Neuroscience

Several weeks ago my mother, in her eighth or ninth year of Alzheimer’s Disease, and 63rd year of marriage, began wielding knives and trying to stab people, verbally threatening to kill my father, throwing dangerous glass objects and screaming bloody murder at her own image in the mirror—“I DON’T WANT YOU HERE, GET OUT!!!” My brother and I finally intervened and had her temporarily hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, hoping we could buy more time for her at home through stabilizing her on the right meds, and getting Dad more help. Read More

"He's such a bright little boy!" My mother and her friends said things like that all the time, as they pointed to me when they thought I wasn't paying attention.

Now that I'm grown, I can let them in on a secret: There was never a time when I didn't pay attention to grownups as a kid. I watched them really close, all the time. Read More

Ask any four-year-old child for his age, and chances are he will hold up four fingers. He will count and add with his fingers too, and this is true for children all over the world. To count with your fingers, you need to be able to move each finger separately, a skill which requires special brain-finger wiring.  Does our ability to count and calculate then depend upon our brain-finger connection?

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In this increasingly competitive, survival of the fittest, winner take all, loser lose out world the spectre of man's inhumanity to man bubbles up as our common amygdalae are being hijacked daily. Read More

For the most part, if we had a healthy, attuned relationship with our parents, we're good to go; we've got brain connections that were nurtured in ways that support healthy relationships. And for the rest of us? Very good news: You're not stuck with a brain that doesn't grow or change. You can potentially give yourself a second chance for successful relationship brain wiring, using mindfulness meditation (no pretzel-poses or religion required). Read More

If American football were a food additive or a drug, it would be banned by the FDA. Or, if financial interests prevented its banning, its package would at least carry a surgeon general's warning: Football causes brain damage. The evidence that football causes brain damage is now indisputable. But the deleterious effects of our strong focus on winning go beyond football and brain damage. The compulsioin to win, in general, may be bad for our health. Read More

A sense of uncertainty generates a threat response, reducing your ability to focus on other issues. Certainty on the other hand feels rewarding, and we tend to steer toward it, even when it might be better for us to remain uncertain. Read More

All learning starts with the ability to focus and heed a teacher’s command to “pay attention.” Yet kids, like many of us, are showing a classroom attention span that is increasingly like their attention span on Facebook: Many seem to be exquisitely distractible and unable to focus on Mrs. Read More

New research from UCLA shows that just a few hours of surfing the Web can trigger increased activity in regions of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning. Read More