There's a disorder that makes it impossible to feel pleasure, and scientists are just beginning to understand how it works

No pain no gain, but what if you can’t feel pleasure?  There may be a reason as stated in the article by Tanya Lewis for the Business Insider.

There’s a name for the inability to take pleasure in activities you once found enjoyable, the subject of countless commercials for depression medications: anhedonia.

In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, scientists stimulated the brains of rats to induce feelings of anhedonia, helping to explain how the phenomenon arises in the brain.

Hopefully, this understanding could one day lead to better treatments for depression and other related mood disorders….READ MORE

There’s a disorder that makes it impossible to feel pleasure, and scientists are just beginning to understand how it works

No pain no gain, but what if you can’t feel pleasure?  There may be a reason as stated in the article by Tanya Lewis for the Business Insider.

There’s a name for the inability to take pleasure in activities you once found enjoyable, the subject of countless commercials for depression medications: anhedonia.

In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, scientists stimulated the brains of rats to induce feelings of anhedonia, helping to explain how the phenomenon arises in the brain.

Hopefully, this understanding could one day lead to better treatments for depression and other related mood disorders….READ MORE

What Poverty Does to the Young Brain

What Poverty Does to the Young Brain

The brain’s foundation, frame, and walls are built in the womb. As an embryo grows into a fetus, some of its dividing cells turn into neurons, arranging themselves into layers and forming the first synapses, the organ’s electrical wiring. Four or five months into gestation, the brain’s outermost layer, the cerebral cortex, begins to develop its characteristic wrinkles, which deepen further after birth. It isn’t until a child’s infant and toddler years that the structures underlying higher-level cognition—will power, emotional self-control, decision-making—begin to flourish; some of them continue to be fine-tuned throughout adolescence and into the first decade of adulthood.

Pat Levitt, a developmental neuroscientist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, has spent much of his career studying the setbacks and accidents that can make this construction process go awry. In the nineteen-nineties, during the media panic over “crack babies,” he was among…READ MORE.

Mindfulness: The craze sweeping schools now at a university near you

Mindfulness: The craze sweeping schools now at a university near you

Slowly take a raisin and examine every wrinkle and fold of its surface. Feel its texture with your fingers. Inhale its scent. Squeeze it and hear how it sounds. Raise it to your lips, place it in your mouth, explore it with your tongue. Prepare to chew. As you bite into it, notice the bursts of taste and how these change, and be aware of when you feel ready to swallow. Finally, feel the raisin travel into your body.

This is a common introductory exercise in mindfulness – a practice derived…READ MORE.

Your Brain on Stress

This is Your Brain in Meltdown. Scientific American SOURCE: “STRESS SIGNALLING PATHWAYS THAT IMPAIR PREFRONTAL CORTEX STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION,” BY AMY F. T. ARNSTEN, IN NATURE REVIEWS NEUROSCIENCE, VOL. 10; JUNE 2009

Train Your Brain…Here’s Why and How!

Try These Cognitive Restructuring Exercises to Improve Your Mood and Reduce Stress

Cognitive restructuring is a core part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). CBT is one of the most effective psychological treatments for common problems like depression, anxiety disorders, and binge eating. Here, clinical and social psychologist Alice Boyes shares some CBT techniques you can try at home to reduce problems with mood, anxiety, and stress.

Practice Noticing When You’re Having a Cognitive Distortion

Choose one type of cognitive distortion to focus on at a time. Example: you recognize that you’re prone to “negative predictions.” For a week, just notice any times you find yourself…READ MORE

Train Your Brain…Here's Why and How!

Try These Cognitive Restructuring Exercises to Improve Your Mood and Reduce Stress

Cognitive restructuring is a core part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). CBT is one of the most effective psychological treatments for common problems like depression, anxiety disorders, and binge eating. Here, clinical and social psychologist Alice Boyes shares some CBT techniques you can try at home to reduce problems with mood, anxiety, and stress.

Practice Noticing When You’re Having a Cognitive Distortion

Choose one type of cognitive distortion to focus on at a time. Example: you recognize that you’re prone to “negative predictions.” For a week, just notice any times you find yourself…READ MORE

This is YOUR brain on NOT enough SLEEP

Find Out about How Your Brain Operates on LOW SLEEP!

When you’re so tired and you haven’t slept a wink, your mind goes on the blink. That’s more than just a play on a quaint batch of Beatles lyrics. It’s the truth.

The sleep-starved mind is a mind on the blink, a groggy, impaired ball of mush.

Being tired — really, really tired — is a lot like being wasted. You’re more likely to slur when you speak, make risky decisions, forget what you did and generally act, well, a bit like an idiot. Worse, driving tired is as dangerous as driving drunk, several studies — and, yes, even the meticulous Mythbusters — confirm.

It’s simple, yet so few of us listen, this zombie mommy included. Bottom line: Sleepy equals bad for your brain. Well-rested equals good. Not getting enough shut-eye isn’t just harmful to you, it could lead to you accidentally harming others, too. By now none of this should come as a surprise, so why aren’t you logging at least six to eight restorative, absolutely critical hours between the sheets every night?

Your wakeup call is now. Take a look at the sobering infographic about the ill effects of sleep deprivation by General Electric and Mic below, then see if you’re still up for an all-nighter. We’re not…READ MORE

This is how you warp your brain when you don’t get enough sleep:

Biodegradable Rice-sized brain implant

Dissolvable brain implant the size of a grain of rice invented by scientists

Biodegradable device which measures temperature and blood pressure could be used to monitor a patient’s recovery

The device could be implanted into the brain without the need to remove it once its job is done Corbis.

A surgical implant no bigger than a grain of rice which measures a patient’s temperature and blood pressure for several days before dissolving harmlessly in body fluids has been invented by scientists.

The biodegradable device could be implanted into the brain or other vital organs to monitor a patient’s medical recovery without the need for cumbersome wires or operations to remove the implant once its job is done, the researchers said.

Tests carried out on laboratory animals shows…READ MORE.

Not Enough Sleep May Help Alzheimer’s Take Hold

In recent years, scientists have made small steps towards understanding the relationship between sleep and Alzheimer’s disease. Now, researchers from Oregon Health & Science University in Portland may soon illuminate the connection—they are launching the first experiment of its kind that will study a key process in the brains of sleeping humans, as NPR reports.

Disrupted sleep patterns have long been a common complaint for patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, sometimes decades before they develop cognitive problems or noticeable memory loss. The reason, researchers have discovered, is likely the buildup of beta amyloid plaque, a sticky amalgamation of proteins that collects in synapses and is characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease. A number of studies published in the last five years have found that people (and mice) with disrupted sleep patterns had more beta amyloid plaque in their brains.

Researchers are starting to get a sense for why this is the case—sleep maysweep toxins from the brain, preventing beta amyloid from collecting in synapses. But scientists are still not sure….Read More.