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 impaired immunity, atherosclerosis, metabolic syndrome, bone demineralization, atrophy of brain nerve cells, hippocampus damage, growth […]

Can Learning NOW Prevent Alzheimers?

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 more you learn and keep your brain cognitively active TODAY can have influence on your […]

How’s Your Hippocampus?

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, consolidate or retrieve our memories, or even orient to new perspectives and beliefs.  We could […]

Could Walking Upstairs Prevent Alzheimers?

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 — that part of the brain intimately involved in memory and cognitive sharpness.  When an area […]

Memory as Fiction

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 happened, it’s really a neurological rebuild or a version of the event. This is why […]

Is Turmeric the Door to Enlightenment?

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 mid-portion of the brain called the limbic system.  A stressful life causes the mid portion […]

False Demons

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 situation only vaguely resembles a previous threatening one.  We trigger often at the memory of […]

Multi-tasking Amnesia

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 you are texting while doing something else? How much more cognitive presence can you have […]