The explanation for the fever producing effect is on much stronger ground. Studies have shown that the immune system works more efficiently at higher temperatures— specifically the proliferation of the fighter cells is accelerated at higher temperatures. A wide variety of viruses and bacteria thrive at temperatures below 98.6°. As the body temperature rises, their doubling time slows and in some cases stops altogether.
Month: August 2017
Stress Relief: Neuroanatomy of Depression
The top layer of the brain is the cortex—the area involved in abstract thinking, cognition, philosophical thought and memory functions. This portion is extremely large and well developed in primates as compared to other animals.
Stress Relief: Neurochemical Theory of Depression
Neurochemical Theory 1 of Depression
‘It is not too little but actually too much norepinephrine’. First, some background orientation. If somebody constantly yells or shouts at you, you stop listening. Similarly, if you surround a cell with lots of a neurotransmitter, the cell will not ‘listen as carefully—in scientific terms the cell will down regulate (decrease) the number of receptors for that neurotransmitter, in order to decrease its sensitivity to that messenger.
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Stress Relief: Cognitive Model of Depression
The field of experimental psychology provides some excellent theoretical understanding about stress and depression. The key point from this theory is that events are considered psychologically stressful when they have some of the following characteristics—a loss of control and predictability within certain contexts, a loss of outlets for frustration, a loss of source of support, a perception that in some aspects life is getting worse. In a number of experiments, when animals are subjected to stressful events that have these characteristics, the result is a condition similar to human depression.
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Stress Relief: Stress and the Onset of Depression
The first stress-depression link is an obvious one. Statistically, stress and the onset of depression go together. People who are undergoing a lot of life stressors are more likely to succumb to depression and people in depression are more likely to have undergone a recent significant stressor.
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Stress Relief: Human Memory
Stress—Friend or Foe?
A little sharpens the mind and memory; too much shrivels the brain and makes you sick.
The quote above captures the essence of the effects of stress on memory. In the following sections, we will examine in greater detail how the memory system functions and see exactly how stress disrupts the different functions.
Stress Relief: Pepsi Vs Coke
We will now look at another instance where the brain influences what we sense.When he isn’t pondering the inner workings of the mind, Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, has been known to contemplate the other mysteries of life: for instance, the Pepsi Challenge. In a series of TV commercials in the US from the 1970s and 1980s that pitted Coke against Pepsi in a blind taste test, Pepsi was usually the winner. So why, Montague asked himself not long ago, did Coke appeal so strongly to so many people if it didn’t taste any better?
Stress Relief: Depression in Women
Here, we will explore the topic in more detail. For centuries, doctors have recognized women’s vulnerability to depression and proposed a variety of explanations. At the beginning of the century, the female of the species, with her ‘excitable nervous system,’ was thought to wilt under the strain of menstruation and childbirth, or later, the pressures of work and family. But researchers are now constructing more scientific theories to explain why women are nearly twice as likely as men to become depressed.
Stress Relief: Effects of Stress on Memory
At the beginning, we mentioned that little stress sharpens the memory. The explanation for this from the evolutionary point of view is really simple. Faced with a predator, it makes sense for you to remember all the things you did previously that saved your life. It also helps to memorize hiding places, special dangers and all other information that will help you escape the predator in future. There are two ways in which the memory is improved during short stressors.
Stress Relief: How is Memory Stored?
We now turn to the important question of how memory is actually stored. As you can expect, there are a number of theories that attempt to explain this. Early work had suggested that there were brain cells that stored specific information. For example, there may be brain cells that store information about faces or some that store information about paintings and so on. Obviously, there is too much information to be stored in this way. A logical way to store information would be to organize it as a pattern and store that pattern in a network of brain cells.