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Steve Bosserman

Why we find change so difficult, according to neuroscience - 0 views

  • “Emotionally and cognitively and executively the brain has established a lot of pathways,” says Dr. Sanam Hafeez, a licensed clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist. “The more you do something the more ingrained it becomes in neural pathways, much like how a computer that stores the sites you visit — when you log onto your browser, they will pop up because you use them a lot. Change is an upheaval of many things and the brain has to work to fit it into an existing framework.”
  • “You absolutely can and should teach your brain to change,” says Hafeez, noting that keeping the brain agile has been shown to help delay aging. “I've done quite a bit of work on the aging process and slowing that down. It starts with changing the aversion to change.”
  • “Let’s say you’re a financial planer who takes up knitting,” says Hafeez. “That is doing something very different, where the brain truly has to adapt new neural pathways. Learning a new skill like this have been shown to ward off dementia, aging and cognitive decline because it regenerates cellular activity. Learn a new language in middle age. You tax your brain by shaking things up and it’s effective for your body in the way HIIT is for your body.”
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  • “Most people won't try something new because they’re deathly afraid of failing,” notes Hafeez. “When you see that something is doable it makes you more receptive and brave. There's that emotional, therapeutic factor that is separate from the neural pathway factor. Over the years, we learn to succeed by viewing our previous failures and successes in a certain light and as we get older we lose sight of that. When you try a new thing it makes you more confident to try to do more new things.”
Steve Bosserman

How Neuroscience Can Help Us Treat Trafficked Youth - Pacific Standard - 0 views

  • A common misconception is that these youths are choosing to engage in the commercial sex trade. But as recent advances in neuroimaging techniques help scientists unravel the myriad ways that trauma affects the brain, emerging evidence suggests that brain changes resulting from trauma could make young people more vulnerable to exploiters and less receptive to people trying to help. Rather than making a conscious decision to rebel, these kids are simply doing their best to survive, using the adaptive strategies that their brains developed in response to a perilous world.
  • Though the human brain is adaptable throughout life, adaptability is greatest during childhood, as the developing brain responds to the surrounding environment. Survival is the brain's top priority. Young people growing up in dangerous environments will develop brains that are highly responsive to threat cues. In particular, recent studies show that children who have experienced trauma exhibit drastic changes in their amygdala, an area of the brain wired to identify signs of danger.
  • Besides the amygdala, another brain region affected by trauma is the hippocampus, an area involved with contextual learning and memory. The hippocampus takes context into account, so that a person can appropriately respond to the same cues in different situations. For instance, most people would respond differently to hearing gunfire in a shooting range than they would to hearing gunfire in an airport.
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  • McLaughlin's research shows that youth who have experienced trauma have a smaller hippocampus than those who haven't, and are less able to take context into account when they detect a threat cue. When McLaughlin presented images of faces embedded in real-world scenes to kids, those with a history of trauma exhibited less activity in their hippocampus while viewing angry facial expressions. And when given a memory test afterward, they were less able to remember scenes in which they'd identified people displaying anger.
  • Because the brain remains malleable throughout life, it's never too late to mitigate the effects of trauma, McLaughlin says. There are a variety of evidence-based treatments that have proven effective in alleviating the mental-health consequences of trauma. For example, the technique of cognitive reappraisal, a cornerstone of Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, can help victims better regulate their emotions by changing the way they view a distressing situation. They can try to imagine that the situation is occurring far away from them, or that they are viewing the event from a removed perspective, as though watching a movie screen. When McLaughlin taught such techniques to young people in her lab, they were able to decrease their emotional reactivity as well as their amygdala response to negative stimuli.
Bill Fulkerson

From 'brain fog' to heart damage, COVID-19's lingering problems alarm scientists | Scie... - 0 views

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    Athena Akrami's neuroscience lab reopened last month without her. Life for the 38-year-old is a pale shadow of what it was before 17 March, the day she first experienced symptoms of the novel coronavirus. At University College London (UCL), Akrami's students probe how the brain organizes memories to support learning, but at home, she struggles to think clearly and battles joint and muscle pain. "I used to go to the gym three times a week," Akrami says. Now, "My physical activity is bed to couch, maybe couch to kitchen." Her early symptoms were textbook for COVID-19: a fever and cough, followed by shortness of breath, chest pain, and extreme fatigue. For weeks, she struggled to heal at home. But rather than ebb with time, Akrami's symptoms waxed and waned without ever going away. She's had just 3 weeks since March when her body temperature was normal.
Steve Bosserman

Area of the brain that processes empathy identified - 0 views

  • According to Dr. Gu, this study provides the first evidence suggesting that the empathy deficits in patients with brain damage to the anterior insular cortex are surprisingly similar to the empathy deficits found in several psychiatric diseases, including autism spectrum disorders, borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, and conduct disorders, suggesting potentially common neural deficits in those psychiatric populations.
Steve Bosserman

How Facebook Is Throwing Our Brains Into Overdrive - Pacific Standard - 0 views

  • The human brain has always loved the dopamine rush of notifications, in any form; recent research indicates the unpredictable but ubiquitous updates of Gmail or Twitter carry the same neurological effect as rocking a slot machine. While Internet use is "not addictive in the same way as pharmacological substances are," as cognitive scientist Tom Stafford noted in 2013, we continually chase those unpredictable payoffs on Facebook and Instagram in ways that tend to mirror gambling or sex addictions, even if "Internet addiction" writ large currently holds an ambiguous position in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
  • For products whose fundamental business proposition is harnessing attention, building those so-called "compulsion loops" isn't an accident of technology—it's the whole point. Indeed, observers have argued since Parker's "human psychology" flub last year that Facebook has not just meticulously measured, but fundamentally altered human behavior, and nascent technology ventures emboldened by Facebook's world-changing success have sought to translate the behavioral tricks that psychologist B.F. Skinner applied to the gambling kiosk to every mobile app under the sun. "When a gambler feels favored by luck, dopamine is released," Natasha Schüll, author of Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, told the Guardian in March. All Facebook managed to do was find a way to miniaturize the captivating logic of the slot machine—with no cost to the user but their time and attention.
  • While the human brain is tremendously plastic, that doesn't mean Facebook is savagely rewiring the human brain. Indeed, the Facebook users in the Cal State–Fullerton study "showed greater activation of their amygdala and striatum, brain regions that are involved in impulsive behavior," as Live Science's Tia Ghose reported at the time. Ghose continued: "But unlike in the brains of cocaine addicts, for instance, the Facebook users showed no quieting of the brain systems responsible for inhibition in the prefrontal cortex." Facebook isn't fundamentally rewiring the structure of the human brain, but its ubiquity has the same relative effect by kicking our rewards centers into overdrive.
Steve Bosserman

In 'Elastic,' a Physicist Argues That the Mind Needs Time to Play - 0 views

  • How to summon our power to think elastically? First of all, play — and its cousin, daydreaming — can provide forums for the subconscious to form novel associations. (Think of Einstein’s delightful thought experiments — how he conceived the theory of relativity by imagining himself riding a beam of light.) Unfortunately, compulsively busy people regard activities like doodling and staring into space as a waste of time. And in this age of the ubiquitous pocket helper-brain, Mlodinow laments that the “dearth of idle time” fences off exciting new paths that the mind might otherwise wander. In this regard, Mlodinow asserts, people with ADHD may have a distinct advantage over others.
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