Feeling impulsive or frustrated? Take a nap

 

Taking a nap may be an effective strategy to counteract impulsive behavior and to boost tolerance for frustration, according to a University of Michigan study. It's becoming increasingly common for people, especially adults, to not sleep an entire night. This can negatively impair a person's attention span and memory, as well as contribute to fatigue. U-M researchers examined how a brief nap affected adults' emotional control. The study's 40 participants, ages 18-50, maintained a consistent sleep schedule for three nights prior to the test. In a laboratory, participants completed tasks on computers and answered questions about sleepiness, mood and impulsivity. They were randomly assigned to a 60-minute nap opportunity or no-nap period that involved watching a nature video. Research assistants monitored the participants, who later completed those questionnaires and tasks again. Those who napped spent more time trying to solve a task than the non-nappers who were less willing to endure frustration in order to complete it. In addition, nappers reported feeling less impulsive. Combined with previous research demonstrating the negative effects of sleep deprivation, results from the U-M study indicate that staying awake for an extended period of time hinders people from controlling negative emotional responses, said Jennifer Goldschmied, the study's lead author. "Our results suggest that napping may be a beneficial intervention for individuals who may be required to remain awake for long periods of time by enhancing the ability to persevere through difficult or frustrating tasks," said Goldschmied, a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology. Napping may also be a cost-efficient and easy strategy to increase workplace safety, the researchers said. Employers who add nap pods in the workplace or offer extended break time may find their employees more productive. The study's authors also include Philip Cheng, Kathryn Kemp, Lauren Caccamo, Julia Roberts and Patricia Deldin. The findings appear in the current online issue of Personality and Individual Differences. Story Source: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Michigan. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference: Jennifer R. Goldschmied, Philip Cheng, Kathryn Kemp, Lauren Caccamo, Julia Roberts, Patricia J. Deldin. Napping to modulate frustration and impulsivity: A pilot study. Personality and Individual Differences, 2015; 86: 164 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2015.06.013

Top 6 Supplements To Boost Your Pineal Gland Function

 

by FoodMatters The pineal gland, an endocrine gland located in the brain, is said to be the seat of the soul. Also referred to as the Third Eye, this small gland is believed to be involved in reaching higher levels of consciousness, acting as a gateway to dimensions beyond our brain-created reality. For the people that seek to fully activate their spiritual potential and tap into the power of the pineal gland, one must begin by strengthening its function though detoxification and proper nutrition. Researchers are finding that in many people, due to our poor diet with pesticide and chemical-laden foods and environmental toxins such as fluoride in our water, the pineal gland and our entire bodies are becoming exposed to many more toxins and nano-organisms than ever before. These form calcium shells around themselves for protection from our immune systems which has resulted in calcification of the pineal gland, a build-up of calcium phosphate crystals in various parts of the human body. Many of us have a pineal gland that is already completely calcified. This does not fare well when we try to tap into the esoteric capabilities of this gland through yoga practice, meditation, using plant medicines such as ayahuasca, and so forth. The process of detoxification is an essential place to start if we want to exploit our full spiritual capabilities. Below is a list, in no particular order, of 6 supplements that will boost your pineal gland function, help in its decalcification, and support you on your journey of personal and spiritual cultivation. Some of the supplements offer similar results, so it is up to you to decide which combination of supplements will work best for you. 1. Oregano Oil And Neem Extract Both oregano oil and neem extract help in the purification process, helping to remove existing calcification within the pineal gland, in addition to purifying the body’s systems, especially the endocrine system. Neem has been used in this way in India for thousands of years. In the western world, oregano oil is also becoming a holistic way of fortifying the immune support system. In the longer term, both of these supplements will act as a natural antibiotic against new calcium shells created by nanobacteria. 2. Raw Cacao Raw, organic cacao in its purest form can help detoxify the pineal gland because of cacao’s high antioxidant content. Cacao will also help stimulate the third eye. 3. Chlorophyll-Rich Superfoods Supplements like spirulina, chlorella, wheatgrass, and blue-green algae are examples of chlorophyll-rich superfoods that offer similar benefits to eating leafy greens but with much more nutrition packed into a small serving. These supplements assist in the decalcification of the pineal gland due to their strong detoxification properties. 4. Raw Apple Cider Vinegar A natural detoxifier, raw apple cider vinegar helps decalcify the pineal gland due to its malic acid properties. Malic acid is an organic compound that gives fruits their sour taste. When taken as a supplement, it supports the digestive system and helps the body detoxify. Apple cider vinegar has many health benefits, many of which are listed here. Ensure that the brand you buy is raw and packaged in a glass container. 5. Iodine Many of us have been exposed to sodium fluoride due to fluoridation of our water systems, and this has also resulted in the calcification of the pineal gland. Iodine, naturally occurring in plants such as seaweed, effectively improves the removal of sodium fluoride via urine. Unfortunately, the Western diet has left us deficient of this vital mineral while our bodies need it most. To avoid calcium deficiency when taking iodine supplements, a diet incorporating many organic foods such as kale, broccoli, almonds, oranges, flax seed, sesame seeds, dill, thyme and other dried herbs is recommended. It is suggested that a non-GMO organic lecithin supplement is also taken to compliment iodine intake. 6. Boron/Borax Another good supplement that can be used to remove fluoride from the human body is the mineral Boron. It is naturally present in beets, which can be eaten raw, steamed, cooked as well as in a powder supplement. It is also present in other foods, such as dried plums. Borax is an inexpensive source of boron that can be bought in most grocery stores.

New role for Twitter: Early warning system for bad drug interactions

 

"I'm not a medical scientist. I work with Big Data," says Ahmed Abdeen Hamed, an interdisciplinary computer scientist who works in the University of Vermont's Social-Ecological Gaming and Simulation Lab. But he and three colleagues are building a tool that may be of value to doctors, pharmacists--and just about anybody who takes medicine. Credit: Joshua Brown, UVM A team of scientists has invented a new technique for discovering potentially dangerous drug interactions and unknown side-effects -- before they show up in medical databases, like PubMed, or even before doctors and researchers have heard of them at all. The far-seeing tool? A computer program that can efficiently search millions of tweets on Twitter for the names of many drugs and medicines -- and build a map of how they're connected, using the #hashtags that link them. "Our new algorithm is a great way to make discoveries that can be followed-up and tested by experts like clinical researchers and pharmacists," said Ahmed Abdeen Hamed, a computer scientist at the University of Vermont who led the creation of the new tool. A report on how the algorithm works, and its preliminary discoveries, was published online, June 8, in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics. "We may not know what the interaction is, but with this approach we can quickly find clear evidence of drugs that are linked together via hashtags," Hamed said. Matching PubMed The new approach could also be used to generate public alerts, Hamed said, before a clinical investigation is started or before health care providers have received updates. "It can tell us: we may be seeing a drug/drug interaction here," Hamed said. "Beware." And the research team also aims to help overcome a long-standing problem in medical research: published studies are too often not linked to new scientific findings, because digital libraries "suffer infrequent tagging," the scientists write, and updating keywords and metadata associated with studies is a laborious manual task, often delayed or incomplete. "Mining Twitter hashtags can give us a link between emerging scientific evidence and PubMed," the massive database run by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, Hamed said. Using their new algorithm, the Vermont team has created a website that will allow an investigator to explore the connections between search terms (say "albuterol"), existing scientific studies indexed in PubMed -- and Twitter hashtags associated with the terms and studies. Heeding #hashtags Previous studies have shown that Twitter can be mined for bad drug interactions, but the Vermont team advances this idea by focusing on the distinctive information contained in hashtags -- like "#overprescribed," "#kidneystoneprobs," and "#skinswelling" -- to find new associations. "Each individual hashtag functions almost like a neuron in the human brain, sending a specific signal," the scientists write, that can reveal a surprising pathway between two or more drugs. The team's approach involves building what they call a "K-H network" -- essentially a dense map of links between keywords and hashtags -- and then pruning out a lot of the "noise and trash," Hamed says, "this is Twitter!" -- to find the terms that are central to the network. Then the algorithm, called HashPairMiner, searches this cleaned-up network for the shortest paths between a pair of search terms and their intervening hashtags. The overall goal of the project, supported by the National Science Foundation, is to "discover any relationship between two drugs that is not known," said Hamed. But to "ground-truth the hypothesis" -- that data-mining in Twitter can find unknown drug interactions -- the team wanted to demonstrate that their approach "can produce interactions that are already known," says Tamer Fandy. He's a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the Albany College of Pharmacy's campus in Vermont, and a co-author on the new study with Ahmed Abdeen Hamed and two other computer scientists, Xingdong Wu and Robert Erickson, professors in UVM's College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. "It does," said Hamed. In one example from the new study, a path between aspirin and the allergy medication benadryl, that are known to interact, was detected by the algorithm; in one instance, the two drugs were linked -- perhaps not too surprisingly -- by the hashtag "#happythanksgiving." Marijuana and memory The new system began with what UVM's Hamed initially thought was as error in November of 2013. An earlier version of the current algorithm "discovered something shocking: ibuprofen and medical marijuana -- which you would think have nothing to do with each other -- were linked by a hashtag called #Alzheimer's," Hamed says. "I thought that has to be an error. I looked at my code. I repeated my experiment. I gathered different tweet data sets -- and I got the same result," he said. But he couldn't find any support for the association on PubMed or other databases of clinical literature. In fact, the only study he could find, from 1989, suggested the opposite, that there was no interaction between ibuprofen and marijuana. It turned out that Hamed had inadvertently discovered people in the Twitterverse who were sharing the results of a brand-new peer-reviewed study suggesting that ibuprofen has some ability to block or reduce the memory-damaging effects of regular marijuana use, which has been associated with the development of Alzheimer's disease. "It appeared on Twitter before PubMed," Hamed said. As more states legalize marijuana, Hamed said, there may be increasing discussion of its interactions with other drugs -- ahead of researchers capacity to study these interactions. "If we're able to detect concerns -- say chatter about headaches or drops in blood pressure or whatever," he said, "that may lead pharmacists or researchers to a hypothesis that can be followed up by a clinical trial or other medical test." Story Source: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Vermont. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference: Ahmed Abdeen Hamed, Xindong Wu, Robert Erickson, Tamer Fandy. Twitter K-H networks in action: Advancing biomedical literature for drug search. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 2015; 56: 157 DOI: 10.1016/j.jbi.2015.05.015

How a newborn baby sees you

 

This is how a newborn infant percieves expressions at different distances. Credit: Illustration by Professor Bruno Laeng/ UiO. A newborn infant can see its parents' expressions at a distance of 30 cm. For the first time researchers have managed to reconstruct infants visual perception of the world. By combining technology, mathematics and previous knowledge of the visual perception of infants, researchers have finally succeeded in showing to an adult audience how much of its environment a newborn baby can actually see. The results tell us that an infant of 2 to 3 days old can perceive faces, and perhaps also emotional facial expressions, at a distance of 30 centimeters -- which corresponds to the distance between a mother and her nursing baby. If the distance is increased to 60 centimeters, the visual image gets too blurred for the baby to perceive faces and expressions. The study was conducted by researchers at the Institute of psychology at The University of Oslo in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Uppsala and Eclipse Optics in Stockholm, Sweden. Live pictures The study plugs a gap in our knowledge about infants' visual world, which was left open for several decades. It may also help explain claims that newborn babies can imitate facial expressions in adults during the first days and weeks of their lives, long before their vision is sufficiently developed to perceive details in their environments. The key word is motion. "Previously, when researchers have tried to estimate exactly what a newborn baby sees, they have invariably used still photos. But the real world is dynamic. Our idea was to use images in motion," says professor emeritus Svein Magnussen from the Institute of Psychology. Testing an old idea Early in his career, Magnussen conducted research into the visual perception of humans. One day, about 15 years ago, he found himself discussing with colleagues the problem of testing whether newborn infants are really able to perceive facial expressions in people around them. The researchers agreed that if it were true that babies could see and imitate facial expressions, the reason might be that the faces were moving. "Back then we had neither the equipment nor the technical competence to test our idea. We dug it out again only a year ago. So, our results are based on an old idea which nobody had tested in the meantime," he says. What makes facial expressions intelligible? In order to carry out the test, the researchers had to combine modern simulation techniques with previous insight into how infants' vision works. We have a great deal of information about young infants' contrast sensitivity and spatial resolution from behavioural studies conducted, for the most part, in the 80s. At that time, it was discovered that presenting an infant with a figure against a uniformly grey background, caused the infant to direct its gaze towards the figure. "Figures made up of black and white stripes were used. By choosing a certain stripe width and frequency, the field would appear uniformly grey, and the child would not direct its gaze towards it. Changing the width and frequency to make up figures, made it possible to determine the exact level of contrast and spatial resolution needed to make the infant direct its gaze towards the figure," Magnussen says. In other words, the researchers had access to quite accurate information about newborn infants' vision. What was unknown to them, was the practical consequences of this information. Does it, for instance, mean that a newborn baby can see the expression in the face of an adult bending over the baby? Movement is easier to see It's easier to recognise something that moves, than a blurry still photo. The researchers made video recordings of faces that changed between several emotional expressions, and subsequently filtered out the information which we know is unavailable to newborn infants. Then they let adult participants see the videos. The idea was that if the adults were unable to identify a facial expression, then we can certainly assume that a newborn would also be unable to do so. The adult participants correctly identified facial expressions in three out of four cases when viewing the video at a distance of 30 centimeters. When the distance was increased to 120 centimeters, the participants' rate of identification were about what one could expect from random responding. This means that the ability to identify facial expressions based on the visual information available to a newborn baby, reaches its limit at a distance of about 30 centimeters. Filling a gap in the foundation wall "It's important to remember that we have only investigated what the newborn infant can actually see, not whether they are able to make sense of it," Magnussen points out. Previous attempts to recreate the newborn baby's visual reality, for instance in students' textbooks, have usually relied on taking a normal photograph and blur it. Magnussen confesses himself surprised that nobody before them have made use of the detailed information we possess about infants' visual perception. Hence this is the first time that we have a concrete estimate of the visual information available to the newborn baby. Magnussen and his colleagues are happy to finally have been able to carry out an idea that had been on the back burner for fifteen years. But as for developing their results further, they will leave that to others. "All of us behind this study are really involved in different fields of research now. Our position is: Now a piece of the foundation is in place. If anyone else wants to follow up, that's up to them," says Magnussen. Story Source: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Oslo. The original item was written by Kjerstin Gjengedal. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference: O. von Hofsten, C. von Hofsten, U. Sulutvedt, B. Laeng, T. Brennen, S. Magnussen. Simulating newborn face perception. Journal of Vision, 2014; 14 (13): 16 DOI: 10.1167/14.13.16