As usual, follow the title link to see the whole article.
Train The Brain: Using Neurofeedback To Treat ADHD
by Jon HamiltonKatherine Ellison's son was 12 when he was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.
Courtesy of Katherine EllisonKatherine Ellison and her son, whom she refers to as "Buzz" in her book, both have ADHD. Buzz was diagnosed at age 12.
"He was getting into fights. He wasn't doing his homework. He was being very difficult with his little brother. And he was just melting down day after day," Ellison says. "So I decided to devote a year to trying out different approaches to see if we could make it any better."
In recent years, more people have been trying an alternative approach called neurofeedback, a type of therapy intended to teach the brain to stay calm and focused. Neurofeedback is expensive, time consuming and still scientifically unproved. But, there's growing evidence that it can help.
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The Psyche on Automatic
Amy Cuddy probes snap judgments, warm feelings, and how to become an “alpha dog.”
Photograph by Fred Field
Amy Cuddy, at Harvard Business School’s Baker Library
Though snap judgments get no respect, they are not so much a bad habit as a fact of life. Our first impressions register far too quickly for any nuanced weighing of data: “Within less than a second, using facial features, people make what are called ‘spontaneous trait inferences,’” says Amy Cuddy.
Social psychologist Cuddy, an assistant professor of business administration, investigates how people perceive and categorize others. Warmth and competence, she finds, are the two critical variables. They account for about 80 percent of our overall evaluations of people (i.e., Do you feel good or bad about this person?), and shape our emotions and behaviors toward them. Her warmth/competence analysis illuminates why we hire Kurt instead of Kyra, how students choose study partners, who gets targeted for sexual harassment, and how the “motherhood penalty” and “fatherhood bonus” exert their biases in the workplace. It even suggests why we admire, envy, or disparage certain social groups, elect politicians, or target minorities for genocide.
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Does adolescent stress lead to mood disorders in adulthood?
Posted On: November 3, 2010Montreal, November 3, 2010 – Stress may be more hazardous to our mental health than previously believed, according to new research from Concordia University. A series of studies from the institution have found there may be a link between the recent rise in depression rates and the increase of daily stress.
"Major depression has become one of the most pressing health issues in both developing and developed countries," says principle researcher Mark Ellenbogen, a professor at the Concordia Centre for Research in Human Development and a Canada Research Chair in Developmental Psychopathology.
"What is especially alarming is that depression in young people is increasing in successive generations. People are suffering from depression earlier in life and more people are getting it. We want to know why and how. We believe that stress is a major contributor."
From parent to child
Ellenbogen and colleagues are particularly interested in the link between childhood stress and the development of clinical depression and bipolar disorder. His team is evaluating the stress of children who are living in families where one parent is affected by a mood disorder.
Mind over matter: Study shows we consciously exert control over individual neurons
Posted On: October 28, 2010Every day our brains are flooded by stimulation — sounds, sights and smells. At the same time, we are constantly engaged in an inner dialogue, ruminating about the past, musing about the future. Somehow the brain filters all this input instantly, selecting some things for long- or short-term storage, discarding others and focusing in on what's most important at any given instant.
How this competition is resolved across multiple sensory and cognitive regions in the brain is not known; nor is it clear how internal thoughts and attention decide what wins in this continual contest of stimulation.
Now a collaboration between UCLA scientists and colleagues from the California Institute of Technology has shown that humans can actually regulate the activity of specific neurons in the brain, increasing the firing rate of some while decreasing the rate of others. And study subjects were able to do so by manipulating an image on a computer screen using only their thoughts.
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The unhealthy ego: What can neuroscience tell us about our 'self'?
Posted On: October 28, 2010With Election Day right around the corner, political egos are on full display. One might even think that possessing a "big ego" is a prerequisite for success in politics, or in any position of leadership. High achievers–CEO's, top athletes, rock stars, prominent surgeons, or scientists–often seem to be well endowed in ego.
But when does a "healthy ego" cross the line into unhealthy territory? Where is the line between confident, positive self-image and grandiose self-importance, which might signal a personality disorder or other psychiatric illness? More fundamentally, what do we mean by ego, from a neural perspective? Is there a brain circuit or neurotransmitter system underlying ego that is different in some people, giving them too much or too little?
What is Ego?
What ego is depends largely on who you ask. Philosophical and psychological definitions abound. Popularly, ego is generally understood as one's sense of self-identity or how we view ourselves. It may encompass self-confidence, self-esteem, pride, and self-worth, and is therefore influenced by many factors, including genes, early upbringing, and stress.
Study of babies' brain scans sheds new light on the brain's unconscious activity and how it develops
Posted On: November 1, 2010Full-term babies are born with a key collection of networks already formed in their brains, according to new research that challenges some previous theories about the brain's activity and how the brain develops. The study is published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers led by a team from the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre at Imperial College London used functional MRI scanning to look at 'resting state' networks in the brains of 70 babies, born at between 29 and 43 weeks of development, who were receiving treatment at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.
Resting state networks are connected systems of neurons in the brain that are constantly active, even when a person is not focusing on a particular task, or during sleep. The researchers found that these networks were at an adult-equivalent level by the time the babies reached the normal time of birth.
These are only a few of the tabs I need to close, so there will be more to come.
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