“Florida State University College of Medicine Associate Professor Antonio Terracciano joined a team of researchers from the United States, United Kingdom and Italy to examine the connection between personality traits and brain structure. […] The traits include neuroticism, the tendency to be in a negative emotional state; extraversion, the tendency to be sociable and enthusiastic; openness, how open-minded a person is; agreeableness, a measure of altruism and cooperativeness; and conscientiousness, a measure of self-control and determination. As people get older, neuroticism goes down — people become better at handling emotions — while conscientiousness and agreeableness go up — people become progressively more responsible and less antagonistic.”
Category Archives: Health & Medicine
PlasticSurgery.com
Missouri highways are encrusted with nasty-ass billboards from border to border. Our claim to shame. Yesterday we spotted a board for PlasticSurgery.com When I got home I got curious and clicked around a bit until I found a list of procedures. A few that caught my eye:
- Body Contouring – Removes loose, hanging skin from the body, after gastric bypass surgery, stomach stapling or gastric banding (gastric bypass).
- Buttocks Augmentation – This procedure is designed to enhance the size of the buttocks. Buttock augmentation can be done by using silicone implants or fat from a person’s body, known as fat transfer (or “fat grafting“).
- Eyebrow Lift (for the person who questions everything)
- Fat Grafting – This procedure will remove a patient’s own fat to re-implant it where needed.
- Jaw Implant – sounds painful
- Forehead Lift – This procedure softens the angry or tired look caused by a wrinkled brow. Most forehead lift patients are between ages 40 and 60 years old.
- Threadlift – Although a threadlift can raise droopy areas of the brow, cheeks, jowls, and neck, it will not produce the same dramatic results as a facelift or brow lift.
Five most restful activities
“The survey asked people to choose the activities that they find the most restful. The results show that the top five most restful activities are those often done alone:”
- Reading (58 per cent)
- Being in the natural environment (53.1 per cent)
- Being on their own (52.1 per cent)
- Listening to music (40.6 per cent)
- Doing nothing in particular (40 per cent)
More than 18,000 people from 134 different countries took part in the Rest Test, an online survey to investigate the public’s resting habits and their attitudes towards relaxation and busyness.
Meditation: 271 Days
After 271 consecutive days of meditation practice, I missed on Saturday. I was attending my 50th high school class reunion and just spaced it off. My previous streak of 371 days (starting on December 4, 2014) ended during a bout with pneumonia (December 5, 2015). I don’t get hung up on the quality of my practice or the duration but I do try to be consistent in sitting every day, if only for 10 minutes. Which is the only reason I keep track of my sessions. As I’ve noted previously, missing once a year might not be a bad thing if it keeps me from focusing on the string instead of today’s session. So today is two in a row!
Silence
In the future, people will be prepared to pay for the experience of silence.
I extremely fortunate in this regard. I have a lot of silence in my life. I live at the end of a gravel road, surrounded by woods. No screaming children in my life (at least none I can’t avoid). Barb doesn’t need me to entertain her so I can experience hours of silence if I choose. I don’t take this for granted. The flip side is I have less tolerance for noise than I once did. From the article below (This Is Your Brain On Silence):
“Two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus, the brain region related to the formation of memory, involving the senses. […] The growth of new cells in the brain doesn’t always have health benefits. But in this case, Kirste says that the cells seemed to become functioning neurons.”
“There isn’t really such a thing as silence,” says Robert Zatorre, an expert on the neurology of sound. “In the absence of sound, the brain often tends to produce internal representations of sound.
“If you want to know yourself you have to be with yourself, and discuss with yourself, be able to talk with yourself.”
I do a good bit of this kind of introspection and, occasionally, wonder if it’s good for me. The article says yes. Shhh.
How LSD affects consciousness
Researchers have published the first images showing the effects of LSD on the human brain, as part of a series of studies that are examining how the drug causes its characteristic hallucinogenic effects. (More at Nature)
“Within some important brain networks, such as the neuronal networks that normally fire together when the brain is at rest, which is sometimes called the ‘default mode’ network, we saw reduced blood flow — something we’ve also seen with psilocybin — and that neurons that normally fire together lost synchronization. That correlated with our volunteers reporting a disintegration of their sense of self, or ego. This known effect is called ‘ego dissolution’: the sense that you are less a singular entity, and more melded with people and things around you.”
Physician population aging faster than patients
“The physician population is aging even faster than their patients, a lot faster, in fact. Fifty-two percent of orthopedists, 54% of cardiologists, 60% of psychiatrists, and two-thirds of oncologists are 55 or older. This will be the first year that more doctors retire than start practicing. […] The Association of American Medical Colleges projects that by 2025, the U.S. will face a shortage of up to 90,000 doctors, and a dearth of specialists will account for most of the shortage.”
“On average, family doctors got a $27,000 raise in the past year, from $198,000 to $225,000, for a 13% increase. Doctors in the two other primary care categories, internal medicine and pediatrics, also had great years. Each garnered 15% bumps to $237,000 and $224,000 respectively.”
Third anniversary of plant-based diet
In Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat, science writer Marta Zaraska does a great job of exposing these claims as myths.
“Vegetarian animals ranging from gorillas to water deer, she reports, have bigger, sharper canines than we do; our canines aren’t specially meant for processing meat. What we lack dentally is more important, in fact, than what we have. Gently open a (calm) dog’s jaw, and there at the back will be the carnassial teeth, “blade-like and sharp and perfect for slicing meat.” Lions and tigers, racoons and house cats — all carnivores — have them too. We don’t. All the high-quality amino acid proteins we require are readily available in plants, Zaraska says, listing soy, buckwheat, quinoa and potatoes as examples.”
“Neal Barnard of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine even notes that when people switch from meat-eating to plant-eating, their intake of vitamins and other nutrients improves.”
Pneumonia
I’ve never had a serious illness. I had most of the childhood stuff (measles, chickenpox, etc) but never more than a bad case of the flu as an adult. Three or four days of feeling shitty.
In November (2015) I came down with some kind of upper respiratory thing and after a week I went to see a doctor who said I had something called parainfluenza. Different from garden variety flu and not prevented by my annual flu shot. This dragged on for a few weeks before an X-ray showed I had “a nasty case of pneumonia.” They gave me a serious antibiotic which helped but a followup X-ray two weeks later showed I still wasn’t out of the woods. New/different antibiotics did the trick and as I write this I believe I’m out of the woods. Feeling much better.
Seven weeks. Better part of two months. According to Wikipedia, it can take as long as 12 weeks for folks over 65 to fully recover from pneumonia. That is a long fucking time to be sick. I like to think there is something to be learned from every experience, especially the bad ones. But it’s too soon for me to say what that might be with this one. I’ll let you know.
Abortion: A positive social good
“I am pro-abortion like I’m pro-knee-replacement and pro-chemotherapy and pro-cataract surgery. As the last protection against ill-conceived childbearing when all else fails, abortion is part of a set of tools that help women and men to form the families of their choosing. I believe that abortion care is a positive social good. I suspect that a lot of other people secretly believe the same thing. And I think it’s time we said so.”