I’ve been thinking a lot about altruism ever since the horrible devastation in Haiti. In the aftermath, the world contributed millions of dollars of aid. From the US alone, $220 million was raised in the first week. The first week! And this at a time when our national unemployment rate was in double-digits. While pondering this generosity, I came across a new study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers James Fowler, PhD from UC San Diego and Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD from Harvard have provided the first laboratory evidence that altruistic behavior can be influenced…

In the United States, about 20% of seniors who suffer a hip fracture will die within a year. Teresa Liu-Ambrose, PhD, has been investigating the impact of women’s weight training for helping seniors decrease the rate of fractures out of her laboratory at the Center for Hip Health and Mobility, Vancouver General Hospital. Now she has found that not only does weight training build up muscle and bone health (as you might expect) but it also improves cognitive functioning. According to international statistics, one-third of all seniors who get admitted to hospitals with hip fractures also have some kind of…

The brain’s plasticity is revolutionary but its evolutionary history is pretty remarkable, too. What’s amazing is that the brain has been evolving since our earliest predecessor, “Tool Maker” first appeared on the planet. But it’s only recently (during these last few minutes of our evolutionary past when neuroscience has been able to take us inside the living brain using imaging techniques) that we’re now learning so much. We’ve made a short video to take you on a tour of the last few million years in the evolution of the brain. Leading off with how our evolutionary brains have tripled in…

I played with marbles as a kid. Did you? Now I’m wondering if those little round stones can have an impact on memory and emotions. According to a new study published in Cognition, simple motor functioning like playing with marbles may trigger memories. Daniel Casasanto, PhD (Donders Center for Brain, Cognition, & Behavior, Nijmegen, New Zealand) and Katinka Dijkstra, PhD (Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands) looked at psycholinguistics – how language and bodily experience can shape the mind. When talking about the negative and the positive, individuals most often use spatial metaphors (e.g. “on top of the world” or “down…

I know that most people are not lovers of physical pain. If someone invented a patch to keep the wearer from feeling pain, this inventor would become an instant billionaire. But it appears that there already is something better than a patch: Zen meditation. In an earlier study, Montreal University researchers from the lab of Pierre Rainville, PhD showed that meditators experienced an 18% reduction in pain sensitivity compared to their non-meditating counterparts. Building on this earlier study, researchers have found that Zen meditation can decrease sensitivity to pain by thickening brain matter. They measured thermal pain sensitivity of 17…

Many of us look back at our teenage years and realize that while often turbulent, these years laid the groundwork for who we are today. We learned incredible amounts of information, not just in terms of academics but also in terms of who we were as individuals. But why were these years so turbulent? At the time that I was living it, I felt that my parents seemed a big part of my teenage angst. Why couldn’t they just let me be me? Of course as I matured, this view has changed greatly. Now I wonder if parents obtain sainthood…