If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
In Pride and Prejudice, the reward for meticulous critical scrutiny is self-consciousness, intellectual expansion and moral growth. Long before the invention of fMRIs, Jane Austen knew that close reading was good for the brain... and for the soul.
The way to defeat ignorance is with evidence. After thousands of reported religious experiences of various kinds, including near-death-experiences, no one has ever provided a single item of verified new knowledge.
Your personal playlist can become your personal toolkit for optimizing your mental and emotional state whenever you need it.
Never pass a lemonade stand. It's one of my favorite things to do for a few reasons. Kids get so excited every time you stop that they sort of wiggle around with excitement, tell you the wrong price, and thank you profusely. How many times do you run across that in your daily transactions?
You get a valuable sense of control over your body by understanding your body. Do this, and you can make your doctor a partner in your health care -- not your guru. It just may improve your health care, and is bound to improve your health.
"So I noticed that someone de-friended me on Facebook," he said with an uncomfortable chuckle. "I didn't de-friend you," I responded, taking a sip of my beer and trying to think of a way to casually change the subject. "I just blocked you."
Throughout every day and night, an area of your brain known as the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) "listens in" on your body's chemical state and responds by actively tinkering with the sensitivity of other neural pathways. This overturns a long-held belief about the brain.
Neuroscience has grown from a subdiscipline of biology to a field in its own right, with its own proliferating subdisciplines. In coming decades, it will rival and then surpass the influence of the older physical sciences. This is the era of the brain supremacy.
Neuroscientists and brain researchers have done quite a lot of study with the brain and its effects on our behavior and our lives.
Sleep is essential for students to achieve their academic potential. Not only does a good night sleep prepare us for an active day of learning, it is during sleep that memories are reinforced and learning is consolidated.
I have not read the book. And I don't plan to. But I thought I should note that Vagina: A New Biography, by the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, has drawn scorn from science bloggers and literary critics alike.
Riding a bike has a very important place in our culture. Kids love it; it's a great way to commute; it's a lifelong sport with an emphatic community focused on health, friendships, and family; and it's really fun. Accidents happen in cycling, as with any other sport.
Whatever your position on American military involvement in the Middle East, 9/11 encouraged us to stand together and support anyone who was making a sacrifice for America
A new research project has people seeing ghosts. By flashing an image on a screen in synch with signal rhythms in certain brain areas, scientists are making people hallucinate the image even after it's disappeared. This happens for a simple reason.
Our perception of the world is filtered through our emotions, especially fear and caution. Proffitt and his many colleagues and students have come to believe that we don't all "see" the same world with the same topography.
I remembered the thief's face vividly for a day or so, but as the days passed, I found that I remembered fewer images and more facts. Try as I might, I couldn't picture the guy's face. In other words, semantic memories were out-competing episodic ones.
It seems a recent article in Scientific American Mind suggests that hitting the sauce does not kill brain cells, but can damage them -- particularly in the cerebellum.
On the night of Thursday, May 8, 1997, my father had a stroke. When I visited him in the hospital, I felt profoundly disturbed by what I witnessed. This sluggish, exhausted man in front of me looked like my father, but I knew, deep down, that he wasn't.
What can we learn from Oliver Sacks' experience (other than, you know, to pay attention to warnings about dangerous animals, and to avoid hiking up desolate mountains alone)? Three morals come to mind.
As far as A.K.P. could tell, everything he experienced had happened before. Every news headline, every episode of every show on TV, every visit from a friend, every conversation with his wife seemed to tickle the edges of memories that lay just out of reach.
