Stress is Killing You
Are you setting yourself up for a stress related disease? Are you shortening your own lifespan? Over time, the allostatic load of stress on the body can no longer be mitigated by the sympathetic nervous system. We end up with…
Are you setting yourself up for a stress related disease? Are you shortening your own lifespan? Over time, the allostatic load of stress on the body can no longer be mitigated by the sympathetic nervous system. We end up with…
Alzheimers is a feared and dignity-stripping blight on many of our images of old age. Recent research in neuroscience notes that those with Alzheimers have a shrunken hippocamus--inhibiting their ability to create new memories and access old ones. Amazingly, the…
The hippocampus--and area of the brain instrumental, among other things, in learning and the consolidation of memory--becomes active in its ability to grow new neural pathways during the process of "learning". Without a healthy hippocampus, we couldn't learn new things,…
Many view aging as a predestined journey towards senility, dementia or Alzheimers...or at least that's what current American statistics would have us believe. Those with Alzheimers have no ability to create new memories and store them in their hippocampus --…
Different aspects of memory are stored in different areas of the brain simultaneously. Memory retrieval is not like looking at a snapshot--it's always a reconstruction and coming together of pieces and parts. So when we think we remember exactly what…
Neuroscience and fMRI's now tell us that insight and higher-order thought processes such as empathy, unity consciousness, and a sense of one-ness all occur in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. We also know that stress and fear strengthen the…
Our amygdala is masterful at creating imagery that imbued with vivid emotional charge. In fact, it's expert in the ones relating to fear and survival. Our hippocampus likes to store these charged stories and reference them easily when a current…
Multi-tasking is productive but impairs memory retrieval greatly. Encoding of memories into the hippocampus happens best when the prefrontal cortex can focus on one thing at a time. How much of your life is fading away into the background because…