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The Mysteries of Sleep Explained

We know we need it. If we don’t get it, we’re cranky, have trouble concentrating, tend to overeat and are more likely to make mistakes.  Yet, with the crush of demanding schedules, bad habits, or sleep disturbances, we don’t always get enough.

So what is happening during those precious hours when we’re asleep?  Is it really a time of restoration for our brains?  And is it possible that it’s more than that?

What happens in our brains while we’re asleep is a question neuroscientist Penelope Lewis is trying to answer.

Lewis directs the Sleep and Memory Lab at the University of Manchester in England. In her new book, The Secret World of Sleep: The Surprising Science of the Mind at Rest, she discusses how sleep makes memory stronger, provides what she terms “spring cleaning” for the brain, and plays a role in depression.

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What Parents Need to Know about Childhood Depression

One of the biggest myths about childhood depression (also known as pediatric depression) is that it doesn’t exist.

However, depression is a real illness that affects both adults and kids. In fact, kids as young as 3 years old can have depression.

Depression can even affect babies, who tend to exhibit symptoms such as unresponsiveness, lethargy, inconsolable crying and feeding problems, writes Deborah Serani, PsyD, a clinical psychologist who specializes in mood disorders, in her new book Depression and Your Child: A Guide for Parents and Caregivers.

Below, she revealed what pediatric depression looks like, along with what you can do if you spot these signs.

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Neuroscience & Psychology
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What can a brain scan tell us about free will?

We all think we have control of our actions but if a brain tumour or injury can completely change our personality, what does that tell us about free will, asks David Edmonds.

Go to the gym or sit in front of the telly with a family-sized packet of crisps? Hmm. Gym or crisps? Gym or crisps? Gym or crisps?

Well, we’ve all been there. We may decide that what we really want to do is go to the gym – yet find ourselves reaching for that tasty salt-and-vinegar snack, followed by the inevitable feelings of self-loathing.

Neuroscientists and psychologists are making tremendous strides in understanding our drives and motivations. Weakness of will – eating those crisps when we don’t really want to – is one intriguing phenomenon. Another is addiction, whether it be to gambling, sex, booze or cigarettes. Much is being learnt about the physiological mechanisms that underlie our compulsive appetites.

There’s a growing recognition of the importance of the subconscious in our decision-making. We may not even be aware of the influence that a surrounding smell or noise is having on our choices. And some neuroscientists have even claimed that by examining patterns in the brain, they can predict decisions that we will take six or seven seconds before we ourselves consciously choose to take them.

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Neuroscience & Psychology
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Six Fundamentals Every Entrepreneur Needs to Succeed

As an entrepreneur who founded and runs a successful and growing business, Getaroom, I see many entrepreneurs with great ideas but no clue how the business will be profitable. For certain websites or apps, if the idea is good enough you can get lucky and sell the business after you get a spike in interest. However, most companies require considerable planning and need both a competitive advantage and a solid business plan in order to succeed. For my company, I focused on a big market and found a profitable and attractive niche.

If you're thinking about starting your own company

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Fire Together, Wire Together: How Prayer Strengthens the Brain

One of the things that we find to be such an important element of many of the rituals and practices that people do as part of their religious traditions is the repetition of it. The more that you come back to a particular idea, the more you focus on it, the more you say a phrase or a prayer, those are the ideas and beliefs that become written into the neural connections of the brain.

There is a cute saying the neurons that fire together wire together. The idea is that when you are doing a particular practice, whatever it is religious or otherwise, the more you do it the more you are writing that information into the neural connections of the brain. The neurons that support that idea or support that practice fire together. They strengthen their connections and it makes it easier for you to come back to that particular practice and it also strengthens the beliefs that are around that particular practice.

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Religion & Philosophy
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Is Family Decline Behind Religious Decline?

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very pastor knows that having kids has a way of bringing young parents inside the church doors. Or, at least, every pastor used to think so. Today, it's less clear. There was a time when you could almost count on young people whose attendance had dropped off after they left Mom and Dad's watchful eyes to return when they became parents themselves. But increasingly, young people who leave aren't coming back. What's going on? According to Mary Eberstadt, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, it has a lot to do with the fact that fewer young people are getting married and having kids.

And if they do finally settle down to start a family, it's much later than it used to be. For Eberstadt, there's an intrinsic link between faith and family, and the decline of the family in Western society has a lot to do with the shrinking size of our churches. In fact, that's How the West Really Lost God, as the title of her new book puts it. “As the family goes,” Eberstadt argues, “so go the churches.” In North Atlantic societies, the family has not done well in recent years, and to her mind that's been the single most important factor driving secularizing trends in the Western world

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Religion & Philosophy
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Why your law firm managing partner or chair should go social

Alexander Ingram (@Alex_M_Ingram), an account coordinator at InkHouse Media + Marketing, shared some thoughts this morning on why your CEO should go social.

For years, CEOs protected themselves from the public and left most of the talking to their PR agencies. Regularly communicating in a public forum was simply not part of a CEO’s job description. Today, the massive onslaught of businesses adopting social media has provided a unique opportunity for finally personalizing the voice – and influence – of these company leaders. However, with a few high-profile exceptions (Richard Branson), CEOs have largely remained out of the mix, often too busy to take the time to participate in the incessant roar of the social channels. Executives, particularly the CEO, can provide a perspective that no one else in your business can, and social media offers a great platform to disseminate that message.

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Law
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Uploading our entire MINDS to computers by 2045

In just over 30 years, humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally immortal – an event called singularity – according to a futurist from Google.

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, also claims that the biological parts of our body will be replaced with mechanical parts and this could happen as early as 2100.

Kurweil made the claims during his conference speech at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress in New York at the weekend.

The conference was created by Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov and featured visonary talks about how the world will look by 2045.

Kurzweil said: ‘Based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human brain, we’ll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold.’

He referred to Moore’s Law that states the power of computing doubles, on average, every two years quoting the developments from genetic sequencing and 3D printing.

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Religion & Philosophy
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5 habits of successful law firm social media managers

Andrew Caravella (@andrewcaravella), vice president of marketing at Sprout Social, a leading social media management and engagement platform, shared 5 habits of successful social media managers, that I thought very appropriate for professionals responsible for social in law firms.

Here’s Carvella’s five focused on acting, stepping backing, and rebooting with a little tailoring to the law from me.

  • Learn the latest tools, but don’t act impulsively. When you lead the social media charge, you’re charged with seeing and playing with the latest and greatest. However you’re in a law firm, professionalism is mandated. With social requiring personal involvement by lawyers time is limited, use it judicially. You may be best to stick with the big 5 — LinkedIn, blogging, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ — and to prioritize within that group.
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Law
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Why Neuroscience SHOULD Change the Way We Manage People

brain2brain

Most organizations and their leaders take pride in updating their systems with the latest technology and equipment. They devote significant resources to ensure their employees are using state of the art processes and materials.

Most organizational leaders would agree that without constant upgrades, they would be trying to achieve success with their hands tied behind their backs.

That’s why it is so baffling that so many of these leaders and their companies continue to operate their most precious “assets” – their employees – using badly dated thinking, outmoded concepts and really old-school beliefs.

As the data from neuroscience continues to mount, we wonder why this crucial evidence-based information is still being so widely overlooked?

One problem is focus – most business leaders simply aren’t focused on this type of information.  Some might argue that it is due to a lack of understanding of human dynamics. Many organizational leaders continue to rely on old management philosophies and the mostly discredited theories behind them.

Another thing that keeps old management thinking and systems in place is the persistent belief that psychology is not relevant to business.  Certainly our cultural views and policies on mental health reflect a deep seated reluctance to accept the primacy of psychological health in our overall well-being and success.

But in the last fifteen years, there has been unremitting neurological research which reveals fundamental insights about how we humans function.  This information is not arbitrary – it’s factual.  These studies impact everything about how we structure work. They show how brain functions affect perception, emotion and conscious thought.

While the growing  body of neuroscience  must stand the scrutiny of further research, we can begin to see applications in the workplace. The following are the BIG FIVE. These core ideas have implications for all management practices:

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Will we ever… have cyborg brains?

For the first time in over 15 years, Cathy Hutchinson brought a coffee to her lips and smiled. Cathy had suffered from the paralysing effects of a stroke, but when neurosurgeons implanted tiny recording devices in her brain, she could use her thought patterns to guide a robot arm that delivered her hot drink. This week, it was reported that Jan Scheuermann, who is paralysed from the neck down, could grasp and move a variety of objects by controlling a robotic arm with her mind.

In both cases the implants convert brain signals into digital commands that a robotic device can follow. It’s a remarkable achievement, one that could transform the lives of people debilitated through illness.

Yet it’s still a far cry from the visions of man fused with machine, or cyborgs, that grace computer games or sci-fi. The dream is to create the type of brain augmentations we see in fiction that provide cyborgs with advantages or superhuman powers. But the ones being made in the lab only aim to restore lost functionality – whether it’s brain implants that restore limb control, or cochlear implants for hearing…

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Neuroscience & Psychology
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Parkinson’s, depression and the switch that might turn them off

Deep brain stimulation is becoming very precise. This technique allows surgeons to place electrodes in almost any area of the brain, and turn them up or down — like a radio dial or thermostat — to correct dysfunction. Andres Lozano offers a dramatic look at emerging techniques, in which a woman with Parkinson's instantly stops shaking and brain areas eroded by Alzheimer's are brought back to life. (Filmed at TEDxCaltech.)

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General Blog