brain
You are viewing stuff tagged with brain.
You are viewing stuff tagged with brain.
Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight: “I knew I was no longer the choreographer of my life…”
And on what it is like to have a left hemisphere stroke: “And in that moment, my brain chatter — my left hemisphere brain chatter — went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.”
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
— John Milton
(Paradise Lost)
Does Exercise Help You Sleep Better? has some pretty strong things to say about the link between sleep and exercise. A quick summary: there isn’t a link. This is my favorite part:
For our wedding, we received an air freshener called “Clean Linen” by White Barn Candle Company. Mykala plugged it in today, and I realized that 5 years ago, someone (Dan McKeown?) in the dorms at St. Thomas had an air freshener that had the exact same scent.
So, according to my limited memory from my neuroscience course (ha, irony!), olfactory (scent) memories are quite intense, due to the proximity of olfactory neurons to the emotionally-intense limbic system. Soo, this scent is dredging up these fond, weirdly conflicted college dorm transition memories while I am simultaneously feeling these newly wed making-a-house-a-home transition feelings.
From Robin Nixon of LiveScience, Exercise is physiologically good for your brain:
Because it burns calories so quickly, aerobic exercise is a threat to the body’s energy reserves. Heeding this danger, the body acts to protect one of its most precious, and energy-demanding, organs: the brain.
…
By acting as a mild stressor, exercise is an alternative way to spur many of the protective benefits associated with calorie restriction and the release of brain-building growth factors, said Carl Cotman, director of the Institute for Brain Aging and Dementia at the University of California in Irvine.
I suddenly began humming and whistling “New York, New York” in biochem lab today, which in and of itself is not all that interesting (and a bit embarassing, as I am embarassed by most things that I do). However, when I got back to my room - amazingly - there were round-trip plane tickets to New York slid under my door! No, no there were not. That was a lie. A fib. A stretcher. In truth, I returned to my dorm room and promptly looked up the lyrics to said song.