Search Results for: exercise

August 22

How Does Exercise Improve the Brain?

When I started college, my best friend and I started a regular workout schedule to evade the infamous freshman fifteen. The odds were already out of my favor when I started to work at the dining hall right next to my freshman dorm. We were not as intense as Olympic runner Allyson Felix pictured above. […]

March 23

Clearing the fog around brain fog

When was the last time you forgot where you kept your keys, or blanked out on someone’s name during an important conversation, or got distracted and abandoned an important task? While everyone might have faced these problems on more than one occasion, chances are that for most of us, these events are few and far […]

March 12

Fighting fire with fire: How we can use opioids to fight opioid addiction

JC Gorman The dramatic rise in opioid overdose-related deaths has become a national health emergency. For decades now, countless dollars have been spent trying to both fight opioid substance abuse and also learn how to best treat people who have become reliant on this class of drugs. These therapies come in many forms, from rehab […]

March 02

Mindfulness as a treatment for anxiety

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) may be similarly effective as medication for treating anxiety disorders

February 09

Boredom and the Brain

Given how overstimulating our world has become (or perhaps because of it), we spend a surprising amount of time absolutely bored to tears. Maybe your wireless headphones died during a long flight and you are simply left to sit in silence, or perhaps your work meeting has just crept into its third hour with no […]

November 10

Say Cheese: The neuroscience of our devotion to dairy

You might be the kind of person that can’t wait for the “cheese pull” when grabbing a hot slice of pizza, or perhaps you’re the first at the table to suggest a cheese-filled charcuterie board for your appetizer (both of these examples are stemming from personal experience, of course). If you are a fellow cheese […]

October 13

The Wandering Nerve

What do epilepsy, depression, and anxiety all have in common? No, this is not some one-liner joke, there is an actual answer to this question. Could it be that they all could be targeted by a single treatment? To understand how this could be, let’s look into what these disorders are, first. Epilepsy is a […]

September 08

Shocking the brain to protect your memories

by JC Gorman Have you tried turning it on and off again? You may be *shocked* to hear it, but recent studies have shown that administering small electric currents to the brain could protect older people from memory loss. A research paper that came out this month showed an even more acute way to prevent […]

July 15

Brains love bone juice

Skeletons as a hormone-secreting organ In the early 2000s, researchers in Dr. Gerard Karsenty’s group were studying a protein secreted by bones named osteocalcin (OCN) to see  if it played a role in bone mineralization (i.e. how our skeleton attracts the minerals needed for its structure). Even though they found that OCN isn’t involved in […]

May 26

Why does breathing slowly make us feel better?

You’ve heard it before – during moments of overwhelm, take slow, deep breaths. But how exactly does controlling our breath influence our physiology and ultimately impact our mental well-being?