Amygdala
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Anatomy of pain can bring relief
Queensland researchers have made a discovery that sheds important new light on how the brain processes pain, and how central emotions are in the pain experience. This very reliable connection means that any signal that reaches the brain’s pain centre is almost guaranteed to set off a signal in the central amygdala. And the cells there trigger emotional responses—emotions, hormones, blood pressure increases and so on.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Teen Aggression May Really Be a State of Mind
For parents of emotionally combative teens, new research offers a powerful biological reason for all the family feuding—adolescent brain size. A team of Australian scientists has found that when key regions of the brain known for controlling emotions are bigger, boys and girls tend to be more aggressive and more persistent during their fights with Mom and Dad.
Amygdala • Anger • Brain • Parenting • Teenagers • (0) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
NIDA research reveals subconscious signals can trigger drug craving
Brain imaging on drug addicted patients shows that poorly controlled desires begin even when cues are unseen. Using a brain imaging technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scientists have discovered that cocaine-related images trigger the emotional centers of the brains of patients addicted to drugs—even when the subjects are unaware they’ve seen anything.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Overweight People May Not Know When They’ve Had Enough
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have found new clues to why some people overeat and gain weight while others don’t. Examining how the human brain responds to “satiety” messages delivered when the stomach is in various stages of fullness, the scientists have identified brain circuits that motivate the desire to overeat. Treatments that target these circuits may prove useful in controlling chronic overeating, according to the authors.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Study Reveals How the Brain Generates the Human Tendency for Optimism
A neural network that may generate the human tendency to be optimistic has been identified by researchers at New York University. As humans, we expect to live longer and be more successful than average, and we underestimate our likelihood of getting a divorce or having cancer. The results, reported in the most recent issue of Nature, link the optimism bias to the same brain regions that show irregularities in depression.
Amygdala • Brain • Depression • Happiness • Mood • (0) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
This Is Your Brain On 9/11
If you witnessed the attacks on 9/11 up close and then continually had bad dreams, felt jumpy, kept thinking about what you saw, and avoided the site even several years later, chances are that parts of your brain were altered in subtle ways. According to scientists, such lingering symptoms and physical changes reflect an undiagnosed and long-term toll on mental health resulting from the attacks.
9/11 • Amygdala • Brain • Children • Depression • Hormones • PTSD • (0) Comments • Permalink
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.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
HeartMath’s emWave Personal Stress Reliever
Our emWave Personal Stress Reliever is on sale until the end of the April for $20.00 off. If you’re interested in realtime stress reduction and peak performance, please take a look at the two-minute demo.
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Sunday, April 01, 2007
In Our Messy, Reptilian Brains
Let others rhapsodize about the elegant design and astounding complexity of the human brain—the most complicated, most sophisticated entity in the known universe, as they say. David Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, doesn’t see it that way. To him, the brain is a “cobbled-together mess.”
Amygdala • Brain • Cognition • Memory • Sleep • (0) Comments • Permalink
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Why the Human Brain Is a Poor Judge of Risk
The human brain is a fascinating organ, but it’s an absolute mess. Because it has evolved over millions of years, there are all sorts of processes jumbled together rather than logically organized. Some of the processes are optimized for only certain kinds of situations, while others don’t work as well as they could. There’s some duplication of effort, and even some conflicting brain processes.
Amygdala • Brain • Emotions • Psychology • (0) Comments • Permalink
Monday, March 19, 2007
Fear centre ‘shrinks’ in autism
A part of the brain associated with emotional learning and fear shrinks in people with autism, research suggests. Teenagers and young men with autism in the study who had the most severe social impairment were found to have smaller than normal amygdalae. The researchers from the University of Wisconsin suggested the amygdalae may shrink due to chronic stress caused by social fear in childhood.
Amygdala • Brain • Relationships • (0) Comments • Permalink
Saturday, January 20, 2007
The Flavor Of Memories
Two crucial facts that neurologists have come to understand in the past few years about the workings of human memory--facts that have important implications for the treatment of a variety of mental disorders, from post-traumatic stress to obsessive-compulsive disorder. The first is that, despite its movie-like clarity, my memory of J.F.K.’s assassination is almost certainly wrong in some details, and maybe even some significant ones. That’s because I’m not simply calling up the original memory laid down in November 1963. I’m recalling the last time I thought about it. Each time we retrieve and re-store a memory, it can be subtly altered by all sorts of factors. What goes back into our brains is like the new version of a text document, overwriting the old. The second fact: memory and emotion are intimately linked biochemically, with hormones like adrenaline actively involved in forming the neurological patterns we call memories.
9/11 • Amygdala • Anger • Anxiety • Autonomic Nervous System • Brain • Cognition • Emotions • Hormones • Memory • Mood • Panic • Psychology • PTSD • Stress • (0) Comments • Permalink
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
High-Quality Marriages Help to Calm Nerves
A University of Virginia neuroscientist has found that women under stress who hold their husbands’ hands show signs of immediate relief, which can clearly be seen on their brain scans. “This is the first study of the neurological reactions to human touch in a threatening situation, and the first study to measure how the brain facilitates the health-enhancing properties of close social relationships,” says Dr. James A. Coan.
Amygdala • Brain • Pain • Relationships • (0) Comments • Permalink
NYU study shows those closer to World Trade Center have more vivid memories when recalling 9/11
Those close to the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 have, on average, more vivid memories of the terrorist attacks than do those who were in other parts of New York City on that day, according to a study by researchers at New York University. The results, reported in the most recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicate personal involvement may be important in engaging the amygdala when recalling 9/11 events. The amygdala is a small, almond-shaped brain structure known to mediate emotion’s influence on memory.
Amygdala • Brain • Emotions • Memory • PTSD • (0) Comments • Permalink
Happy Emotions Boost Creativity
Seeing the world “through rose-colored glasses” may not just be a metaphor anymore. Increasing evidence suggests that our mood literally affects the way we visually process information. According to a new study published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a happy mood may “free our mind” and increase our creative thinking abilities. However, being in a good mood may also make us more distracted. “Having a positive mood affects your attention—it can broaden your visual field, literally,” said Dr. Adam Anderson, assistant professor of psychology at University of Toronto and senior author of the study.
Amygdala • Creativity/Innovation • Emotions • Mood • Optimism • Productivity/Performance • Stress • (0) Comments • Permalink