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Posts tagged ‘brain research’

Oct 30

Outsmarting Our Primitive Responses to Fear

What scares you? Terrorism? Climate change? Snakes? Germs?

Whether it makes you buy a handgun or hand sanitizer, an electric car or an electric fence, fear drives much of human behavior. And it’s not just fear of physical harm that makes us want to hide under the covers. The twin fears of intimacy and rejection, for example, shape many of our social interactions.

Scientists say fear and its companion — the fight, flight or freeze response — can save us when faced with imminent physical harm.

This served us well when we were cave dwellers, under constant threat from marauding wild animals or invading warrior tribes. But it can often get in our way in modern life.

Read more . . .

Mar 25

Treating Depression with Botox?

Don’t Worry, Get Botox

Sunday Review: March 21, 2014 – Gray Matter by Richard A. Friedman

FEELING down? Smile. Cheer up. Put on a happy face. No doubt you’ve dismissed these bromides from friends and loved ones because everyone knows that you can’t feel better just by aping a happy look.

Or perhaps you can. New research suggests that it is possible to treat depression by paralyzing key facial muscles with Botox, which prevents patients from frowning and having unhappy-looking faces.

In a study forthcoming in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, Eric Finzi, a cosmetic dermatologist, and Norman Rosenthal, a professor of psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School, randomly assigned a group of 74 patients with major depression to receive either Botox or saline injections in the forehead muscles whose contraction makes it possible to frown. Six weeks after the injection, 52 percent of the subjects who got Botox showed relief from depression, compared with only 15 percent of those who received the saline placebo.

Read on . . .

Aug 2

Using Hypnosis to Gain More Control over Your Illness

Great article by Lesley Alderman in NY Times Health section April 15, 2011:

Using Hypnosis to Gain More Control Over Your Illness

KIRSTEN RITCHIE, 44, is no stranger to surgery — nearly 20 years ago, doctors removed four tumors from her brain. She remembers the operation and its aftermath as “horrific . . .”

Jul 17

The Morality of Meditation

Check out this very interesting article in the New York Times Sunday Review by David DeSteno on July 5, 2013:

 

Oct 17

Charles Caleb Colton

October 17, 2012

There is an elasticity in the human mind, capable of bearing much, but which will not show itself, until a certain weight of affliction be put upon it; its powers may be compared to those vehicles whose springs are so contrived that they get on smoothly enough when loaded, but jolt confoundedly when they have nothing to bear.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon

 

Sep 24

Meet Sara on YouTube

Aug 14

Photo of a beautiful sunset over mountains

Making Decisions

August 15, 2012

Make more decisions in every day. Because a decision is a summoning of life. That’s why a little chaos is good for you, because often you don’t make a decision until you get yourself in a jam. And then, in the middle of the jam, you make a decision, but that decision summons Life Force. Have you ever been in a place where you couldn’t quite make up your mind and you just felt sort of limp? “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.” And then you decided, and you felt alive again. We want you to know that you’ll never get it done. So don’t approach this from, “I gotta get on this,” because you’re not ever going to get it done, anyway. And the other thing we want you to know is, you cannot get it wrong. So, make a decision. Let it flow. – Abraham Hicks

Jan 1

Hypnosis and The Brain

This is Your Brain Under Hypnosis, Sandra Blakesee, NYT, November 22, 2005.