life

Grand Rounds: Brain and Cognition edition

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Encephalon (brain & mind blog car­ni­val, edi­tion ) final­ly meets Grand Rounds (health & med­i­cine blog carnival).

What a nice sur­prise. Hel­lo. Nice to meet you!

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Note: Chron­ic Babe wins a com­pli­men­ta­ry copy of The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness for basi­cal­ly invent­ing cog­ni­tive sleep ther­a­py. Con­grats!

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Life and Death

Mind­Hacks dis­cuss­es an unex­pect­ed surge in brain activ­i­ty when blood pres­sure drops to zero.

In Sick­ness & In Health suf­fers a death in the fam­i­ly. Adam shem tov. A man of good name.

Brain­Blog­ger won­ders, is reli­gion a “nat­ur­al” phe­nom­e­non?

Mind and Empathy

Behav­ior­ism & Men­tal Health finds that every­one can have a men­tal ill­ness — take a look at “Adjust­ment Dis­or­der”.

ACP Internist rein­forces the impor­tance of empa­thy. Nov­el Patient encour­ages patients to dream big, Flo­re­cen­dot­com high­lights how patients them­selves con­tribute to patient safe­ty. The Hip­po­crat­ic Oaf dis­cuss­es the feel­ings of a med­ical stu­dent. Clin­i­cal Cas­es won­ders what doc­tors  in train­ing car­ry in their white coats.

Advances in the His­to­ry of Psy­chol­o­gy exam­ines an impor­tant ear­ly step in the jour­ney to con­cep­tu­al­ize cog­ni­tion and emo­tion from a neur­al point of view.

The Fit­ness Fix­er empathizes with her feet.

Brain

How to Cope With Pain dis­cuss­es a con­tro­ver­sial treat­ment for severe pain.

Neu­rophiloso­pher shows how vision (view­ing one’s body) can mod­u­late the sens­es of touch and pain. Fun exper­i­ments  includ­ed. Neu­r­o­crit­ic takes things one step fur­ther, and takes us to the poten­tial future of tat­too removal.

Prov­i­den­tia announces a new NFL Con­cus­sion Com­mit­tee. 300,000 sports-relat­ed trau­mat­ic brain injuries occur in the Unit­ed States alone each year.

Sharp­Brains answers 15 com­mon ques­tions relat­ed to neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty.

Med­ical Smart­phones [Read more…] about Grand Rounds: Brain and Cog­ni­tion edition

Neuroscience Core Concepts: What is “It” in Use It or Lose It?

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We all have heard “Use It or Lose It”. Now, what is “It”? how does “it” work? why is “it” our best (and too often unrec­og­nized) friend?

The Soci­ety for Neu­ro­science (SfN) has just released a user-friend­ly pub­li­ca­tion titled Neu­ro­science Core Con­cepts, aimed at help­ing edu­ca­tors and the gen­er­al pub­lic learn more about the brain.

Descrip­tion: “Neu­ro­science Core Con­cepts offer fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples that one should know about the brain and ner­vous sys­tem, the most com­plex liv­ing struc­ture known in the uni­verse. They are a prac­ti­cal resource about:

  • - How your brain works and how it is formed.
  • - How it guides you through the changes in life.
  • - Why it is impor­tant to increase under­stand­ing of the brain.”

You will enjoy read­ing the web page explain­ing in detail 8 Neu­ro­science Core Con­cepts:

1| The brain is the body’s most com­plex organ.

2| Neu­rons com­mu­ni­cate using both elec­tri­cal and chem­i­cal sig­nals. [Read more…] about Neu­ro­science Core Con­cepts: What is “It” in Use It or Lose It?

A User’s Guide to Lifelong Brain Health: BrainFit for Life

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As the Brain Fit­ness indus­try con­tin­ues to gain momen­tum, and peo­ple explore all the incred­i­ble brain-train­ing tools being devel­oped, we hope that enthu­si­asts don’t take their eye off the impor­tance of the phys­i­cal health of the brain and all the sys­tems it com­mu­ni­cates with. The brain is unique in that it hous­es our cog­ni­tive and emo­tion­al capac­i­ties in the form of the mind. It is a ‘cog­ni­tive’ organ that hungers for stim­u­la­tion from new expe­ri­ences and chal­lenges. Many brain fit­ness pro­grams strive to sat­is­fy this need. Yet the brain is also a phys­i­cal organ that plays by many of the same rules as the heart, lungs, liv­er and kid­neys. To stay healthy and per­form opti­mal­ly it requires qual­i­ty nutri­tion, phys­i­cal activ­i­ty and opti­mal sleep. The brain, espe­cial­ly, relies on a healthy vas­cu­lar sys­tem to effi­cient­ly deliv­er oxy­gen and key nutri­ents and remove waste. In fact, the brain uses approx­i­mate­ly 20% of the oxy­gen we breathe to sat­is­fy its high-ener­gy demands. Giv­en that the brain only weighs about 2% of the body, we can con­sid­er it an ener­gy hog and we must cater to its needs very carefully.

Nutri­ents play key roles in brain func­tion. Sev­er­al have shown effi­ca­cy in clin­i­cal tri­als treat­ing cas­es of mood dis­or­ders, cog­ni­tive decline and of course ben­e­fit­ing the phys­i­cal health of the brain. Nutri­ents are both the raw mate­ri­als employed in cre­at­ing new neur­al con­nec­tions and [Read more…] about A User’s Guide to Life­long Brain Health: Brain­Fit for Life

Manage Stress for Your Brain Health

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We just received this very insight­ful essay on stress man­age­ment and brain health writ­ten by Lan­don, a home­school­er and par­tic­i­pant in Susan Hill’s writ­ing work­shop. Susan asked Meditation School Studentsher stu­dents to write about impli­ca­tions of recent brain research.

Enjoy the arti­cle and the long week­end (at least here in the US) and Relax…

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Stress Man­age­ment for Your Brain Health 

– By Lan­don N

Thou­sands and thou­sands of web-like neu­rons linked togeth­er form a spongy mass inside a skull. This mass, called the brain, is what con­trols the body and the thoughts that run threw it have a notable effect on the heath of an indi­vid­ual. In addi­tion to thoughts, fear, stress, and emo­tions also have a strong effect on health. So then, health depends on more than just eat­ing right and exer­cis­ing; it depends on our men­tal state as well.

[Read more…] about Man­age Stress for Your Brain Health

Top Ten Tips for Women Who Lead Men

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Thinking menEllen recent­ly wrote a nice post titled Top Ten Tips for Men Who Lead Women, and asked for vol­un­teers to offer a com­ple­men­tary per­spec­tive. I hope you enjoy!

  1. We men know we are hard to lead, and that can be stress­ful for you and for us. You should know that stress affects short term mem­o­ry, so it is impor­tant to be able to man­age stress well, with med­i­ta­tion or oth­er meth­ods. Check here your lev­el of stress to see how much this point applies to you. Please remem­ber, laugh­ing is good for your brain.
  2. Don’t think too much-we don’t. If we do, we try to find ways to self-talk us out of that uncom­fort­able state.
  3. Please remem­ber our hum­ble ori­gins. We are tool-using ani­mals, which is why we like play­ing with all kinds of toys, from a car to that blackberry.
  4. When we are stub­born, you are enti­tled to remind us that even apes can learn-if you help us see the point. Show us that change is pos­si­ble at any age. Believe it or not, we can lis­ten.
  5. Espe­cial­ly if we can find com­mon ground: what about chat­ting about sports psy­chol­o­gy?.
  6. Please moti­vate us to lis­ten and be open mind­ed to learn with wise words. If that does­n’t work, please per­se­vere with nice words. Please don’t ever say that we are worse than pink dol­phins-if we feel attacked, we’ll just disengage.
  7. Some­times we don’t coop­er­ate enough?. Please give us time for our brains to ful­ly evolve, we have been try­ing for a while!
  8. You can help us grow. For the next lead­er­ship work­shop, buy us copies of the Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain book. You may think we don’t need this… but at our core we real­ly want to get bet­ter at Grat­i­tude and Altru­ism. We want to be able to play with the ulti­mate toy: our genes!
  9. If that book is sold out, we could also ben­e­fit from read­ing Dama­sio’s Descartes Error and dis­cov­er how emo­tions are impor­tant for good deci­sion-mak­ing. Or help us improve our abil­i­ty to read emo­tion­al mes­sages. As long as we believe we can some­how ben­e­fit from it, we’ll try!
  10. If you lead some­one with Bill Gates-like Frontal Lobes, con­grat­u­late him for his brain. If you don’t, encour­age him to fol­low track. Please be patient…

Now, any tak­ers for Top Ten Tips for Women Who Lead Women or Men Who Lead Men?