The CDC Measures American Sleeplessness Americans are progressively sleepless. The latest survey reported Friday by the Centers for Disease Control, found 35.3% of 75,000 adults were sleeping less than 7 hours a night. Some people don’t need much sleep. Yet most of us perform better with at least 7-8 hours of sleep. Too little sleep […]
Your kludgy brain (and how to use it – 3/2/11)
Seeing Without Sight Ever wondered how congenitally blind people “see” what they’re reading? It’s because they’re using the visual processing part of their brains to decipher words. It turns out your brain is a group of kludges – Rube Goldberg machines of tacked together parts that get the job(s) done. Darwinian evolution never went to […]
Fat Planet – People are getting fatter, but not everywhere (2/22/11)
Bigger It’s not just pets that are getting fatter. Humans are, too. And though the US ranks 49th in the world in lifespan, our nation is number one in body mass index, a major index of obesity. Sixty eight percent of Americans are now classified as obese or overweight. However, beyond the headlines of Finucane […]
Putting life into life coaching (2/8/11)
Preparing for Life They’re everywhere, promising transformation, momentum, performance, and vision. Life coaching as a business has ballooned over the past twenty years, with tens of thousands of practitioners ranging from psychotherapists and physicians with decades of clinical experience and real wisdom to youngsters whose claims are their only claims to fame. There are educators, […]
Sleep, Memory (2/1/11)
Are Memories Permanent? The brain creates memory through a near endless conversation. To move ideas from short term, working memory to long term memory the cortex and hippocampus communicate again and again. It may take ten years or more for “permanent” memories to encode in cortical locations – where they first registered as thoughts […]