| Horstman; Sci. Am., Day in the Life of Your Brain | |||||
| Book | Page | Topic | |||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 1 | Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to view the brain as thoughts, feelings, and actions occur, researchers are able to see which parts are activated when we have sex, eat, express anger, listen to music, dance, sleep, or meditate. | |||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 2 | The same neurotransmitters in brain regions that foster a love, cooperation, and trust also foster lusts, addiction, and fear. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 2 | Memory is handled by several different parts of the brain and seems to do much in the short-term work while we sleep. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 2 | Music plays in many parts of the brain. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 2 | When push comes to shove, your most primitive emotional brain part, the amygdala, rules. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 2 | There are many more connections from the amygdala that to the thinking brain than the other way around. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 2 | Your brain is unique and uniquely yours, affected by your age, genes, race, ethnic and cultural origins, family culture, diet, and even birth order: all the things that make you you. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 3 | Your brain has an estimated 100 billion neuron cells and 40 quadrillion connections. But nobody knows for sure. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 3 | With its many creases, folds, and layers, the brain would take up more than three times its area if it were spread out flat. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 3 | The brain is an energy hog. Although the brain occupies only 2% of your body, it uses 20% of your body energy when we are at rest. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 3 | The brain makes new neurons, and it does so into old age. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 3 | The brain can change. The more you repeat something -- an action or a thought -- the more brain space is dedicated to it. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 3 | In musicians, the part of the brain that controls the thing you use to play an instrument is up to 130% larger than that section and the rest of us. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 3 | While very young brains are most adaptive, old brains can be retrained as well. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 3 | The brain prunes itself. The brain weakens less used connections and strengthens useful connections, which actually improves memory. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 3 | Stress can shrink your brain -- and meditation and exercise strengthen your brain and your ability to relieve stress. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 3 | Your brain surface itself has no sensation. Only when the interior parts are stimulated to you feel, both tactilely and emotionally. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 4 | The primitive brain -- the brainstem are hindbrain -- that sits at the top of the spine is the oldest part of the brain. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 4 | Above the sub cortical structures, the brain is divided into two hemispheres connected by a band of fibers and nerves called the corpus callosum. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 4 | In an oft-cited generalization, the right hemisphere is associated with creativity and the left hemisphere with logic. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 4 | For reasons unknown, messages between the hemispheres and the rest of the body chris-cross, so that the right brain controls our left side, and vice versa. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 4 | The emotional brain -- the limbic system -- is to be inside the bulk of the midbrain and acts as a gatekeeper between his spinal cord and the thinking brain in the cerebrum above. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 4 | The limbic system regulates sex hormones, sleep cycles, hunger, emotions, and addictions. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 4 | The amygdala to handle survival needs and emotions such as fear and anger. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 4 | The amygdala is responsible for the fight-or-flight reaction. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 5 | The hippocampus is the gatekeeper for short-term memories. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 5 | The hypothalamus controls your biological clock and hormone balance. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 5 | The limbic system passes along sensory information to and from the cerebrum, the limbic system, and the spinal cord. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 5 | The basal ganglia is surrounded thalamus and are responsible for voluntary movement. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 5 | The so-called pleasure center or reward circuit is also based in the limbic system, involving the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 5 | At the very top of the brain is the wrinkly and crevassed cerebrum. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 6 | The thin layer of the cerebral cortex (or neocortex) covers the cerebrum. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 6 | Their cerebrum as four major sections or lobes. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 6 | The frontal lobes take care of speech, movement commands, and reasoning. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 6 | They occipital lobe in the back of the brain take care of vision. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 6 | The temporal lobes (above your ears) are responsible for hearing and for understanding speech and appreciating music. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 6 | The parietal lobes run across the top and sides of the brain and are the primary sensory areas, receiving information about taste, temperature, touch, and movement. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 6 | The parietal lobes are involved in reading and math. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 6 | Neurons carry information throughout your body. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 6 | Some neurons are about 3 feet long, and most of them live as long as you do (in contrast to other cells that die and are renewed). | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 6 | Neurons are connected by synapses. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 6 | Neurons communicate with other neurons by releasing neurotransmitters into the synaptic gap. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 6 | Billions of tiny blood vessels (capillaries) feed your brain, carrying oxygen, glucose, nutrients, and hormones to brain cells so they can do their work. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 6 | There are more than 100 different neurotransmitters. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 6 | Acetylcholine excites cells, activates muscles, and is involved in wakefulness, attentiveness, anger, aggression, and sexuality. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 7 | Surgeons have severed the corpus callosum on patients who have experienced dozens of debilitating seizures daily that primarily afflict one hemisphere and resists all medication and treatments. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 7 | Surprisingly, the corpus callosum surgery usually has no apparent effect on personality or memory. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 7 | People can survive the corpus callosum surgery and function pretty well after the procedure, but they will have some physical disabilities, depending on the person's age at the time of the surgery. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 7 | Four adults having corpus callosum surgery, there can be significant loss of function on one side of the body and some vision impairment. If the left side of the brain is taken out, most people have problems with their speech. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 7 | The younger a person is when having the corpus callosum surgery, the less likely there is to be a speech difficulty. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 8 | Glutamate is a major excitatory neurotransmitter, dispersed widely throughout the brain. It's involved in learning and memory. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 8 | GABA slows everything down and helps keep your system in balance. It helps to regulate anxiety. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 8 | Endorphins act as hormones and neurotransmitters: they reduce pain sensations and increase pleasure. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 8 | Epinephrine, also called adrenaline, keeps you alert and your blood pressure down lots, and it jumps in when you need energy. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 8 | Epinephrine is produced and released by the adrenal glands in times of stress. Too much can increase anxiety or tension. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 8 | Dopamine is vital for voluntary movement, attentiveness, motivation, and pleasure. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 8 | Dopamine is a key player and addiction. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 8 | Serotonin helps regulate body temperature, memory, emotion, sleep, appetite, and mood. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 8 | Many antidepressants work by regulating serotonin. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 8 | Oxytocin is both a hormone and neurotransmitter. It's responsible for labor, breast milk, mother love, and romantic love and trust. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 8 | Just about everything you do is run by your own inner biological pacemaker known as the circadian clock. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 8 | The powerful master clock, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) paces all sorts of daily physiological fluctuations and cycles, including body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, hormone levels, and sleep-waking times. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 8 | Scientists have found that active clock genes are not just in the SCN, but are scattered throughout the body, so that some organs and tissues may be running on different schedules, with their mini-clocks responding to other external clues such as exercise, stress, and temperature changes. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 10 | At 6:00 AM blood pressure and heart rate began to rise, beginning a four hour time interval when most heart attacks and strokes occur. | 2 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 10 | At 8:00 AM is the highest risk for heart attack and stroke. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 10 | At 10:00 AM is the beginning of highest alertness for early risers. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 10 | At 6:30 PM, blood pressure is highest. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 14 | 5:00 a.m. Waking to the World | 4 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 14 | The reticular activating system (RAS), is a part of your brain left over from the prehistoric era when you had to be able to detect danger immediately and wake abruptly. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 15 | The RAS has has fibers that project widely throughout the brain, many through the thalamus, considered to be the doorway between the sensory input and the cerebral cortex. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 15 | A part of the RAS called a locus coeruleus is particularly attuned to respond to new, abrupt, or loud stimulation and is your brain's major factory for norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter released in response to stress or other stimulation. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 15 | The neurotransmitter acetylcholine helps pass information to the rest of your brain for interpretation. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 16 | When the amygdala detects a possible survival challenge, your hippocampus helps decide how much focused attention and memory formation the stimulus warrants and helps it get processed by way of the thinking brain where goal setting and decisions are made. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 16 | Neurotransmitters include serotonin (necessary for mood regulation and involuntary movement) and dopamine (needed for voluntary movement and attentiveness.). | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 16 | A hefty shot of cortisol jump-starts everything, including body temperature, blood pressure, and restoration. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 16 | An active RAS is vital for ongoing awareness. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 16 | If your brain's RAS stops firing signals, you may fall asleep, and damage to you RAS can cause coma. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 16 | Many general anesthetics and some tranquilizers work on the RAS part of the brain. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 16 | During the evening, rising levels of sleep-promoting chemicals such as melatonin and adenosine make you sleepy all over again. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 16 | Some of us are morning people; some of us are not. Scientists don't know why yet, but all of us know which is which. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 19 | Waking up with an erection is fairly common for a healthy male. | 3 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 19 | Men have 3 to 5 cycles on nocturnal penile tumescence through the night during phases of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 19 | Women go through the same cycle of nocturnal tumescence, within engorgement of the labia, vagina, and clitoris. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 19 | Some researchers think an erect penis may be the default state. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 19 | Most of the time, the sympathetic nervous system puts the brakes on many functions, including erections. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 19 | The sympathetic neurons in the locus coeruleus that connect to the spinal cord are turned off during REM sleep. This may allow nocturnal erections to occur. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 19 | Researchers are interested in morning erections as a clue to solving erection problems. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 19 | If a man who has erectal dysfunction is getting morning erections, the cause could be psychological rather than physical. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 20 | No matter how simple (or unconscious) the routine daily action, each involves a multiplicity of complex memory, sensory, and muscle functions that involve many regions of the brain and frequently overlap with incoming data from other senses. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 20 | Take this simple act of getting a cup of coffee. You smell the coffee, it triggers a memory that you like and want coffee. You look around and see the coffee pot, hear it perking and bubbling, and get up and walk across the room and pour a cup. In just the milliseconds that your frontal lobes decide to get that cup of coffee, a tidal wave of neural signals sweeps across a multitude of brain regions. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 20 | In each step a routine daily activities, your brain has to coordinate vision and sound with balance, touch, smell, and spatial awareness. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 20 | In routine daily activities, your brain has to decide which muscles to activate to move you across the room and how much pressure to use when you pick up the cup and coffeepot, when to tip the pot and when to stop pouring coffee, whether the brew tastes strong enough for you, if it needs sugar or milk, if it is too hot or too cold. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 20 | Smell pulled you to the brewing coffee. It's our most intense and ancient sense, profoundly connected to memory, sex, and survival. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 20 | Even bacteria "smell" poisons or nutrients, danger or safety. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 20 | Many animals rely on smell to know the sex, social rank, territories, and reproductive status of others and to identify their own mates or offspring. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 20 | Smell is profoundly linked with memory. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 20 | A familiar scent can whisk you suddenly into the past, even many decades ago. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 21 | Smell can help the brain encode memories. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 21 | Whereas human sense of smell is relatively weak compared to that of other mammals, we nevertheless have 347 different types of memory neurons in the olfactory layer for smell inside the nose. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 21 | Each type of olfactory neuron detects a different type of smell, and all the varied aromas and stenches we know result from mixtures of responses of the 347 types of receptor cells. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 22 | In vision, every color we see results from signal combinations of only three types of sensory neurons in the retina (red-, green-, or blue-sensitive cones). | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 22 | Sound helps you orient yourself in time and space. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 22 | Sound enters the eardrums and travels through several complex processing and filtering centers, including the thalamus, and ends up in the temporal gyrus of our thinking brain where it is interpreted and processed further. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 22 | Speech gets shunted to the left hemisphere language centers. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 22 | If smell is our most ancient sense, touch is our first sense as a newborn. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 22 | Our entire bodies are covered with a network of tactile sensors, grabbed 6 million to 10 million in all. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 23 | Sensory receptors are not evenly distributed over your body. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 23 | We have many fewer touch sensors in our internal organs, and the surface of the brain feels nothing at all when touched. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 23 | They skin (our largest organ), especially the erogenous zones and the area around the mouth, is rich in receptors. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 23 | Your lips are hundreds of times more sensitive than the rough soles of your feet. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 23 | Touch as the potential for adding pleasure and pain to your world and is essential for protecting your body from damage. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 23 | Some people with leprosy or diabetes who have lost the nerves for pain perception often end up with extremities so damaged they must be amputated. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 23 | The signals and feelings that arise from your body surface -- itch, sharp pain, dull pain, burning pain, tickle, soothing touch, heat and cold -- go to the insula and anterior cingulate cortex. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 23 | Sensations from inside the body -- the invigorating inner feeling when you finally drink that first cup of warm morning coffee -- are mapped in your insula. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 23 | Researchers make a distinction between passive and active touch information. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 23 | Passive tactile awareness is accepting external sensations: the sun on your face, the wind in your hair, the warmth of a morning shower, your mother's caress. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 23 | Active touching is when we explore our surroundings with our hands, feet, or mouth: sipping that coffee, walking barefoot on wet grass, biting into a ripe mango. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 23 | The active form of touch helps our brains develop a comprehensive understanding of objects around us. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 23 | Both active and passive touch are vital for early brain development. Babies of many species develop as they actively explore their environment with hands, feet, and mouth. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 24 | For routine daily activities, many regions of the brain direct these actions on a subconscious level. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 24 | Your brain likes to this auto-state for routine activities and is constantly trying to run on autopilot. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 24 | The brain attempts to remove mental processes from consciousness, so that work can be completed faster, more effectively, and at a lower metabolic cost. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 24 | Consciousness is slow, subject to error and expensive in terms of energy. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 24 | With practice, the neural networks involved in actions gradually become smaller and get shifted to areas that operate unconsciously, such as the motor cortex, the cerebellum, and the basal ganglia. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 24 | Many researchers agree that early skin-to-skin contact affects later intelligence, as well as social and emotional growth. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 24 | Children who spend the first two years of their lives in an orphanage may later produce much lower levels of oxytocin, the hormone of bonding, love, and trust. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 24 | Therapies for premature babies that include whole-body massage have been shown to reduce stress hormone levels and are correlated with faster weight gain and growth. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 25 | 6:00 a.m. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 25 | Consciousness is one of the great unsolved puzzles of neuroscience. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 25 | Scientists say consciousness is actually many states or levels along a continuum. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 25 | At one end of the consciousness spectrum is alertness or vigilance: the one that science defines as being awake and aware. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 25 | At the other end of the consciousness spectrum is deep sleep and coma. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 25 | Neuroimaging techniques suggests that we consciously perceive only the information that gets processed in the associative regions of the cerebral cortex. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 26 | The associative cortex is strongly connected to the amygdala in the limbic system and the hippocampus. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 26 | Consciousness, memory, and emotion are inextricably intertwined. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 27 | The amygdala that, the mighty nucleus of the limbic system, has a major role in the emotions. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 27 | Emotions are shaped below the level of conscious thought (subcortically) by both memories and by the workings of the limbic system on the thinking brain (cerebral cortex). | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 27 | The amygdala generates and processes unconscious emotional states and experiences. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 27 | The main function of the amygdala is to recognize input from your environment that is considered terrifying or could be physically damaging and signal you to fight or flee. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 27 | Some researchers believe that the amygdala also takes part in non- fear-related emotions, such as curiosity and the will to action. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 27 | The emotions of desire, satisfaction, and contentment are closely related to the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area: the brain's reward circuit. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 27 | The ventral tegmental area and a nucleus accumbens act with the neurotransmitter dopamine and other powerful brain chemicals to alert the cerebral cortex and other brain centers when they detect a positive or desirable circumstance. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 27 | Memory content is critical to consciousness and to determining which experiences are dangerous or desirable. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 27 | Conscious memory is called "declarative memory." | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 27 | Scientists differentiate two types of declarative memory -- semantic memory and episodic memory. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 27 | Semantic memory is about information not related directly to people, locations, or time. It's generalized factual information. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 28 | Episodic memory is about experiences relating to the self. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 28 | The very heart of episodic memory is the autobiographical memory, which forms the foundation of the self and self-awareness. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 28 | According to current theory, the hippocampus is responsible for episodic memory, and the surrounding cortex controls semantic memory. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 28 | Between the limbic system (emotions) and the cerebral cortex (thought) since the cingulate cortex. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 28 | The cingulate cortex is involved in controlling alertness and the emotional coloring of our internal reactions to physical sensations such as pain. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 28 | There is no consensus about how consciousness works. Some researchers believe it's a collective effort, many neurons, but they don't quite understand how clusters of neurons from the various regions of the brain get together and collaborate to form consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 28 | Researchers agree that consciousness seems to rely on a huge number of links among neurons. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 28 | The states of consciousness are thought to be based on split-second rewiring in a neural network of the cortex to do a specific task. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 28 | The connections in the synapses between the billions of neurons in the cortex can be strengthened or weakened for a short time to let nerve cells from specific sections of the network temporarily share information -- a short-term team effort. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 29 | Consciousness is mediated by the neurons (gray matter) and their axons covered by myelin (white matter). The neurons are connected at synapses. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 29 | The myelin sheath coating of neurons is crucial to cellular communication, in particular to how speedily and efficiently impulses race along the pathways in the thinking, sensory, or motor processing regions of the brain. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 29 | Studies show that the amount of white matter correlates to record it with IQ -- the more white matter, the higher the IQ. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 29 | White matter varies in people who have different mental experiences. Children who have been severely neglected have less myelin and their corpus callosum. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 29 | Violin is only partially formed at birth and gradually develops in different brain regions through our 20s, working its way up from behind brain to the forebrain. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 30 | White matter is key to types of learning that require prolonged practice and repetition, as well as extensive integration among greatly separated regions of the cerebral cortex. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 30 | Children whose brains are still myelinating widely find it much easier to acquire new skills than their grandparents do. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 30 | The theory of myelinating neurons may explain why there seem to be windows for learning. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 30 | People who begin playing musical instruments in childhood, early in the myelination process, have myelin distributed throughout the brain. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 30 | There is less white matter in the brains of people with schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disease, and autism. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 30 | Faulty or missing myelin is responsible for a number of diseases, including multiple sclerosis and cerebral palsy. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 30 | Dyslexia results from disruptive timing of communication; brain imaging has revealed reduced white matter in these tracks, which could cause such disruption. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 30 | Mylan is regularly being broken down and restored in the brain, but after middle age, the replacement process begins to slow. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 30 | We all have some gradual loss of myelin as we age, our reflexes slow when confronted with a car running a red light, and we find it hard harder to learn to play tennis or chess. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 30 | Studies of motor reflex reaction time and myelin suggest that reflex speed peaks at age 39. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 31 | Over the course of evolution as human brains got bigger, we needed more space to house the brain than the skull and available. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 31 | Folds allow more brain surface area without increasing the size of the head. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 31 | The area of the cerebral cortex is about three times as large as the inside surface of the skull. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 31 | The folding pattern of the cerebral cortex is far from random. Nerve fiber bundles our tense, like stretched elastic. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 31 | Regions in the brain that are densely connected car pulled toward one another, producing outward bulges between themTom the gyri of the cortical landscape. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 31 | Weakly connected regions drift apart, forming the sulci. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 31 | The stretching and compression of brain tissue have an effect on the architecture of the cortex and the shape of individual cells. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 31 | The peak times for stroke and heart attacks are between 6:00 AM and noon. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 32 | Early morning is it. Sharpness blood pressure rise. Cortisol flood your system jumpstarting your body to get into action quickly, and raising body temperature and speeding up your heart, with blood pressure peaking shortly after you awake. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 32 | The early-morning chemical rush can be hard on your brain and your heart, especially if your blood vessels are less elastic, you have high blood pressure, or have plaque buildiup in your arteries, the sudden cortisol jump may stress already vulnerable hearts or shake plots loose. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 32 | Once you are up, cortisol ebbs back, and the blood vessel constrictor noradrenaline takes over to maintain alertness. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 33 | 7:00 a.m. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 33 | Anger has its roots in the amygdala, the almond-sized emotional center of the brain that is the seat of vigilance and basic emotions such as fear and aggression. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 33 | The trigger-happy amygdala is poised to react at a perceived threat. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 33 | At a perceived threat, the amygdala can flip the switch that prompts the hypothalamus to set off a neurochemical chain reaction. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 34 | The hypothalamus recruits stress chemicals such as cortisol and noradrenaline from the adrenal gland to put your body on high alert and increased stress, frustration, and anger. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 34 | There are brakes for all of the raw emotions. Serotonin (the versatile neurotransmitter of emotional balance and good moods) and the ventral area of the prefrontal cortex (known to be crucial for constraining impulsive outbursts) damp down reactions such as anger. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 34 | The prefrontal cortex attempts to constrain anger can get overwhelmed by the amygdala. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 34 | There are many more neural connections going from the amygdala to the cerebral cortex than the other way. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 34 | Studies suggest that aggressive people tend to have a less active prefrontal lobe in general. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 34 | Serotonin is involved in emotion and is a key neurotransmitter affected by the class of antidepressants such as Prozac, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 34 | Serotonin's role in emotional control is still uncertain, but it appears to be connected to aggression and anger, and the brain's ability to control anger. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 35 | Low serotonin levels are associated with obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety, depression, and a multitude of other feeling-not-so-good conditions. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 36 | Can Meditation Help Master Emotions? | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 36 | Meditation is an ancient practice to quiet and focus the mind on an object, idea, or sensation or on simply being still in the moment. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 36 | Meditation practice can help your brain learn how to defuse anger and other negative emotions. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 36 | The imageed brains of meditating monks had significantly higher levels of gamma waves, which have frequencies ranging from 25 to 42 Hz and appear during periods of increased awareness. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 37 | Gamma waves are produced by active neurons in the neocortex and are associated with consciousness and perception. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 37 | When frontal lobe neurons were more active, the neurons of the limbic system were quieter, especially in the amygdala. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 39 | Meditation may even delay certain signs of aging in the brain. | 2 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 39 | The prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula were thicker in meditators. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 39 | Persons with temporal lobe epilepsy tend to have more spiritual episodes. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 39 | A study of long-term meditators found that concentrating on feelings of loving kindness physically affects brain regions that play a role in empathy and suggest people can be trained to cultivate this positive emotion. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 41 | 8:00 a.m. | 2 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 41 | Researches postulate that we create mental maps of our environments. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 41 | Cells in the hippocampus fire when we are in specific locations (they are called "place cells"), and they help us organize our experiences and places where they happen on "cognitive maps." | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 41 | Researchers working with the rats have discovered grid cells, which are even more specialized than place cells, in the brains entorhinal cortex. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 41 | Researchers found that rat brains have specialized grid-cell neurons that project a latticework of triangles across the mental map of an environment. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 42 | It is known that most mammals share systems of navigation. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 42 | In men, parts of the parietal cortex, which is involved in spatial perception, is relatively bigger than the same brain regions in women. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 42 | In women, brain imaging shows that the hippocampus, which is involved in memory storage as well as spatial perception and mapping of the environment, is larger than in men. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 43 | Grid cells are located in the entorhinal cortex, a brain region that processes information before sending it to the hippocampus. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 43 | Because place cells have a unique firing pattern for nearly every experience, it's likely that the hippocampus, and not primarily the entorhinal cortex, decides whether a location is new or being revisited. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 48 | 9:00 a.m. | 5 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 48 | A specific processing center for faces is the fusiform face area (FFA) in the visual processing center of the brain. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 48 | The fusiform face area (FFA) is a pea-sized region located in in the fusiform gyrus, a spindle shaped area where the temporal lobes meet the occipital lobe. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 48 | The fusiform gyrus is known to help process color information and word and number recognition, as well as recognizing faces, bodies, and objects. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 48 | The FFA is a subsection specifically dedicated to recognizing human faces. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 49 | fMRI's show that the FFA is larger in adults than in children and that it grows as children age, along with an improved memory for faces. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 49 | Very young babies will know their mothers but may not recognize other people. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 49 | Research shows that we are much more adept at recognizing faces of our own race and at aging, disease, and mental illness can affect the FFA. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 49 | The fusiform gyrus is less developed in those with schizophrenia and autism. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 49 | Face recognition, along with almost all other brain functions, involves many brain processes that overlap and support one another. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 49 | Interpreting Facial Expressions | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 49 | Human expressions appear to be universal and universally understood across cultures and races. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 50 | Paul Ekman, psychology professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, has spent 40 years studying human facial expressions. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 50 | The hair-triggered amygdala makes a split-second decision about friend or foe. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 51 | Psychologists have been researching social perception for decades, but only recently have brain imaging and other techniques begun to explain how it works in the brain. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 51 | The thinking brain may have to overcome biases and emotional responses. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 51 | We respond more positively to beauty, e.g. especially the child-like features on an adult woman or to the people of our own race. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 51 | If a stranger is unattractive, of a different race, and angry, your amygdala that will be on alert. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 51 | The amygdala reacts more strongly to an angry face than to a snake. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 51 | Women are better at social perception than men. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 51 | Women have a better memory for verbal information, which they may use to dissect a person's underlying motives or intentions -- a skill that seems to elude many men. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 51 | Mirror Neurons in the Brain | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 51 | We learn by imitation, and scientists discovered why a decade or so ago. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 51 | We have mirror neurons scattered throughout key parts of our brain that fire as we perform an action and also fire when we watch someone else perform the same action. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 51 | The mirror neurons fire when we just think about performing that action, as though we are rehearsing it in our minds. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 51 | Researchers found that mirror neurons in monkeys fired when they just heard someone performing an action they had experienced. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 52 | Mirror neurons are found in areas associated with movement and perception, as well as in the regions that correspond to language and understanding someone else's feelings and intentions: the pre-motor cortex, the inferior and posterior parietal lobe, the superior temporal sulcus, and the insula. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 52 | The findings on mirror neurons go a long way toward explaining a biological basis for empathy and for learning and motor language skills, and explaining the basis of some social and psychological problems. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 52 | Mirror neurons might contribute to the influence of violent video games. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 52 | Video games that allow us to imitate violence may reinforce pleasure associated with inflicting harm. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 52 | Low mirror neuron activity is common in people with autism, which is thought to be due in part to flaws in the mirror neuron system. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 52 | Autism is a condition of near isolation and social withdrawal that usually shows up in early childhood. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 52 | Persons with autism often have difficulty understanding what others are feeling and thinking. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 52 | Autism has a strong genetic component. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 52 | Persons with autism have abnormalities in specific brain areas, including those of facial recognition and mirror neurons -- areas that are essential in relating to others. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 53 | Research studies show that mirror neurons fired much less often in autistic children. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 53 | Research studies showed an association between a specific region in the brain's language system and the tip of the tongue (TOT) experiences, which are a normal part of aging. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 53 | Tip of the tongue (TOT) moments became more frequent as gray matter density in the left insula declined. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 53 | The left insula area of the brain has been implicated and sound processing and production. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 53 | When we do not often use a word, the connections among all its various representations in the brain become weak. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 53 | Words are not stored as a unit. Instead, you have sound information connected to semantic information, connected to grammatical information, and so on. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 53 | Sounds are much more vulnerable to decay over time than other kinds of information, and that leads to the TOT experience. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 54 | We read other people's minds all day long. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 54 | Social interactions are based on our perceptions of what others are thinking, as well as their actions. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 54 | We interpret others' behavior based on what we think is going on in their minds, and we predict their behavior -- and modify our own behavior -- based on this understanding. We do this in a part of the brain called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ). | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 54 | The DPJ sits between the temporal lobes (involved in speech, memory, and hearing) and the parietal lobes (which integrate sensory input). | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 54 | fMRI imaging has shown increased activity in the TPJ when people think about other people's thoughts. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 54 | The theory of mind is the ability to attribute thoughts and feelings to others as well as ourselves and to know the difference and to understand and predict behaviors. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 54 | Theory of mind is an active research area, and scientists are imaging, theorizing, and discussing about where in the mind (and how) we make judgments about others as opposed to inanimate objects, how we reach moral decisions, and how we generally make decisions about social interaction. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 55 | 10:00 a.m. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 65 | 11:00 a.m. | 10 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 67 | The brain, like any good consumer, is concerned with cost effectiveness and the best allocation of resources. Making decisions is part of that neuroeconomic process. | 2 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 67 | Our brains have evolved to capture, store, and process input information and to make choices in the most economical way. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 67 | Oxytocin, the neurotransmitter of bonding and love, can affect decision-making by making us more trusting -- sometimes too trusting. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 67 | Addictive drugs rewire the brain's dopamine system, which is normally used to reward choices that are good for us, such as obtaining food, family, and friends, to reward choosing the next drug high instead. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 67 | The medial orbitofrontal cortex is an area of the brain that studies suggest may encode for pleasantness of an experience. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 68 | Ideas generated in the brain can also produce reward signals that feed into the dopamine neurons. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 68 | The human brain can also spawn nonsense ideas, such as the Heaven's Gate cult members who chose suicide to join the mother ship they believed was awaiting them near Comet Hale-Bopp. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 68 | The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) is active in moral sentiments such as compassion, guilt, and shame. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 68 | People with VMPFC damage are more likely to make utilitarian choices involving dilemmas -- judgments that favor the greater good or the welfare of many over the welfare of fewer individuals. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 68 | It's human nature to sometimes regret a decision. That feeling of remorse is strongly correlated with activity in the medial orbital frontal cortex (OFC). The medial OFC sits just above the orbits of the eyes in the brain's frontal lobe. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 72 | Noon | 4 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 72 | Hunger (or appetite) is a multifaceted function, involving hormones in your stomach lining, you're ever active amygdala, and a control section in the hypothalamus called the arcuate nucleus. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 72 | The arcuate nucleus regulates your appetite by counting calories for you. It monitors your blood levels of glucose and insulin and the hormones ghrelin and leptin To see if your body has enough calories and nutrients | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 72 | Ghrelin, produced in cells lining the stomach stimulates appetite: ghrelin levels rise before meals and fade after you've eaten. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 73 | The hormone leptin (mostly produced from fat tissue), puts the brakes on appetite after you've eaten -- most of the time. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 73 | Humans have been losing functional olfactory receptors for a long time. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 73 | Compared with mice, rats, dogs, and other primates, people have a greater percentage of pseudogenes -- defunct genes that arise through mutation -- littering our olfactory genome. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 74 | Food is a basic survival need, but overeating isn't. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 74 | Overheating is an addiction very much like drug addiction, which may explain why so many of us have such trouble with weight. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 74 | Overheating operates in the brain much the same as addictive drugs. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 74 | Using fMRI imaging, the amygdala lights up in the brains of hungry people when they see anything edible. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 74 | fMRI imaging shows that the brain's reward center (the nucleus accumbens) is flooded with dopamine when you see something delicious. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 74 | Studies have shown that when cocaine addicts saw lines of white powder, their amygdalas perked right up, and dopamine flushed the nucleus accumbens. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 74 | After you have eaten, the amygdala no longer responds to food for a while -- usually. But when your dopamine levels are off, the urged continues. Overheating can become an addiction. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 74 | If you're already overweight, you're at a higher risk for overheating addiction. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 74 | Research surveys have found the number of dopamine receptors in overweight people is closely related to BMI (body mass Index): the higher the BMI, the heavier you are, and the fewer dopamine receptors you have. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 75 | Overweight people have a dopamine shortage, which makes them constantly seek reward stimulants in the form of food. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 75 | Overweight people have a dopamine shortage that sets up a vicious cycle similar to the dopamine seeking in drug addicts. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 75 | An addict's brain notes the dopamine surge, then compensates for the excess dopamine by reducing the number of dopamine receptors, which triggers a need for more dopamine. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 75 | The brain's yen for food and the brain' s addiction for drugs are very much the same, and similar medications and behavioral control might play a role in controlling both kinds of addictions. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 75 | Why Calories Taste Delicious | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 75 | It is thought that two brain mechanisms control our food intake. The hypothalamus tells us when we need to eat to maintain our body weight. Other brain centers such as the dopamine reward system control our desire to eat. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 75 | The desire to eat can lead us to crave tasty foods even when not hungry, contributing to obesity. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 76 | How does a dopamine system sense calories? | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 76 | Addiction is not limited to drugs, smoking, and alcohol. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 76 | Many interlocking and overlapping brain parts get turned on by just about anything. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 76 | You can get hooked on compulsive behavior such as gambling, shopping, obsessives Internet use, television viewing, risk-taking, eating, and sex. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 76 | Orgasm has been described as the biggest legal high you can experience without a prescription. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 77 | Feelings, thoughts, and sensations kidnap and convert what scientists tantalizingly refer to as our reward system: a pleasure center your brain uses to decide what it likes and to then reward you with a burst of feel-good dopamine. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 77 | Although much is still being discovered about how the brain's reward pathways work, scientists do know that the brain has multiple pleasure and reward centers and systems to register good things. And those are just about anything your brain decides is good. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 77 | The reward system is focused in your emotional brain and the limbic system and in it's reaction to stimuli. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 77 | The amygdala decides whether an experience is pleasurable or bad and whether it should be repeated or avoided, and it sends a message along to the hippocampus, which helps to record memories of the event, including where and when and with whom it happened. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 77 | Eventually your thinking brain in the frontal regions of the cerebral cortex will coordinate and process all of the information and decide how you'll respond. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 77 | Long neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) near the base of your brain are sending dopamine to a structure deep beneath you frontal cortex called the nucleus accumbens. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 77 | The VTA-accumbens pathway evaluates how good the experience is and sends that rating along to other parts of your reward circuit, including your amygdala and prefrontal cortex. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 77 | Certainly many events and experiences register pleasure, but some things are more potent than others. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 77 | All drugs of potential abuse prompt a veritable tsunami of dopamine -- a reaction much more powerful than any natural reward. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 77 | Eventually the drugs of abuse reactions overwhelm, capture, and change the reward pathway, leaving as craving more and more. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 81 | Keeping a healthy weight is a struggle, especially as we get older. | 4 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 81 | We all seem to have an individual body weight set point: a weight that is hardwired through sensitivity to leptin, the appetite suppressing hormone. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 81 | There is evidence that leptin actually helps to write and rewrite the brain's appetite circuitry and arcuate nucleus. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 84 | 1:00 p.m. | 3 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 84 | As we age, it becomes harder to recall names, dates, and even where we put our reading glasses. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 84 | Mylan, (the brain's white matter) naturally erodes with age, disrupting communication, and introducing some cross talk between brain areas. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 85 | fMRI imaging has been used to monitor the activity in the fronts and backs of older persons brains to see if those areas were operating in sync. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 85 | fMRI studies have found that inner-brain communication had dramatically declined in older persons. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 85 | Experts say that using your brain keeps you from losing it. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 85 | Try learning a new skill, owning an older one, staying social, and working out your body. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 85 | Physical exercise builds new neurons in two brain areas, one of which is the dentate gyrus, a region of the hippocampus linked to age-related memory decline. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 85 | Several long-term study showed the benefits of a circle of friends. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 85 | Only 10% of older persons with a strong social network developed dementia. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 86 | The only absolute way of confirming Alzheimer's disease is by autopsying in the brain. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 87 | People with more years of formal education tend to be diagnosed with dementia later in life, but once it starts, dementia gallops through the educated brain much faster than it does in those with less school learning. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 87 | Challenging the brain with mental activities may delay dementia. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 88 | Most people slide into sleep through four stages of the deepening slumber, ending with the dream stage of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, and then start the cycle all over again. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 88 | People with narcolepsy bypass the initial stages of sleep and drop almost immediately into a form of REM sleep. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 88 | Many narcoleptics take amphetamine- like stimulants to combat daytime drowsiness. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 89 | Mountains of evidence show that sleep enhances memory and that short sleeps are the norm in animals, infants, and the elderly. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 89 | Even with a short six-minute nap, you stand to gain in improved short-term memory. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 89 | Falling asleep for only six minutes is enough to significantly enhance memory. This is the shortest period of sleep found to affect mental functioning. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 89 | Research studies suggest that something happens at the point of losing consciousness that solidifies memories. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 90 | 2:00 p.m. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 90 | ADHD, the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, makes it difficult to focus, control impulses, or even sit still. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 90 | With ADHD you can't concentrate on the task at hand, no matter what it is. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 90 | With ADHD your mind is flitting everywhere and aimlessly, you get up-and-down from your desk, stop and start a half-dozen projects, tap your foot, drum your fingers, get coffee, get a soda, work the Internet and e-mail obsessively. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 90 | 4 million school-age children have been diagnosed with ADHD. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 90 | Some children outgrow it, but up to 80% still have some degree of ADHD as adults. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 90 | ADHD could be interpreted as boredom, since boredom is linked to problems with attention, and it's hard to be interested in something when you can't concentrate on it. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 91 | Children with ADHD have differences in the brain areas responsible for planning, impulse control, and movement. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 91 | Areas such as the frontal lobe, cerebellum, and parietal and temporal lobes are smaller in ADHD children than in non-ADHD kids of a similar age. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 91 | ADHD persons have lower levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that strengthens connections between the brain's reward center and actions. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 91 | When dopamine levels are low, the action-reward connection is skewed: the brain gets a much reduced reward signal, it gets it at the wrong time, or it has no effect. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 91 | Some people may have the novelty-seeking gene. In people with a risk variant of the DRD4 gene, the neurochemical high is more likely to overrule common sense, much like the urge for cocaine hits an addict. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 91 | In people with the risk variant of the DRD4 gene, it takes ever more extreme risk to get the dopamine rush they crave. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 91 | Even without the DRD4 gene, the urge for a dopamine rush could tempt you to take other risks that are dangerous to your health, your relationships, or your job. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 91 | You could succumb to the urge to speed on the freeway, sneaky sex from was someone else's spouse, a blow off their workday afternoon in a bar -- all actions known to have potentially very bad outcomes. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 91 | The DRD4 gene variant on personality might be connected with sex addiction. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 91 | Both ADHD-like behavior and risky business are connected to damage to the frontal cortex. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 91 | People were frontal cortex brain injuries have trouble paying attention and are prone to a number of emotional and cognitive quirks, including extreme increases in sensation seeking or risk-taking. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 92 | Among the genes scientists have identified connected with ADHD is a variant of one of the dopamine receptor genes called D4, or DRD4. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 92 | People who have the DRD4 gene need to go to risky extremes to get a rush. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 92 | The DRD4 gene variant people are the ones you find bungee jumping and extreme skiing. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 92 | Novelty seeking people tend to be relatively impulsive, exploratory, fickle, excitable, quick tempered, and extravagant. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 92 | The DRD4 gene has been dubbed the "novelty seeking gene." | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 92 | While kids with ADHD face difficulties in school and on the playground, ADHD qualities such as an exploratory nature and high-octane energy might be advantageous and an adult. It helps to select occupations and lifestyles that benefit from these qualities. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 93 | Some persons can't control impulsiveness or the urge for danger. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 93 | We have a network of brain regions dedicated to meandering thoughts that turns off and on, depending on how focused we need to be two complete different tasks. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 93 | The brain's "default" network, which is composed of at least seven separate brain regions, kicks-in any time we are at rest. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 93 | Addicted to Technology | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 93 | For a growing number of people, the hooks-up life they lead online may seem more important, more immediate, and more intense than the life they lead face-to-face. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 94 | Some studies have found that ADHD-like symptoms all but disappear when ADHD kids interact with a computer. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 94 | Video games in particular offer escape and distraction to ADHD kids. Players quickly learn that they feel better when playing, and a kind of reinforcement loop develops. They self-medicate with electronics. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 94 | Maintaining control over media habits is a challenge. Like so many other addictions, Internet and cellphone addiction seems more prevalent among persons who are vulnerable to addiction in general. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 95 | 3:00 p.m. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 95 | It's your extremities that are screaming in pain, but the perception of pain is in the brain. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 95 | The pain message gets sent to your brain by specialized neurons called nociceptors, which sit outside the central nervous system. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 95 | Nociceptors have two arms: a sensation-detecting branch that projects outward to the periphery of your body and a second branch that extends into the spinal cord. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 95 | Some pain is good. Acute pain is an alarm in your brain telling you something is wrong in your body. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 96 | When pain never goes away, it becomes chronic. It can interfere with your ability to make good decisions, and it surely can make your life miserable. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 96 | Unrelenting pain is a disease in itself. Chronic pain alters your nervous system and can make structural changes in your nerve cells, making them supersensitive, or causing them to fire off pain signals when nothing is happening. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 96 | Pain wins in a battle for your brain's attention. Everyone knows that it's impossible to concentrate when you're in pain. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 97 | When doctors decide whether to prescribe strong painkillers such as opiates, they consider the thought-blurring side effects. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 97 | The outer cortex of your brain doesn't feel anything. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 97 | Nociceptors exists near your brain, but they are in the blood vessels and in the meninges, the thin membrane that wraps around and protects the brain and spinal cord. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 97 | One of the sources of migraine headache pain may arise from the nociceptors in the meninges. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 97 | Interestingly, when those few nociceptors inside an organ are stimulated, the pain is "referred" to regions on the surface of the body. This explains why the pain that may accompany a stroke is commonly felt in the muscles and joints, particularly in the shoulder region. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 98 | People can be distracted from their pain. Burn patients undergoing wound care can have their pain drop dramatically when they're engaged in virtual reality programs. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 98 | Hypnosis is sustained, focused attention coupled with suggestions for changes in experience, perception, emotion, thought, or behavior. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 98 | Not everyone can be hypnotized. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 98 | Science isn't sure how hypnosis works, but evidence indicates that hypnotic suggestions affect specific parts of the brain and can modify the way the brain processes information. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 100 | Researchers have used hypnosis to study one kind of forgetting: functional amnesia, a sudden memory loss connected with psychological trauma rather than damage or disease. | 2 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 100 | Hypnosis can be a valuable tool for pain control for some people. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 100 | When used responsibly by medical professionals as one part of a treatment plan, hypnosis can help with some emotional and medical problems. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 101 | If you hear a hypnotic suggestion that you will not feel pain, certain areas of the brain may still register that painful stimulus, but the brain's normal emotional reaction is muted. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 101 | Hypnosis can also help some people who suffer from pain or debilitating anxiety or wish to curb addictions or lose weight. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 101 | Hypnosis is almost never a stand-alone treatment and is not a foolproof way to cure unhealthy habits. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 102 | 4:00 p.m. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 102 | Exercise Grows Neurons and Improves Memory | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 102 | The adult brain spawns new neurons in only two locations. One of them is the dentate gyrus, a region in the hippocampus linked to age-related memory decline. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 104 | Why We Get Food Cravings | 2 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 104 | fMRI studies suggest that pining for a certain food activates a bunch of brain areas, including components of the amygdala, anterior cingulate, orbital frontal cortex, insula, hippocampus, caudate, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 104 | In pining for a certain food, a network of neural regions may be involved, including those of emotion and memory, as well as a chemosensory centers. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 105 | The developing human brain has an overproduction and then a pruning of neurons in the womb and in the first two years after birth. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 105 | Magnetic resonance imaging shows a surge in brain development in teen years. Some researchers say that the prefrontal cortex in the teen brain is still developing, which contributes to all the turmoil, bad decisions, and risky business. | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 105 | Imaging studies found a link between brain structure and aggression. Teens of either gender who had a larger amygdala stayed angry longer, as did boys with a smaller left anterior cingulate cortex | 0 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 106 | Surging hormones affect behavior, including teen behavior. | 1 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 110 | 5:00 p.m. | 4 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 116 | 6:00 p.m. | 6 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 124 | 7:00 p.m. | 8 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 133 | 8:00 p.m. | 9 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 140 | 9:00 p.m. | 7 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 147 | 10:00 p.m. | 7 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 156 | 11:00 p.m. | 9 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 165 | 1:00 p.m. | 9 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 174 | 1:00 a.m. | 9 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 179 | 2:00 a.m. | 5 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 185 | 3:00 a.m. | 6 | ||
| Horstman; Day in Life of Your Brain | 191 | 4:00 a.m. | 6 | ||
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