Blog Profile / Brain Blogger
| URL : | http://brainblogger.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / Neuroscience | |
| Posts on Regator: | 538 | |
| Posts / Week: | 2.4 | |
| Archived Since: | January 19, 2009 | |
Blog Post Archive
Out-Group Discrimination Fuels Anger, Risk-Taking and Vigilance
Discrimination originates in prejudice. It most often takes the form of social rejection, with racial- and gender-based discrimination being two of the most common types. A curious phenomenon about the effects of discrimination is reported in the journal Psychological Science by the team of Wendy Mendes — a senior psychologist at the University of California, [...]
Understanding How Color Is Perceived in the Brain
Scientists have examined the effects of language on categorical color perception — the idea that color perception is affected by how it is described in language — with behavioral research. Meanwhile, other scholars have looked into this phenomenon using neuroimaging techniques in an attempt to get a better look at the neural processes underlying these [...]
Psychopharmacological Drug Development in A Depression?
“If you are a mouse and suffer from depression, we can cure you!”. You may have heard similar statements for other diseases, which is a general reflection on the current state of drug development. After spending billions of dollars in pharmaceutical drug development only about 30 new drugs reached the market last year — a [...]
Teaching the Brain to Calm Itself
Estimates of combat-related Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in U.S. veterans since the Vietnam War ranges from approximately 2& to 17%. Additional studies of combat veterans of more recent wars places the range of Iraq War returnees who suffer from PTSD between 4% and 17%. Currently, there is no one form of treatment that has been [...]
Horror on Seymour Avenue
As we get ready to celebrate Mother’s Day this weekend, we have been greeted with news of the liberation of three young women who were held in captivity for nearly 10 years in a ramshackle house located in a rundown neighborhood of Cleveland. Michelle Knight, Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry, along with her six year [...]
Exercise for Depression – A Gold Standard Therapy
Depression has become a common medical issue worldwide. Conventional treatments, generally, have not been effective in preventing recurrence of this condition. SSRIs can take months to provide a beneficial effect. Adverse side effects of antidepressant medications are a further concern, based on individual physical and mental health status. Show More Summary
Is Obesity Linked to ADHD?
As more and more children consume high-fat diets and become increasingly overweight, the incidences of diseases like type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure have steadily grown among the population. However, these may not be the only health issues linked with this surge in overeating among children. In a recent study from the University of [...]
Do Not Ignore a Headache
A thunderclap headache. Post-partum cerebral angiopathy. Sub-arachnoid hemorrhagic headache. Posterior reversible encephalopathy. Primary and benign angiopathies of the central nervous system. Call-Fleming syndrome. I am not throwing the dictionary at you. Show More Summary
Tackling Schizophrenia Using the Eriksonian Stages
Erik Erikson developed a psychosocial stage theory that illuminates how people progress through certain stages during their life spans. The stages in this theory of development may be negotiated poorly by people with chronic illness and schizophrenia, so Erikson’s theory may have bearing on treatment for schizophrenia in adulthood. Show More Summary
You Are What You Eat
Excess food intake makes you fat. High calorie foods make you gain excess fat. Excess carbohydrates and saturated fatty acids get taken up by fat cells and get converted into fatty acids stored within them. This is what we know of the straightforward relationship between diet and obesity. Yet, the relationship between food choices and [...]
Cognitive Dissonance and Psychosis – Understanding Inconsistency
Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs when a person simultaneously holds two cognitions, thoughts or beliefs that are psychologically inconsistent with a person’s behavior. Cognitive dissonance occurs in terms of internal behavior wherein an individual’s thoughts or beliefs are rooted in inconsistency. Show More Summary
Aging Successfully
Successful aging is an experience governed by gender, culture, personality, and health-related factors. For some, successful aging simply means freedom from disability, while for others it is a more comprehensive assessment of life satisfaction. With an aging population, our society needs to evaluate what it means to ‘age successfully’ and how we – as healthcare [...]
Child IQ – Why Confidence Matters
Intellectual functioning has a significant relationship to the child’s confidence in his or her abilities. Both intellect and self confidence interact with, and to a great extent, originate from personal experience. It is through experience with the world by which the child acquires self-confidence in his or her thought processes. Although ‘confidence’ in one’s self [...]
Telecommunication in Healthcare
Imagine this scenario: you have a stroke while camping in the middle of nowhere. You are taken by paramedics to the nearest ER, where you are told that there are no stroke neurologists around. But luckily, the ER has videoconferencing equipment connecting it to stroke neurologists based in larger hospitals in other cities. These stroke neurologists are then able [...]
Ketogenic Diet for Epilepsy and Other Neurological Disorders
In recent years, clinicians have utilized a somewhat surprising tool to treat their patients with refractory epilepsy-diet. The majority of people with epilepsy can become free from seizures with the use of antiepileptic medications, but in about 20-30% of people with epilepsy, medications fail to completely control their symptoms. Clinicians and researchers have found the [...]
The Tongue – A Portal for Neuromodulation
The human tongue does more than just taste food. Of course, one needs the tongue for better pronunciation of words and effective communication. Surprisingly the tongue is also a valuable channel for communication with one’s brain. An electrolyte-rich saliva and a high density of sensory nerve receptors on the tongue enable this communication. With the [...]
The Brain’s Stopwatch – Emotions and Time Perception
Albert Einstein, when asked to explain his theories in layman’s terms, once famously said, “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.” That’s also how our brains work [...]
Neuroeconomics – Hype or Hope?
You may have perhaps heard of game-theory and behavioral economics, but like many within and outside the field the term neuroeconomics seems to be a revolutionary one. Neuroeconomics is, briefly put, an innovative research program, which combines findings and modeling tools from economics, psychology and neuroscience to account for human choice behavior. Neuroeconomics is, make [...]
Bilingualism May Be Neuroprotective
The ability to communicate in multiple languages not only provides doorways to new cultural and social experiences but also apparently promotes brain growth and staves off the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers at the University of Kentucky and Kyungpook National University in South Korea studied 110 participants (who were either bilingual or monolingual) [...]
Can Age-Related Forgetfulness be Overcome?
Most older adults accept forgetfulness as natural part of the aging process. However, a group of Canadian researchers from the University of Toronto and Baycrest Health Services have found that mature adults can boost their memory and even perform as well on memory tests as younger adults through distraction learning. This type of learning uses [...]