Blog

  • On Yawning

    Hard to read about without opening wide and breathing in deep, but here’s an article about recent thought on yawing: According to psychologists and researchers who study such things, yawning has nothing to do with boredom, rudeness, or even fatigue. Quite the contrary. Yawning helps cool down our brains so they function better…

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  • Dreams and Memory

    A study looks at how dreaming improves memory. Given a maze test, subjects who napped for 90 minutes improved performance on a retest. “Our findings suggest that if something is difficult for you, it’s more meaningful to you and the sleeping brain therefore focuses on that subject – it ‘knows’ you need to work on…

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  • Mind Over Meds

    Mind Over Meds or “how I decided my psychiatry patients needed more from me than prescriptions”–a psychiatrist’s story, from the NYT Magazine. [L]earning the formal techniques of therapy was like navigating without a compass. While I learned how to form an alliance with my patients and begin a good dialogue, becoming a skillful therapist requires…

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  • Your Brain on God

    Nifty interactive brain at NPR.org links to series of stories about science and spirituality. [S]cientists…are using new technologies to analyze the brains of people who claim they have touched the spiritual — from Christians who speak in tongues to Buddhist monks to people who claim to have had near-death experiences. Hear what they have discovered…

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  • Stress, Depression, and Asthma

      A study looks at how a depression and stress combo can trigger asthma symptoms in children. If your child has asthma and is experiencing symptoms of depression, you may want to reconsider buying advanced tickets to the Twilight’s Eclipse. New research shows asthmatic children with depression are 50 percent more likely to have an…

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