Mindframe

As if depressed or anxious people needed another thing to worry about, a new study from UC San Francisco suggests that depression and anxiety may be as bad for the health as smoking or obesity. First author Dr. Andrea Niles and senior author Dr. Aoife O’Donovan of the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and the San Francisco VA Medical Center examined the records of 15,000 adults over four years. Of that sample, 16% were found to be noticeably depressed or anxious. Compared to their non-depressed, non-anxious counterparts, those 16% of respondents were 65% more likely to have a heart condition, 64% more likely to have had a stroke, 50% more likely to have high blood pressure, and a whopping 87% more likely to have arthritis. (They were not found to be at greater risk for cancer, but that’s not much of a silver lining, considering.) Clearly, depression and anxiety are not a simple bad mood, or a weakness of character, but a serious medical condition. Clearly, something mu...

  Science news is full of what certainly sound like promising new studies featuring lab mice or lab rats as the test subjects. New treatments are assessed, and psychological truths are mined. Reading about this research, it’s easy to feel like we are witnessing the first steps of something big, something impactful. However, you are not a mouse (we assume). If you have ever read a conclusion from a mouse behavior study and wondered at the exact practical implications to your life, it turns out you had a pretty good point. For instance, more than 80% of medical treatments tested on animals—usually mice—fail when tested on people. Mice are cheap, easy to genetically modify, and we share 99% of our genes, but that one percent holds some crucial differences, especially when it comes to neuroscience research. For example, mice lack a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved with human learning, memory, and cognition. It’s hard to model, let’s say, a mental illne...

Parents of teenagers won’t run out of things to worry over any time soon. A 2016 Pew Research Center report surveyed Americans with children under 18 and found that 60% of these parents worry about their child getting bullied, while 54% fear their child might at some point suffer from anxiety or depression, and a full 50% of responding parents fret over the possibility of their child getting kidnapped. However, here’s one danger the concerned parents might not have considered: high school football. Researchers with the University of California, Berkeley, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently finished examining the impact of full-contact football on the adolescent brain, and the results are well, troubling. Using a new kind of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) called diffusion kurtosis, the scientists scanned the brains of 16 high school football players, all between the age of 15 and 17. The young brains were scanned before and after p...

Imagine that scientists have discovered a painkiller that is incredibly cheap to make, has no dangerous side effects, and performs at a level comparable to—or even better than—90% of drugs developed in the United States. You might find yourself wanting to reach for a bottle the next time you sprain your back. There’s just one problem: the medication doesn’t, in the traditional sense, work. It’s a sugar pill. The Placebo effect has been a known entity since at least the days of Ben Franklin, when French King Louis XVI tasked an elite panel of scientists and thinkers—Franklin included —with debunking claims made by Mesmerists. For instance, that a properly trained Mesmerist could cure people’s afflictions by manipulating an invisible force called “animal magnetism.” Patients did seem to respond to the treatments, sometimes crying out or even falling unconscious, and at least some reported positive results. However, the commission ultimately found that none of the Mes...

You already know that exercise is good for you. You may already know that exercise is good for your mind. For instance, you may have encountered studies which show how half an hour of vigorous exercise gives you a boost in brain-derived neurotropic growth factor or BDNF, what’s sometimes referred to as “ miracle-gro for the brain .” That’s not the kind of nickname that comes casually; BDNF stimulates the production of new brain cells and increases your neuroplasticity, which allows the components of your brain to work more smoothly with each other. A 2016 study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease found that the top quartile of older individuals who kept active retained noticeably more grey matter than the others, specifically in areas related to memory and higher-level thinking. And those with more grey matter were also shown to be 50% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s or other memory problems over the next five years. “If we want to live a long time but also k...

As Halloween approaches, let’s pause for a moment to consider a common piece of creepy iconography in Western culture: the bat. Associated as they are with darkness, caves, leathery skin stretched over bony wing bones—and yes, in the case of the vampire bat, blood-sucking—it’s no wonder they’ve become a symbol of all things spooky. Yet, there’s more to these humble non-rodents than thrills and chills. Scientists hope their brains might hold the key to a human mystery: just how do we track the relative position of people around us? Luckily, "A bat's hippocampus is very similar to a human's,” Professor Nachum Ulanovsky of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel told Phys.org . “The hippocampus is very important for things like spatial and social memory." And while bats are not the smartest member of the animal kingdom—they don’t have the tool use of elephants or the trickery of corvids—they are highly social creatures, as well as famously good navigators. ...

Studies show that senior citizens are more connected to the web than ever before. According to the Pew Research Group , smartphone ownership among those 65 and older has increased by 24 percentage points since just 2013, and more than a third of this group use social media.   And that’s potentially a good thing, says new research from the University of Michigan. By now, we’re all familiar with the complaints against social media. It shortens attention spans. It decreases face-to-face social skills. We don’t notice the world around us when all we do is stare at our phones all day. We are becoming a nation of screen-obsessed zombies. However, there’s a flip side to that Facebook habit. As Western society has moved away from a family model in which elders continue living with their offspring, isolation has increasingly become standard for those living in their golden years. Friends and spouses die, seniors relocate to nursing homes or other care facilities far from their...

    “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it,” wrote Jonathan Swift in 1710. Variations of the saying, including the punchier "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” have been ( likely incorrectly ) attributed to everyone from Winston Churchill to Mark Twain, but the timeless truth remains: it’s amazing how catchy an outright falsehood can be. Since at least the days of the newspaper wars between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, on some level less-than-scrupulous media outlets have understood that our faster, more reactive brain systems bias us towards internalizing more emotional, good-vs-evil stories—especially when the “good” and “evil” in question align with our own prejudices. For instance, in the late 1890’s, Hearst’s papers whipped up a frenzy of anti-Spanish sentiment, characterized by unproven claims, propaganda, and bold-faced lies. “When the USS Maine exploded and sank in Hava...

If you’re not, say, a recent time traveler from the Middle Ages, by now you’ve probably heard that exercise is good for you. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you likely also know that exercise benefits the brain in a seemingly ever-expanding list of ways. Regular aerobic activity has been found to increase memory, boost cognitive skills, fight depression, and slow the effects of age-related mental fog, among other things. There’s just one problem: it’s not necessarily a good time.   For the less athletic among us, mention of exercise can conjure flashbacks of high school gym class, of dodgeball injuries and rope-climbing humiliations. And while the ability to make a mad dash for it has surely saved our species on countless occasions, the body may not feel rewarded in the early days of a jogging routine. Some can rely on the rosy glow of personal satisfaction and the legendary “runner’s high” to stay on the exercise train, while others may need a bit more of an incent...