I had to write a piece on love as part of my positive psychology course, and as a die-hard bachelor, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. But, as I looked into the research on love, I found it to be a fascinating area of research. Maybe, deep down, I’m just an old [...]
Archive for the ‘Neuroscience’ Category
Differential Susceptibility – Are some brains more plastic than others?
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010Ever heard of the idea that for some illnesses and disorders to develop, you need to have an inherited risk factor plus environmental stress? It’s known commonly as the diathesis-stress model (diathesis basically means predisposition), and it’s a common explanation for a large range of phenomena, from schizophrenia to serial murder. Both diathesis [...]
The Buddhist Brain
Thursday, November 5th, 2009What happens to the brain if you spend 44,000 hours in focused meditation?
This is a question Richard Davidson and his neuroscience team asked. To answer it, they took experienced Tibetan monks to their lab at the University of Wisconsin, and took various scans of their brains. Is the Buddhist brain fundamentally different than [...]
Smoking may cause cognitive functions to decline
Monday, October 12th, 2009I saw an anti-smoking pop-up the other day. I hate pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-throughs and pop-whatever-else-they’ve-come-up-with, but I did appreciate the message. Not enough to make me like pop-ups, but it was nice to know they’re being used for a good purpose, at least. If I remember rightly it mentioned some of the [...]
Happiness Music
Monday, September 21st, 2009Music has a remarkable ability to conjure up strong emotions in people. It can cheer you up, bring you down, and in the case of boybands, cause severe anger and disgust. And it’s old; some scientists believe music even predates language, this based on flute-like instruments dug up in France, believed to be over 50,000 [...]
Why is Smoking Addictive?
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009“I finally overcame my will power and started smoking again.” – Mark Twain
There’s no better way to start an article than to quote a long-dead writer with a moustache; especially when he (or she – women can have moustaches too) makes a good point in an ironic way. In this case, the point is that [...]
