Mindframe

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...