Mindframe

Granted, when you think about all the things that are slowly killing you, things like second-hand smoke, the chemicals in your food, and the guy in the cubicle next to you with the annoying laugh probably come to mind before your office chair or the sofa in your living room. Think again says, James Levine, an endocrinologist at Mayo clinic and author of the article “Killer Chairs” in November’s issue of Scientific American . Levine cites the results of 18 studies over a period of 16 years involving 800,000 people. Among other things, they found that the average person spends 13 hours a day seated. That means in a normal 16 hours of wakefulness, we are only physically mobile about 3 of those hours (similar to the brown bat). With the advent of personal pedometers like the FitBit or Nike’s Fuel, more and more of us have discovered what Levine is talking about.  Someone with an office job finds it pretty tough to get in the recommended 10,000 steps (roughly 5 miles a day) wit...

Whatever happened to Sigmund Freud? Of course, the answer is that he died, but not before taking modern science down a fifty-year rabbit hole.  Freud came of age in the early 1900’s, a time when science was first beginning to wrap its mind around brain function, including dreaming. The big question in 1895: what is the essence of dreams? Freud thought he had the answer. To him, it was all about wish fulfillment of repressed feelings. He saw dreaming as the “royal road to the unconscious.”  Saul Mcleod of simplypsychology.org explains that Freud distinguished between the manifest content of a dream—the actual story—versus its latent content, the symbolism. Through the process of condensation, you transform a wish, perhaps strangling your sister-in-law, into a dream about strangling a small dog. In this way, you lessen your own guilt regarding deeply held negative feelings about your sister-in-law. (Freud’s example, not mine.) Secondary elaboration occurs whe...

What is the evolutionary purpose of sleep? Doesn’t it seem like a huge concession to spend a third of your life inactive? Or is it an amazing strategic adaptation from the days before indoor lighting, when productivity went down once the sun set, and danger came in the form of fast and powerful predatory animals? Jerome Siegel, a UCLA neuroscientist, suggests the latter. He says that for our ancestors, staying awake and mobile during the evening hours would actually have been evolutionarily maladaptive. We are not the brown bat, who can avoid predators by sleeping 20 hours a day and still manage to hunt blind at night via sonar. It's been argued that the way our bodies recharge during our evening REM cycles—not just regaining energy but rebalancing the immune system and performing brain maintenance—is just another example of evolution piggybacking on an existing adaptation and making the most of it. We aren't equipped for echolocation, so this is what we got instea...

Memory is a fickle thing. There are times when the important information you need, like an email password, remains just out of your grasp.  But you’re equally likely to recall a jingle for a product that’s been obsolete for decades, a product you never even purchased or liked. Forgetting: the older we get, the scarier it seems, what with the threat of Alzheimer’s and dementia hovering out there like the ghosts of senility future. But what if the act of forgetting wasn’t just part of the normal degradation of memory but actually intrinsic to the act of remembering?  What if in order to remember something, you had to forget a little of it? It flies in the face of how we conceptualize memory, as stored information slowly disappearing like cookies from the cookie jar. But University of California scientists Robert and Elizabeth Bjork have helped alter our perception of how memory and learning work. In one experiment, people were given a series of poetry lines to learn...