Zhana Vrangalova had hit a problem. On a blustery day in early spring, sitting in a small coffee shop near the campus of New York University, where she is an adjunct professor of psychology, she was unable to load onto her laptop the Web site that we had met to discuss. This was not a technical malfunction on her end; rather, the site had been blocked. Vrangalova, who is thirty-four, with a dynamic face framed by thick-rimmed glasses, has spent the past decade researching human sexuality, and, in particular, the kinds of sexual encounters that occur outside the norms of committed relationships. The Web site she started in 2014, casualsexproject.com, began as a small endeavor fuelled by personal referrals, but has since grown to approximately five thousand visitors a day, most of whom arrive at the site through organic Internet searches or referrals through articles and social media. To date, there have been some twenty-two hundred submissions, about evenly split between genders, each detailing the kinds of habits that, when spelled out, can occasionally alert Internet security filters. The Web site was designed to open up the discussion of one-night stands and other less-than-traditional sexual behaviors. What makes us engage in casual sex? Do we enjoy it? Does it benefit us in any way—or, perhaps, might it harm us? And who, exactly, is “us,” anyway?
Category: research
Response to PTSD Treatment Associated With Size of Hippocampus
The study, from researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), was published online in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging on May 4, 2016.
Previous research has shown that having a smaller hippocampus is associated with increased risk of PTSD. In this study, the researchers examined the relationship between hippocampus volume, measured with MRI, and response to treatment in 50 participants with PTSD and 36 trauma-exposed healthy controls. The participants were evaluated at baseline and after 10 weeks, during which time the PTSD group had prolonged exposure therapy, a type of cognitive behavioral therapy that has been shown to help patients with PTSD discriminate between real and imagined trauma.
The study found that patients with PTSD who responded to treatment had greater hippocampal volume at the beginning of the study than non-responders to treatment.
The findings add to growing evidence that the hippocampus is key to distinguishing between cues that signal safety and those that signal threat.
“If replicated, these findings have important implications for screening and treating patients who have been exposed to trauma,” noted Yuval Neria, PhD, professor of medical psychology at CUMC, director of the PTSD Program at NYSPI, and senior author of the paper. “For example, new recruits for military service may be scanned before an assignment to determine whether they are capable of dealing with the expected stress and trauma. Having a smaller hippocampus may be a contraindication for prolonged exposure to trauma.”
Neuroscience News
The magical thing eating chocolate does to your brain
In the mid 1970s, psychologist Merrill Elias began tracking the cognitive abilities of more than a thousand people in the state of New York. The goal was fairly specific: to observe the relationship between people’s blood pressure and brain performance. And for decades he did just that, eventually expanding the Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study (MSLS) to observe other cardiovascular risk factors, including diabetes, obesity, and smoking. There was never an inkling that his research would lead to any sort of discovery about chocolate.
And yet, 40 years later, it seems to have done just that.
Why we never really get over that first love
If you spend enough time reading advice columns, you notice a pattern. In the stream of sorrows and quandaries and relationship angst, one word bubbles up again and again. First. My first love. My first time. My first ever. And unlike all the relationships that came after, with this one, the past can’t seem to stay in the past.
Because long after it ends, our first love maintains some power over us. A haunting, bittersweet hold on our psyches, pulling us back to what was and what can never be again. Unless . . . ?
But why? Why should this one lodge in our brains any differently than the others, even when the others were longer, better, more right? They just weren’t quite as intense as the first.
Chew Yourself a Better Brain
Would you believe that while standing in line to pay for your groceries, you are but an arm’s length away from a potent neurochemical catalyst that costs less than a single pill of any antidepressant?
Yes, gum – wonderful, flavorful, get-your-jaws-moving gum — is an unlikely object of cognitive science research that turns out to possess qualities Mr. Wrigley would never have guessed.
Gum has been studied for its beneficial effects on memory, alertness, anxiety reduction, appetite suppression, mood and learning. Attributes of gum that have gone under the microscope include its flavor, texture and density, to name a few.
Why (almost) everything you know about food is wrong
There was a time, in the distant past, when studying nutrition was a relatively simple science.
In 1747, a Scottish doctor named James Lind wanted to figure out why so many sailors got scurvy, a disease that leaves sufferers exhausted and anemic, with bloody gums and missing teeth. So Lind took 12 scurvy patients and ran the first modern clinical trial.
The sailors were divided into six groups, each given a different treatment. The men who ate oranges and lemons eventually recovered — a striking result that pointed to vitamin C deficiency as the culprit.
This sort of nutritional puzzle solving was common in the pre-industrial era. Many of troubling diseases of the day, such as scurvy, pellagra, anemia, and goiter, were due to some sort of deficiency in the diet. Doctors could develop hypotheses and run experiments until they figured out what was missing in people’s foods. Puzzle solved.
Unfortunately, studying nutrition is no longer that simple. By the 20th century, medicine had mostly fixed scurvy and goiter and other diseases of deficiency. In developed countries, these scourges are no longer an issue for most people.
Today, our greatest health problems relate to overeating. People are consuming too many calories and too much low-quality food, bringing on chronic diseases like cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
A neuroscientist says there’s a powerful benefit to exercise that is rarely discussed
The immediate effects of exercise on my mood and thought process proved to be a powerful motivational tool. And as a neuroscientist and workout devotee, I’ve come to believe that these neurological benefits could have profound implications for how we live, learn and age as a society.
Let’s start with one of the most practical immediate benefits of breaking a sweat: exercise combats stress. Exercise is a powerful way to combat feelings of stress because it causes immediate increases in levels of key neurotransmitters, including serotonin, noradrenalin, dopamine and endorphins, that are often depleted by anxiety and depression. That’s why going for a run or spending 30 minutes on the elliptical can boost our moods immediately—combatting the negative feelings we often associate with chronic stressors we deal with every day.
Junk food is tricking your brain: The depressing science behind your binging
Eating for the sake of pleasure, rather than survival, is nothing new. But only in the past several years have researchers come to understand deeply how certain foods—particularly fats and sweets—actually change brain chemistry in a way that drives some people to overconsume.
Scientists have a relatively new name for such cravings: hedonic hunger, a powerful desire for food in the absence of any need for it; the yearning we experience when our stomach is full but our brain is still ravenous. And a growing number of experts now argue that hedonic hunger is one of the primary contributors to surging obesity rates in developed countries worldwide, particularly in the U.S., where scrumptious desserts and mouthwatering junk foods are cheap and plentiful.
No, Lettuce Is Not Worse For The Environment Than Bacon
If you follow the intersection of food and climate change, you know that you can barely swing a reusable grocery bag these days without running into a new study or article bemoaning the environmental damages of a meat-heavy diet.
So imagine the joy that must have leapt into meat-eaters’ hearts when Tuesday, media outlets from around the world ran a story claiming that the environmental villain lurking in your refrigerator is not that salty slab of bacon, but that crisp head of lettuce hiding innocently in the salad drawer.
“Bacon lovers of the world, rejoice!” cried one article in Climatewire.
That celebration, however, should be short-lived. Sorry to break it to you, meat enthusiasts, but bacon isn’t necessarily better for the environment than lettuce.
The issue is that the original Carnegie Mellon study on which the claim was based looked at energy, water use, and greenhouse gas emissions on a per calorie basis.
The Real Face of Jesus
From the first time Christian children settle into Sunday school classrooms, an image of Jesus Christ is etched into their minds. In North America he is most often depicted as being taller than his disciples, lean, with long, flowing, light brown hair, fair skin and light-colored eyes. Familiar though this image may be, it is inherently flawed. A person with these features and physical bearing would have looked very different from everyone else in the region where Jesus lived and ministered. Surely the authors of the Bible would have mentioned so stark a contrast. On the contrary, according to the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus was arrested in the garden of Gethsemane before the Crucifixion, Judas Iscariot had to indicate to the soldiers whom Jesus was because they could not tell him apart from his disciples. Further clouding the question of what Jesus looked like is the simple fact that nowhere in the New Testament is Jesus described, nor have any drawings of him ever been uncovered. There is the additional problem of having neither a skeleton nor other bodily remains to probe for DNA. In the absence of evidence, our images of Jesus have been left to the imagination of artists. The influences of the artists’ cultures and traditions can be profound, observes Carlos F. Cardoza-Orlandi, associate professor of world Christianity at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta. “While Western imagery is dominant, in other parts of the world he is often shown as black, Arab or Hispanic.” And so the fundamental question remains: What did Jesus look like?