5 Ways Your Brain Is Messing With Your Head We accept on a regular basis the premise that our minds are being screwed with. Advertisers, politicians, magicians; we accept that they know the tricks to pull the wool over our eyes. But as it turns out, the ways in which your head is being truly and royally messed with the most, are coming from inside. Please be advised that your brain does not want you reading the following list, and may kill you to protect its secrets. #5. What is it? It's your inability to notice changes that happen right in front of you, even if they're hugely obvious... as long as you don't see the actual change take place. Um, What? Consider Alfonso Ribeiro. Now, if suddenly that image of Carlton blinked and changed to a different image, you'd notice it. In fact, if the entire text of this article--and the whole color and layout of this website--changed while you were gone, you probably wouldn't notice. A scientist named George McConkie started working on this in the 70s. Why Does the Brain Lie About it? #4. #3.
Berkeley on Biphasic Sleep If you see a student dozing in the library or a co-worker catching 40 winks in her cubicle, don’t roll your eyes. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that an hour’s nap can dramatically boost and restore your brain power. Indeed, the findings suggest that a biphasic sleep schedule not only refreshes the mind, but can make you smarter. Students who napped (green column) did markedly better in memorizing tests than their no-nap counterparts. Conversely, the more hours we spend awake, the more sluggish our minds become, according to the findings. “Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap,” said Matthew Walker, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the lead investigator of these studies. In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups — nap and no-nap.
Frontiers | Mechanisms of white matter change induced by meditation training | Cognition 1Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA2Department of Psychological Sciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA3Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, School of Medicine, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA Training can induce changes in specific brain networks and changes in brain state. In both cases it has been found that the efficiency of white matter as measured by diffusion tensor imaging is increased, often after only a few hours of training. In this paper we consider a plausible molecular mechanism for how state change produced by meditation might lead to white matter change. According to this hypothesis frontal theta induced by meditation produces a molecular cascade that increases myelin and improves connectivity. Keywords: theta rhythm, myelination, diffusion tensor imaging, meditation, fractional anisotropy (FA) Citation: Posner MI, Tang Y-Y and Lynch G (2014) Mechanisms of white matter change induced by meditation training.
Yogic meditation reverses NF-κB and IRF-related transcriptome dynamics in leukocytes of family dementia caregivers in a randomized controlled trial. Night Owls Smarter: A New Study Suggests That Late-To-Bed-Late-To-Rise Leads To Greater Workplace Success : Healthy Living A new study suggests the early riser has only more time for mediocrity. Researchers at the University of Madrid followed nearly 1,000 teenagers and found that night owls bested "morning larks" in qualities linked to general intelligence, such as inductive reasoning, conceptual and analytical thinking. "What hath night to do with sleep?" asked John Milton, the 17th century English poet who worked as a civil servant, among a class of people generally obliged to rise early in the morning. Indeed, while many early risers outperform night owls in school, researchers said the late risers surpass their counterparts later in the workforce. A previous study conducted by the U.S. Jim Horne, a professor of psychophysiology at Loughborough University, commented on the Spanish study. In comparing the two types, Horne said stark differences in personality emerged. "They will probably be good at cryptic crosswords, while morning types go for the more logical ones."
Meditation found to increase brain size Kris Snibbe/Harvard News Office Sara Lazar (center) talks to research assistant Michael Treadway and technologist Shruthi Chakrapami about the results of experiments showing that meditation can increase brain size. People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don’t. Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input. In one area of gray matter, the thickening turns out to be more pronounced in older than in younger people. “Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being,” says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. Controlling random thoughts
Empower Your Brain With Water - Daily Two Cents Empower Your Brain with 8 six ounce glasses of water per day. Scientists have been studying how to help empower your brain without drugs or medication. The studies have been focusing closely on what humans eat each day. Recently on television there was a news program and new developments in the study of what humans eat. The main gist of the program was to unveil the fact that cutting fat is a good thing, but not if it is replaced with sugar, which is what most people in American have done. Another part of that program explained clearly the benefits of starting every day with 16 ounces of fresh water. I have been experimenting with this information and here are the results. For example, this post is going to be my fourth quality post in the last three hours. We need three eight ounce glasses of water in the morning half of our day. Information Link – How to Drink More Water Each Day Image: Freedigitalphotos.net To report this post you need to login first. About The Author javaman
Adverse Cognitive Effects of Medications: Turning Attention to Reversibility In this issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, Gray and colleagues1 present findings from an observational analysis that show a higher risk for dementia with the increasing dose and duration of exposure to medications with strong anticholinergic activity. The risk for dementia was consistent when comparing participants with recent and past heavy use of such medications with nonusers, suggesting that the adverse cognitive effects are permanent. Other studies2- 4 have consistently shown similar results.
This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain as a Weapon. On an otherwise routine July day, inside a laboratory at Duke University, two rhesus monkeys sat in separate rooms, each watching a computer screen that featured an image of a virtual arm in two-dimensional space. The monkeys' task was to guide the arm from the center of the screen to a target, and when they did so successfully, the researchers rewarded them with sips of juice. But there was a twist. The monkeys were not provided with joysticks or any other devices that could manipulate the arm. Rather, they were relying on electrodes implanted in portions of their brains that influence movement. Making things even more interesting, the primates shared control over the digital limb. Neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, who led the research, published earlier this year, has a name for this remarkable collaboration: a "brainet." But there is a potentially dark side to these innovations. Consider Nicolelis’s brainet idea. It isn’t hard to imagine what this might look like.
Echolalia Echolalia (also known as echologia or echophrasia[1]) is the automatic repetition of vocalizations made by another person (by the same person is called palilalia). It is one of the echophenomena, closely related to echopraxia, the automatic repetition of movements made by another person; both are "subsets of imitative behavior" whereby sounds or actions are imitated "without explicit awareness".[1] Echolalia may be an immediate reaction to a stimulus or may be delayed.[1] Signs and symptoms[edit] Echolalia can be categorized as immediate (occurring immediately after the stimulus) vs. delayed (some time after the occurrence of a stimulus).[1][4] A typical pediatric presentation of echolalia might be as follows: a child is asked "Do you want dinner?"; the child echoes back "Do you want dinner?", followed by a pause, and then a response, "Yes. Cause[edit] Imitation and learning[edit] Function[edit] Tourette syndrome[edit] Autism[edit] See also[edit] Lists of language disorders References[edit]
Uncovering New Players in the Fight Against Alzheimer's Peer inside the brain of someone with Alzheimer’s disease, and you’ll see some striking features: shriveled nerve cells and strange protein clumps. According to a leading theory, proteins called amyloid beta and tau build up in the brain and choke nerve cell communication, setting the disease in motion years before people suspect anything is wrong with their recall. Yet the Alzheimer’s brain has another curious aspect. Some of the clusters of toxic amyloid proteins are entangled with octopus-like immune cells called microglia, cells that live in the brain to clear unwanted clutter. For years scientists have probed how neuroinflammation contributes to Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative ailments. For decades multiple lines of evidence have given scientists a hunch that inflammation plays some role in Alzheimer’s. Some researchers continue to believe inflammation plays a part, however. TREM2 initially appeared to have a protective role.