Race car driving was the last thing Marilyn Kays expected to be doing at the age of 63. Her late husband called her ‘grandma’ because of her pokey driving. After completing BrainHQ, where she made great individual progress, Marilyn felt more confident than ever before. She noticed that she remembered things like her bank account…
There are now a number of published studies that have revealed that the progression of Alzheimer’s-like pathologies can be slowed down by housing mice or rats in enriched (vs impoverished) environments. I’ll discuss this growing body of literature supporting the prophylactic or rejuvenative power of exercising your brain and body (at least if you’re a…
A couple of weeks ago, Jerry Emmons shared his story with Posit Science. It seems that the 84-year-old was spending much of each day re-living old, painful World War II memories. He had been the only survivor in his crew and the horror was haunting him more and more. “Post-traumatic stress disorder,” said his doctor.…
I just read disturbing comments by a highly respected University of California doc Karen Seal [who screens and treats returning veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan at San Francisco’s famous Ft. Miley Veterans Administration Hospital, one of our premier VA Research Hospitals] about the redeployment of young soldiers treated for PTSD and other neurological and psychatric…
Neil Pearson wrote an inspirational and informative comment from a soldier on the front lines of pain therapy about my last entry [which described another neurological confirmation of an empathetic response actually engaging the pain centers of the brain, when a subject witnessed realistic (fake) videos of inflicted pain]. If pain is an issue for…
In the May issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex, a group from the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, Japan reported interesting results from a study in which “pain centers” in the brain were shown to be activated by WITNESSING pain afflicted to others. If you see someone being poked with a sharp needle…
In Caldwell, Idaho, on the Snake River in Western Idaho, Dr. Carolyn Rees tells us that she was at ground zero during a West Nile Virus epidemic “leaving many people with post-encephalitic brain damage”. A review of the research literature on WNV includes a number of studies now documenting enduring memory and other cognitive losses…
Sometime over the next days, the millionth child willl enroll in a Fast ForWord language or reading program. For Paula, Bill, Steve, Bob, Glenn …………. and the thousands of other good people who have helped make, sell, manage, train, support, HELP those million children — THANK YOU! One of the nicest things that can happen…
Alan Towers wrote an instructive, poignant comment about the difficulty that he had understanding that his schizophrenic son could not be EXPECTED to “make sense”, if sense was defined by the standards that applied for Alan, or for the wider society. Because so many people who live with psychotic illness or substantial neurological impairment require…