Trauma’s impact on the body can often be readily apparent, but what does trauma look like from inside the brain? According to David Berceli, PhD, there’s a specific sequence to how the brain processes trauma . . . . . . and knowing how it works could be essential to honing our approach to the treatment of trauma. David takes us through the process in the short video below. Check it out – it’s just 3 minutes. Click here to sign up. The webinar with David is a special bonus for Gold Members, and in it, he’ll give us an…

Have you ever seen colors spelled out using the wrong color font? It’s called the Stroop task and it might look like this: Red Blue Green Yellow. Instead of reading the word, you have to determine the color of the word. Researchers from the University of Toronto, led by psychologist Michael Inzlicht, PhD, examined subjects’ brains during the Stroop task to find out if believers’ and non-believers’ brains functioned differently under stress. Subjects had a split second before having to push a button indicating what color they saw. At the same time, they were hooked up to a brain monitoring…

We all know that trauma impacts us emotionally, but does it also affect our intelligence? A new study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health suggests that children who witness their mothers being the victim of abuse, or experience physical or sexual abuse themselves, actually score lower on cognitive tests later in life. Childhood is such an important time. Trauma in childhood can have lifelong consequences because children’s brains are developing. We created a video to show you 4 ways that childhood trauma affects the brain − it’s only 4 minutes long. Click here to sign up. We’ll…

We can’t control the brain we’re born with, but we can control the brain we end up with. And according to Sharon Begley, there are two forces that shape our brain throughout life. Sharon Begley is the Senior Health & Science Correspondent at Reuters and co-author of The Emotional Life of Your Brain with Richard Davidson, PhD. Watch below as she talks about these two forces. Click here to sign up. As Sharon said, that’s neuroplasticity! We’ll get into a whole lot more about ways to change the brain in our interview with Sharon. You can watch the entire interview…

What activates the pleasure and reward centers of the brain, calms parts of the brain associated with fear and anxiety, and is available to anyone without a prescription? Long-term relationships. Researchers Bianca Acevedo, PhD and Arthur Aron, PhD took ten women and seven men who had been married an average of 21.4 years and did fMRIs to look at their brains. They wanted to see what was happening in their brains while participants looked at photos of their partners. For a comparison, they also saw photos of a highly familiar acquaintance, a very close, long-time friend, and a less familiar…

We know that stress can take a toll on our bodies, but it also affects our brain. I’ve written about how it affects memory and the hippocampus. Research is now suggesting that stress also alters how we learn. This has ramifications for addiction and anything involved in the negative aspects of neuroplasticity. A recent review article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science by University of Southern California researcher Mara Mather, PhD, suggests that stress alters our decision-making abilities. Specifically, when under stress, dopamine levels in the brain’s pleasure circuit change in such a way that people overemphasize remembered rewards…