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.
Stress Relief: What is Procedural Memory?
Procedural memory is memory storage of skills and procedures. This type of memory has also been referred to as ‘tacit knowledge’ or ‘implicit knowledge’. Procedural memory is involved in tasks such as remembering how to swim or how to ride a bicycle. This is ‘knowhow’ memory; it often can only be expressed by performing the specific skill and people have problems verbalizing what they are doing and why. Procedural memory is, therefore, very important in human motor performance.
Stress Relief: What is Declarative Memory?
Declarative memory is our memory for facts. There is a common belief that declarative memory is further broken down into two components: Episodic (memory for past and personally experienced events), and Semantic (knowledge for the meaning of words and how to apply them).
Stress Relief: How Do We Feel Pain?
To understand stress-induced analgesia, it is necessary for us to understand how the body perceives pain and how it responds to the pain signal. Here, we confront an anatomical problem. The sensors for pain are scattered all over the body. The central nervous system (CNS) processes the signals from the sensors. This is housed entirely within the cranial cavity housing the brain, and the vertebral canal, housing the spinal cord.
Stress Relief: Stress Reduces Pain
In the last few months of 2003, newspapers in India had been running full-page advertisements from an oil company. The advertisements described the life story and achievements of individuals who succeeded against all odds and inspired others. One life story struck me as particularly poignant. It is the story of a brave captain in the Indian Army. Barely a year and a half out of the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun, the young captain and his team is asked to defend the country against terrorists in the inhospitable terrain of Kargil in the Himalayas.
Stress Relief: Alzheimer’s Disease and Stress
People who get more upset by disturbing events are more likely to suffer the declines in memory and mental ability found in Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published recently. The study tracked a group of priests, nuns and monks as part of a long-term examination of the aging process.
Continue reading Stress Relief: Alzheimer’s Disease and Stress
Stress Relief: Acupuncture
An interesting facet of this discussion on the body’s opiates and the ability of the brain to modulate pain is that it begins to explain how acupuncture may work. Practised for centuries in China, acupuncture involves using fine needles that are stuck into patients at different points. With the needles in the body, pain is reduced to such an extent that surgery can be performed without anaesthesia.