gregarious Brain
If a person suffers the small genetic accident that creates Williams syndrome, he’ll live with not only some fairly conventional cognitive deficits, like trouble with space and numbers, but also a strange set of traits that researchers call the Williams social phenotype or, less formally, the “Williams personality”: a love of company and conversation combined, often awkwardly, with a poor understanding of social dynamics and a lack of social inhibition.
Brain • Genetics • Relationships • (0) Comments • Permalink