Read moreOrch OR was harshly criticized from its inception, as the brain was considered too “warm, wet, and noisy” for seemingly delicate quantum processes. However, evidence has now shown warm quantum coherence in plant photosynthesis, bird brain navigation, our sense of smell, and brain microtubules.
Read more…Young adult rats were either allowed to have sex only once in a two-week period, or every day (Leuner et al., 2010).
What they found was that sex was stressful-the rats had elevated levels of stress hormones-but sex also promoted brain cell growth.
The rats that had been having sex for two weeks displayed neurogenesis: the process by which neurons are generated from stem cells in the brain.
Read moreStuck thoughts… the brick walls that form a prison around your mind. The harder you try to get rid of them, the more powerful they become.
I’ve been wrestling with stuck thoughts ever since I was in fourth grade. The content or nature of the obsessions has morphed into many different animals over the course of 30-plus years, but their intensity and frequency remain unchanged.
Read moreFor most of my career as a teenager I was preoccupied with being cool, with cultivating a counter-culture, bohemian persona (assuming clove cigarettes, On the Road, and a pile of mixed tapes constituted “bohemian”). Rolling my eyes at my mother was a near-constant affectation.
I was certain that I knew it all; I had the rest of my life all figured out and I rejected anything that didn’t fit with my narrow understanding of the world.
This is actually a followup post to this primary article on Trauma Focused Therapy.
Read moreBut oftentimes, despite PTSD treatment, patients still complain of nightmares. What can I offer them then?
A psychotherapeutic option
Image rehearsal therapy (IRT) is one option:
* IRT is a modified CBT technique that utilizes recalling the nightmare, writing it down and changing the theme.
Read moreTo get the outcome you want, you need to attentively listen to the person complain about the problem in order to find a non-confronting way in. Focus on normalizing the problem – making it seem like a normal, everyday behaviour – and creating an alliance with the person. Do not be tempted to offer advice, which comes across as “I’m normal; you’re not.”
Read moreResearchers at the University of Auckland wanted to find out if the secret to a happy marriage was due to doing what your partner wanted most of the time or doing what you felt was right.
The study, which involved a New Zealand couple, had to be abandoned before the 12 day period because the man fell into a deep depression as a result of the exercise.
Read moreOne of the hallmarks for intelligent people is an obvious tendency to ignore the “accepted” behaviour of the general public. Smart people seem to have their own agendas and their own schedules. A recent study by the London School of Economics indicates that insomnia is a natural tendency of the intellectually elite amongst us. It doesn’t appear to be a fluke, either.
Read moreWomen are turned off by sexually explicit images in advertisements. Unless that is, the item being advertised is very precious. And valuable. And rare. Like, maybe, a once a year type gift.
At least, that’s the findings of a new study by an international group of marketing professors. Kathleen D. Vohs, Jaideep Sengupta and Darren W. Dahl used made-up advertisements for watches to test a theory in sexual economics that women want sex to be seen as something special, or at least not cheap. Sexual economic theory is “probably the least romantic theory about sex you’ll ever have learned,” says Vohs, who’s a researcher at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.
Read moreOne theory in psychology research suggests that we all have a happiness “set-point” that largely determines our overall well-being. We oscillate around this set point, becoming happier when something positive happens or the opposite, afterwards returning to equilibrium.
