PsychCentral, June 10 2021.
With so many types of psychotherapy available, you may be unsure what’s the best option for you.
This is why a recommended first step toward starting therapy is to learn about what each method is typically used for and how it may help you.
Here’s an overview. Read More >
LiveScience, January 31 2011.
Forget the brain puzzles, mild exercise such as walking can boost brain volume and improve memory in older adults, researchers have found.
“With a limited investment of time and effort you can produce fairly dramatic improvements in memory and brain health,” senior researcher Arthur Kramer, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told LiveScience. “You can roll back the clock about two years.” Read More >
LiveScience, January 26 2011.
Could boosting your memory someday be as simple as popping a pill? Scientists found that rats injected with a hormone could remember better, even two weeks after the memory was formed.
The memory-boosting hormone was IGF2, which plays an important role in brain development. The researchers suggest that a better understanding of how this chemical works (IGF2 is short for insulin-like growth factor 2) might lead to drugs that enhance human brain power, particularly in individuals with Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. Read More >
LiveScience, January 12 2011.
Holding a hard or soft ball can influence a person’s perception of how masculine or feminine others are. The finding adds to the growing insight about how connected our sense of touch is to social processing in our brains.
“What you are experiencing every day can influence your thoughts, like if you are sitting on a hard chair or a soft chair,” lead researcher Michael Slepian at Tufts University told LiveScience. Read More >
Discover, January 4 2011.
Babies: As we reported yesterday, they just keep getting bigger. And while they haven’t always been trending towards obese, human babies have always been larger, relative to their mothers, than the infants of most other species. This make birth difficult and could have even changed the social structure of early hominids, steering human evolution.
Human babies are about 6.1 percent of their mother’s weight at birth, while chimp babies are about 3.3 percent. A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences takes a look at our extinct relatives to determine when this shift occurred, and suggests that it could even have encouraged our ancestors to come down from the trees and to form more complex social arrangements. Read More >
Discover, November 19 2010.
What monkey mothers eat has a large impact on how skittish their offspring act in stressful situations like stranger danger–or the presence of a Mr. Potato Head in their cage. According to researchers, even normal monkeys find the toy’s large eyes to be “mildly stressful.”
But baby monkeys from mothers who were fed a high-fat diet (over 35 percent of calories from fat, modeled after a typical American diet) had a much stronger reaction to an encounter with the spud man, and also spazzed in the presence of an unknown human. The study, presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual conference, found that in stressful situations, the female offspring were more anxious and the males more aggressive. Read More >
Discover, November 11 2010.
Even the sight of the reddest, rawest steak won’t get your blood boiling. Surprising new research has found that staring at pictures of meat actually makes people less aggressive. The insight comes from McGill University undergraduate Frank Kachanoff. He wondered if the sight of food would incite men’s defensive desires, much like a dog aggressively protecting its food bowl, he explained in a press release:
“I was inspired by research on priming and aggression, that has shown that just looking at an object which is learned to be associated with aggression, such as a gun, can make someone more likely to behave aggressively. I wanted to know if we might respond aggressively to certain stimuli in our environment not because of learned associations, but because of an innate predisposition. I wanted to know if just looking at the meat would suffice to provoke an aggressive behavior.” Read More >
Discover, November 9 2010.
Some may say it as a joke, others might find it offensive, but it turns out there’s some truth to the idea that people of other races “all look alike.” A new study demonstrates that people have more trouble recognizing faces of people of other races. While this effect has been observed for almost a hundred years, scientists still don’t fully understand why it happens and who it happens to, explains Ars Technica:
It has been suggested that the other race effect is simply a result of differing amounts of facial variation between races, or varying observational abilities of particular races. However, in this study, subjects of both races showed the same trends, suggesting that the other race effect is a generalized phenomenon experienced by people of more than one race. Read More >
Discover, November 4 2010.
New neuroscience research is not only adding to our understanding of math and number processing in the brain, it’s also suggesting a way to improve learning in the math-deficient. A small new study published in Current Biology involved electrical stimulation of the parietal lobe, a part of the brain involved in math learning and understanding. When this area was stimulated, students performed better on a math problem test. Said study leader Cohen Kadosh:
“We’ve shown before that we can induce discalculia [an inability to do math], and now it seems we might be able to make someone better at maths, so we really want to see if we can help people with dyscalculia…. Electrical stimulation is unlikely to turn you into the next Einstein, but if we’re lucky it might be able to help some people to cope better with maths.” Read More >
Discover, October 28 2010.
There are many different kinds of intelligent. Are you book smart? Street smart? Good at school and test-taking smart? Good at schmoozing your way out of deadlines and into jobs smart? Better at writing or math? One new intelligence test, put online today by New Scientist and the Discovery Channel, claims to be the best test of overall smarts. The test was designed by neuropsychologist Adrian Owen to test 12 different “pillars” of wisdom, and to work every part of your mind. From Owen’s article about the test for New Scientist:
Like many researchers before us, we began by looking for the smallest number of tests that could cover the broadest range of cognitive skills that are believed to contribute to intelligence, from memory to planning. Read More >