Monday, 4 June 2012
Stress, Prefrontal Cortex Inhibition, and Depression
Exposure to chronic stress has many harmful effects, including effects on our cognition and mental health. The June 2009 edition of Nature Reviews Neuroscience presents several articles summarizing the most recent research findings on this subject.
One of these articles, by Amy F. T. Arnsten, shows how stress inhibits thinking, planning, and control activity in the prefrontal cortex, while strengthening the activity of the rapid reflex pathways connected to the amygdala and the subcortical structures associated with it. (more…)
Mental Disorders | Comments Closed
Monday, 28 May 2012
Playing Chess at School Improves Learning
According to America’s Foundation for Chess, an organization that promotes the use of chess in the schools, this age-old game is an ideal learning tool. When children are around age 8 or 9, the brain’s analytical abilities are developing rapidly, and playing chess seems to stimulate this development. In any case, studies show that children who play chess do better in most of their school subjects. (more…)
Memory and the Brain | 1 comment
Monday, 21 May 2012
The Neurobiology of Charity
As the holiday season approaches, a traditional time for charitable giving, what do we know about this behaviour from a neuroscientific standpoint? Well, first of all, we know that it activates the brain’s dopaminergic reward circuits. We also now know that the old saying “It’s better to give than to receive” has a neurobiological basis: these reward circuits are typically activated more when you give money, for example, than when you receive it. (more…)
Pleasure and Pain | Comments Closed
Monday, 14 May 2012
Links About Brain Anatomy
While I’m doing research on the various subjects that I write about in The Brain from Top to Bottom, I often come across interesting articles on other subjects that I’ve already dealt with elsewhere on the site. Whenever that happens, I save a link to the article, planning to embed it as a Link module on the appropriate page of the site.
The problem is that I accumulate links faster than I can put them where they belong, so I end up with a file full of interesting links that none of my readers can access. To solve this problem, I’ve decided that from time to time, I’ll make a blog post containing all the links that I’ve accumulated about one of the topics on the site. (more…)
From the Simple to the Complex | Comments Closed
Monday, 7 May 2012
Insomnia as a Treatment for Depression
Lack of sleep has a beneficial effect on depression. However counterintuitive this finding may seem, it has been well documented in more than 75 studies published over the past 40 years. One of the reasons that sleep deprivation is not used more extensively in the treatment of depression is that prolonged insomnia can also have significant negative effects on cognitive functioning. Another reason is that insomnia-induced improvements in mood dissipate rapidly when the individuals eventually and inevitably catch up on their sleep. (more…)
Mental Disorders | Comments Closed
