Aging impairs the 'replay' of memories during sleep

Aging impairs the consolidation of memories during sleep, a process important in converting new memories into long-term ones, according to new animal research in the July 30 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings shed light on normal memory mechanisms and how they are disrupted by aging.

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A unique coherence project for the first time on earth - come join.......

The scientific community is just beginning to appreciate how the fields generated by living systems and the ionosphere interact with one another. For instance, the earth and the ionosphere generate a symphony of frequencies ranging from 0.01 hertz to 300 hertz, and some of the large resonances occurring in the earth's fields are in the same frequency range as those of the human heart and brain. Although researchers have looked at some of the possible interactions between the earth's fields and human, animal and plant activity, scientists have barely scratched the surface of what may be achieved with something as sophisticated as the Global Coherence Monitoring System.

A number of important findings already have emerged. For example, changes in the earth's magnetic field are associated with changes in brain and nervous system activity; performance of athletic, memory and other tasks; sensitivity in a wide range of extrasensory perception experiments; synthesis of nutrients in plants and algae; the number of reported traffic violations and accidents; mortality from heart attacks and strokes; and incidence of depression and suicide. It's interesting to note that changes in geomagnetic conditions affect the rhythms of the heart more strongly than all the physiological functions studied so far.

There is also evidence in some cases that people's brainwaves can synchronize with the rhythm of the electromagnetic waves generated in the earth's ionosphere. When people say they "feel" an impending earthquake or other planetary events, such as weather changes, it is possible that they may be reacting to the actual physical signals that occur in the earth's field prior to the event.

The Global Coherence Monitoring System will directly measure the planet's magnetic field, which we postulate should be much more sensitive to the effects of emotion-based collective human interactions than can be detected with other types of detectors. For example, two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) space weather satellites monitoring the earth's geomagnetic field also displayed a significant spike at the time of the September 11th attack and for several days thereafter, indicating the stress wave possibly caused by mass human emotion created modulations in the geomagnetic field .

Geosynchronous Operational Environmental Satellites – Measuring the Earth's Geomagnetic Field.

The Global Coherence Monitoring System will establish a worldwide network of sensing stations to measure fluctuations in the earth's geomagnetic fields for the following purposes:

1. Verify the degree to which earthquake, volcanic eruptions and other planetary energetic events are reflected in and predicted by specific patterns of activity in the dynamics of the earth's magnetic field.
2. Examine the degree to which there is an energetic resonance between the earth's magnetic field and the rhythms of human heart and brain activity.
3. Examine the influence of the earth's field on patterns of human collective behavior.
4. Examine the degree to which collective human emotional resonance in response to mass events of common emotional significance is reflected in the activity of the earth's magnetic field.

We believe the Global Coherence Monitoring System can facilitate a better understanding of the mutual interactions between humans and our global environment. Far more important, however, is enlisting the collaboration of individuals and groups of people in establishing and amplifying coherent out-going fields which interact with planetary fields, thus helping establish global coherence.

Visit this site and join this unique project done for the first time on earth:

http://www.globalcoherenceproject.org/

Music Therapy

Music Therapy for Depression, Anxiety

Music therapy may improve depression, anxiety and relationships in psychiatric patients, a new study reports.

Music is an ancient tool of healing that was recognized in the writings of the Greek philosophers Pythagoras, Aristotle and Plato. The modern discipline of music therapy began early in the 20th Century with community musicians visiting veterans' hospitals around the country to play for those traumatized by war. The positive response prompted many hospitals to hire musicians to play for their patients.

Studies suggest that music may be used to influence physical, emotional, cognitive and social well-being and improve quality of life for healthy people, as well as those who are disabled or ill. It may involve either listening to or performing music, with or without the presence of a music therapist.

Music therapists are professionally trained to design specialized applications of music according to an individual's needs using improvisation, receptive listening, song writing, lyric discussion, imagery, performance or learning through music. They work in psychiatric hospitals, prisons, rehabilitative facilities, medical hospitals, outpatient clinics, day treatment centers, agencies serving developmentally disabled persons, community mental health centers, drug and alcohol programs, senior centers, nursing homes, hospice programs, correctional facilities, halfway houses, schools and private practices.

Infants, children, adolescents, adults, the elderly and even animals can all potentially benefit from music therapy. Research supports all forms of music as having therapeutic effects, although music from one's own culture may be most effective. Types of music differ in the types of neurological stimulation they evoke. For example, classical music has been found to soothe and comfort the listener, while rock music may be unsettling and cause distress.

Researchers from the Graduate School of Art Therapy, Daejeon University, Daejeon, South Korea, tested whether group music therapy effectively improves depression, anxiety and relationships. A total of 26 patients were allocated to either a music intervention group or a routine care group.

The music intervention group received 60 minutes of music intervention for 15 sessions (one or two times weekly).

The study found that after 15 sessions, the music intervention group showed significant improvements in depression, anxiety and relationships compared with the control group.

The authors concluded that despite the positive results, objective and replicable measures are required from a randomized controlled trial with a larger sample size and an active comparable control.

There is evidence that music that reflects the listener's personal preference is more likely to have desired effects. It is possible that music through headphones during medical procedures could interfere with the patient's cooperation with the procedures. Further research is needed in this area.

Man Dies From Heart Attack Caused By To Much Water?

Andrew Thornton, 44, swallowed five times the recommended daily amount of water and gave himself a heart attack as his body rejected the vast intake of fluid.

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Pomegranate Ranked Healthiest Fruit Juice

Pomegranate is the healthiest of them all because it contains the most of every type of antioxidant. It wins in all categories. And it's thought that it might do some very good things; it may protect against some cancers, such as prostate cancer. It might also modify heart disease risk factors, and it could be healthy for your heart.

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Commitment

Winston Spencer Churchill was born on November 30, 1874, in England. He served in the British Army until 1899. The following year, Churchill began his long career in the government. Churchill was elected to various positions for the next several years. After the beginning of World War II, Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. In early May, the former Prime Minister of England resigned and Churchill was appointed to the position by King George VI. England's army suffered many losses early on and Churchill faced a great deal of criticism. But one of the major contributions he made to eventual victory was his ability to inspire the British people to greater effort by making public broadcasts on significant occasions.

 A brilliant orator, he was a tireless source of strength to people experiencing the sufferings of the German bombing campaign. On October 29, 1941, Churchill made a speech at Harrow School which he attended as a youth. Part of the speech included the line, "Never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." He also used the phrase, "Never, never, never give up" in his personal writing and correspondence. Churchill lost his bid for re-election in 1945 and shortly thereafter suffered his first stroke. He remained active in politics, returning to the Prime Minister position in 1951, until his health forced him to retire in 1956. Throughout his life he was an avid writer and even won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sir Winston Churchill passed away on January 24, 1965.

20 Ways to Attack Shyness

Can you remember wanting to ask someone out, but was too shy to do so? Here are 20 ways on how to overcome this shyness.Get off your computers and get practicing!

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The Value of Not Overthinking a Decision

Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought...

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Marijuana Could Treat Cancer, Glaucoma, and More

"Targeting the CB2 receptor could be a therapeutic strategy to prevent or treat diseases like Crohn's disease [inflammation of the intestinal tract], liver cirrhosis, osteoarthritis, and atherosclerosis," said lead study author Jürg Gertsch.

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Stephen Hawking's Explosive New Theory on the Universe

Prof Stephen Hawking has come up with a new idea to explain why the Big Bang of creation led to the vast cosmos that we can see today. Astronomers can deduce that the early universe expanded at a mind-boggling rate because regions separated by vast distances have similar background temperatures.

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7 Simple Rules For How to Take A Nap

We’ve talked about the whys of taking naps on the blog before — they improve mood, creativity, memory function, heart health, and so much else — but never, to my knowledge, have we discussed how to take a nap.

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14 Research-Proven Ways To Boost Brain Power

Until just a few years ago, doctors believed that the brain stopped making new neural connections - meaning that the memory began to get irreversibly worse - when the body stopped developing, usually in the early 20s. And doctors knew that, like any other part of the body, neurons weaken as people age. Loss of brain function due to neural breakdown was assumed to be a normal, unavoidable part of aging. It turns out they were wrong.

In the past few years, it has become clear that you can, in fact, make new neurons starting in your 20s and continuing well into old age. You can literally rewire the brain with new parts as the older parts wear out. How?

There are lots of things you can do right now to preserve, protect and enhance your gray matter.

1Physical exercise

A healthy body really does mean a healthy mind. In the last decade it became clear that regular exercise beneficially affects brain function. Exercise boosts brain power by stimulating formation of new brain cells (neurons), the process known as neurogenesis2. Also, exercise strengthens connections between those cells. Researchers have found the areas of the brain that are stimulated through exercise are associated with memory and learning1.

Physical exercise may even help prevent Alzheimer's disease. Several studies7-9 have confirmed that regular physical activity reduces the risk of cognitive decline and dementia in old age.

2Lifelong learning - your brain is a learning machine

For most of us, after we graduate from high school or college, our pursuit of new knowledge bottoms out over time. We may be masters at what we do, but we aren't learning new things. There is clear evidence10-11 that education and learning produce favourable changes in the brain. Researchers believe that intellectual activity play a neuroprotective role against dementia. Some studies suggest that having a low level of formal education and poor linguistic skills is a risk factor for cognitive decline in later life.

But if you continue to learn and challenge yourself, your brain continues to grow, literally. Recent research12 have demonstrated that learning over time enhances memory and the survival of new brain cells. An active brain produces new connections between nerve cells that allow cells to communicate with one another. This helps your brain store and retrieve information more easily, no matter what your age.

How can you challenge yourself? Scientists agree that anything that is new and expands your knowledge will be effective:

• Learning to play a musical instrument
• Switching careers or starting a new one
• Starting a new hobby, such as crafts, painting, biking or bird-watching
• Learning a foreign language. According to the latest study speaking more than one language may slow the aging process in the mind.
• Staying informed about what's going on in the world
• Learning to cook new dish

If you let your brain be idle, it's not going to be in the best health.

See full article at: http://www.emedexpert.com/tips/brain.shtml

Does Meditation Alter Your Brain Structure?

Ancient traditional therapies do not always stand up to close scientific scrutiny. However, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which is about 80% meditation, has been approved by the National Institute for Health & Clinical Excellence (NICE) for use with people who have experienced three or more episodes of depression.

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Foresight- Helen Keller

Helen Keller lived in a world of "white darkness." Born in Alabama in 1880, she was a year and a half old when a case of scarlet fever or meningitis left her deaf and blind. She made signs and gestures, but her inability to truly communicate often left her a frustrated and angry child. Once she locked her mother in the pantry for three hours, and another time threw her baby sister out of a cradle.

When Helen was seven, her parents hired Anne Sullivan to be Helen's tutor. Helen learned the manual alphabet and some words, and for a month Helen signed words without knowing what they meant. One day Anne held Helen's hand under a water pump while signing "water." Helen suddenly realized that the motions of her fingers had meanings. "That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!" she later said. "There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away."

During the next decade, Helen worked on sweeping away those barriers. She learned to read Braille, to read lips, and to write in normal script. Eventually she learned how to speak. She attended schools for the deaf and blind, and, later, mainstream schools. It took Helen longer than her classmates to study, but she excelled. She wrote her memoirs, The Story of My Life, at age 21, the first of almost a dozen books during her lifetime. She graduated from Radcliffe College, the women's counterpart to Harvard University, in 1904: the first deaf and blind person to graduate from a college.

Helen also learned to paddle a canoe, ride a horse and a tandem bicycle, and play chess and checkers. She traveled the country as a lecturer, and until 1922 she even performed in vaudeville shows.

By the age of 24, Helen Keller was already more accomplished and famous than any other deaf and blind person in modern history. But she also had a keen sense of the needs and suffering of others. Having "swept away" her own barriers as much as she could, she began to focus on doing the same for others.

Helen Keller believed in equal rights and economic opportunities for all people. She became involved with the Women's Suffrage movement, the Socialist movement, and labor unions. In 1917 she founded an organization that would later become Helen Keller International to prevent and treat blindness in impoverished nations. This organization still operates in 23 countries. Helen Keller joined the American Foundation for the Blind in 1924 and advocated for policy and technology to allow the blind to live fuller lives. During her lifetime she traveled to 35 countries on five continents. Her visits inspired blind citizens, but also prompted legal and social changes that improved conditions for them.

Helen Keller died in Easton, Connecticut in 1968, a few weeks short of her 88th birthday. In her life she had reached far beyond her own darkness to shape a more compassionate future for the world. As Senator Lister Hill of Alabama said in her eulogy, "Her spirit will endure as long as man can read and stories can be told of the woman who showed the world there are no boundaries to courage and faith."

What is Consciousness

The Problem of Consciousness

Conventional explanations portray consciousness as an emergent property of classical computer-like activities in the brain's neural networks. The prevailing views among scientists in this camp are that 1) patterns of neural network activities correlate with mental states, 2) synchronous network oscillations in thalamus and cerebral cortex temporally bind information, and 3) consciousness emerges as a novel property of computational complexity among neurons.

However, these approaches appear to fall short in fully explaining certain enigmatic features of consciousness, such as:

• The nature of subjective experience, or 'qualia'- our 'inner life' (Chalmers' "hard problem");
• Binding of spatially distributed brain activities into unitary objects in vision, and a coherent sense of self, or 'oneness';
• Transition from pre-conscious processes to consciousness itself;
• Non-computability, or the notion that consciousness involves a factor which is neither random, nor algorithmic, and that consciousness cannot be simulated (Penrose, 1989, 1994, 1997);
• Free will; and,
• Subjective time flow.

Brain imaging technologies demonstrate anatomical location of activities which appear to correlate with consciousness, but which may not be directly responsible for consciousness.

 PET scan image of brain showing visual and auditory recognition (from S Petersen, Neuroimaging Laboratory, Washington University, St. Louis. Also see J.A. Hobson "Consciousness," Scientific American Library, 1999, p. 65).

Read full article : http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/presentations/whatisconsciousness.html

Neurocardiology: The Brain in the Heart

Neurocardiology: The Brain in the Heart

While the Laceys were doing their research in psychophysiology, a small group of cardiovascular researchers joined with a similar group of neurophysiologists to explore areas of mutual interest. This represented the beginning of the new discipline of neurocardiology, which has since provided critically important insights into the nervous system within the heart and how the brain and heart communicate with each other via the nervous system.

After extensive research, one of the early pioneers in neurocardiology, Dr. J. Andrew Armour, introduced the concept of a functional "heart brain" in 1991. His work revealed that the heart has a complex intrinsic nervous system that is sufficiently sophisticated to qualify as a "little brain" in its own right. The heart's brain is an intricate network of several types of neurons, neurotransmitters, proteins and support cells like those found in the brain proper. Its elaborate circuitry enables it to act independently of the cranial brain – to learn, remember, and even feel and sense. The recent book Neurocardiology, edited by Dr. Armour and Dr. Jeffrey Ardell, provides a comprehensive overview of the function of the heart's intrinsic nervous system and the role of central and peripheral autonomic neurons in the regulation of cardiac function. The nervous system pathways between the heart and brain are shown in Figure 2.

The heart's nervous system contains around 40,000 neurons, called sensory neurites, which detect circulating hormones and neurochemicals and sense heart rate and pressure information. Hormonal, chemical, rate and pressure information is translated into neurological impulses by the heart's nervous system and sent from the heart to the brain through several afferent (flowing to the brain) pathways. It is also through these nerve pathways that pain signals and other feeling sensations are sent to the brain. These afferent nerve pathways enter the brain in an area called the medulla, located in the brain stem. The signals have a regulatory role over many of the autonomic nervous system signals that flow out of the brain to the heart, blood vessels and other glands and organs. However, they also cascade up into the higher centers of the brain, where they may influence perception, decision making and other cognitive processes.

Dr. Armour describes the brain and nervous system as a distributed parallel processing system consisting of separate but interacting groups of neuronal processing centers distributed throughout the body. The heart has its own intrinsic nervous system that operates and processes information independently of the brain or nervous system. This is what allows a heart transplant to work: Normally, the heart communicates with the brain via nerve fibers running through the vagus nerve and the spinal column. In a heart transplant, these nerve connections do not reconnect for an extended period of time, if at all; however, the transplanted heart is able to function in its new host through the capacity of its intact, intrinsic nervous system.

Read the full article:http://www.heartmath.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=51/index.html

Study: Naps - Coffee, Good Night's Sleep to Combat Tiredness

You probably know how it goes. You've just had lunch and you're back at your desk. 3pm rolls around and home time is still some way off. Then the yawns start and all you can think about is curling up under your desk for a sleep.

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How much sleep do you *really* need?

In 2002, he compared death rates among more than 1 million American adults who, as part of a study on cancer prevention, reported their average nightly amount of sleep. To many his results were surprising, but they've since been corroborated by similar studies in Europe and East Asia.

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How to Make Profound and Lasting Change

Is there an area of your life you’ve tried changing, made some progress but somehow ended up in the same spot you started in? ThinkSimpleNow offers a simple psychological approach and a great exercise for making life changes stick.

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The Science Behind Why You Can't Recall Your Neighbor's Name

It's estimated that, on average, people have a tip-of-the-tongue moment at least once a week. Researchers have located the specific brain areas that are activated during such moments, and even captured images of the mind when we are struggling to find these forgotten words.

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