Teaching Your Body Feel exhorted, cajoled, pushed and nagged into “exercise?” Most folks know it’s good for you, but so are vegetables (though not recent Romaine from Yuma.) They just don’t really know how exercise works. Witness a recent study in Circulation, demonstrating that in people at high and low genetic risk of heart disease, relatively moderate […]
How Food Can Make You Smarter
Eating trains every part of your body. Except most of that education is not conscious. When you bite down into a juicy hamburger and watch your vegan friends turn their faces away, the effects of your taste preference are far greater than than just social and psychological. Food is more than taste, politics, culture and tradition. It’s training […]
Is Your Brain Like a Muscle?
Grow your muscle, grow your brain. For decades it’s getting clearer – physical activity leads to more brain cells. But how? And why? A recent paper in Cell Metabolism, ably reported by Gretchen Reynolds, shows the advantages of cross-species research. Work with mice, monkeys and humans demonstrated something jocks sensed long ago – your legs talk […]
Do clothes make the brain? (4/18/12)
Seeing Behind Clothes Do the clothes you wear change how your brain processes information? Yes. But can the same suit of clothes, given a different occupational meaning, change the whole process of focus and how you see the world? Yes again. Clothes Make the Man Mark Twain’s statement that “clothes make the man” distills what […]
What your gut tells your brain (9/20/11)
Is It Romance, Or Do the Right Bacteria Make the Mood? Brain, your gut is calling. It’s got a lot to say – about, stress, anxiety, and your mood. That’s the potential upshot of a recent study published in PNAS (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/26/1102999108.abstract?sid=1091d71a-9201-45df-90ec-6134dfd8231d) by Javier Bravo and company from the University College, Cork, and nicely described in […]