Why you do it? Ways to reduce it.

Some 2,700 years ago in the ancient city of Sam’al, in what is now modern Turkey, an elderly servant of the king sits in a corner of his house and contemplates the nature of his soul. His name is Katumuwa. He stares at a basalt stele made for him, featuring his own graven portrait together with an inscription in ancient Aramaic. It instructs his family, when he dies, to celebrate ‘a feast at this chamber: a bull for Hadad harpatalli and a ram for Nik-arawas of the hunters and a ram for Shamash, and a ram for Hadad of the vineyards, and a ram for Kubaba, and a ram for my soul that is in this stele.’

There is no shortage of psychological and pharmacological therapies to combat the world’s most widespread mental health issue, major depressive disorder (MDD). However, a significant portion of the affected population fail to respond to many of these traditional therapies. For this reason, new drugs must be tested and validated. One promising candidate is ketamine – famously but somewhat improperly known as a horse tranquilizer.

This is a surprisingly interesting video.

Using characters from "Game of Thrones", researchers investigated what happens in the brain when people immerse themselves in fiction. The study found the more people became immersed in a story, the more they "became" the fictional character while reading. This was reflected in activity changes in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with thinking about one's self.

In her new book, Brandy Schillace recalls the unbelievable legacy of a Cold War era neurosurgeon’s mission to preserve the soul.

A two-week course of high doses of CBD helps restore the function of two proteins key to reducing the accumulation of beta-amyloid plaque, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease, and improves cognition in an experimental model of early onset familial Alzheimer's, investigators report.

We've all been there: walked into a room and can't remember what we came for. But how much is the actual doorway to blame for our forgetfulness?

Recently published neuroimaging research provides evidence that the directional connectivity between several brain regions plays an important role

My wife was recently telling some mutual friends an amusing anecdote about the time she was changing our then-baby son’s nappy in the toilet of a busy café, only for him to urinate all over the groin region of her trousers, meaning she had to return to the crowded eating area displaying a deeply suspicious stain. Big laughs all round.

Back in the 1970s, the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget discovered that, if you ask young children to explain the mechanics of vision as they understand them, their answers tend to reveal the exact same misconception: that the eyes emit some sort of immaterial substance into the environment and capture the sights of objects much like a projector.

You are what you think. Understanding this is essential to start thinking in more useful ways. Why do two heads think better than one and four heads think better than two? It’s because we’re all limited by our own experiences and biases. How can we overcome this?

My partner and I are both book nerds–we met working at a bookstore–but we don’t have a lot of overlap in our reading. He tends towards science fiction and horror, and I read YA, literary fiction, and queer lit of all genres. When we do both read the same book, though, it’s always an interesting experience for me. I tend to immerse myself in books, absorbing the general emotions I get from the story, or the big ideas that it grapples with.

Dreaming experiments involved real-time conversations between sleepers and scientists

Many people experience a tingly feeling called autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) when they watch whispery videos. For some, the effect is wearing off

Noninvasive electrical zaps, tuned specifically to individual brain-activity patterns, appear to reduce checking, hoarding and other compulsions for up to three months

Their development, published on December 18th in Scientific Reports, gives researchers more confidence in using the technique to untangle the human brain’s wiring and to better understand the changes in this wiring that accompany neurological or mental disorders such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease.

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM) in St. Louis have spent some years investigating the links between circadian rhythm and Alzheimer’s, and have recently been making some real inroads.

Just a few doses of an experimental drug can reverse age-related declines in memory and mental flexibility in mice, according to a new study by UC San Francisco scientists. The drug, called ISRIB, has already been shown in laboratory studies to restore memory function months after traumatic brain injury (TBI), reverse cognitive impairments in Down Syndrome, prevent noise-related hearing loss, fight certain types of prostate cancer, and even enhance cognition in healthy animals.

In stressful times, this surprising lesson from neuroscience may help to lessen your anxieties.