Ovulation gives women's brains a boost

THE size of a woman's brain changes throughout her menstrual cycle, with some areas growing by as much as 2 per cent in the run-up to ovulation, when women are at their most fertile.

So say Belinda Pletzer and colleagues at the University of Salzburg, Austria, who took MRI scans of the brains of women during their monthly cycles.

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How to Find Your Life's Passion When You Are Broke

Have you always had a problem achieving your goals? Do you feel like you have read every "How to" goal book ever written, but yet, you still fail at your goals?

Perhaps the problem is not you, but your goals. Do you know what you really, really want out of life?

We tend to want so much out of life. We feel like we will die if we don't get the new car, but a few weeks after getting the new car and the "newness" wears off, we realize the car no longer makes us happy. This happens because the car was not what we really, really wanted in the first place. We simply thought the car was what we wanted.

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Risk

In fact, as researchers are discovering, the psychology of risk involves far more than a simple "death wish." Studies now indicate that the inclination to take high risks may be hard-wired into the brain, intimately linked to arousal and pleasure mechanisms, and may offer such a thrill that it functions like an addiction. The tendency probably affects one in five people, mostly young males, and declines with age. It may ensure our survival, even spur our evolution as individuals and as a species. Risk taking probably bestowed a crucial evolutionary advantage, inciting the fighting and foraging of the hunter-gatherer.

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