Lately, we've been discovering addiction to wealth. Or, I should say, rediscovering.

It began with Sam Polk's op-ed in the New York Times, "For the Love of Money."

In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.

Polk, as they say, knew of what he spoke: he was "a daily drinker (hey!) and pot smoker and a regular user of cocaine, Ritalin and ecstasy," and had been suspended from Columbia for burglary and arrested twice.  The only thing important to him was his girlfriend. "But even though I was in love with her, when I got drunk I’d sometimes end up with other women."

Research led by Swiss neuroscientist Pascal Vrticka and his U.S. colleagues at Stanford University has found that, among other things, humor plays a key role in psychological health. According to the study, recently published in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, adults with psychological disorders such as autism or depression often have a modified humor processing activity and respond less evidently to humor than people who do not have these disorders. Vrticka believes that a better understanding how the brain processes humor could lead to the development of new treatments.

This is not the first study to explore the healing force of humor. In 2006 researchers led by Lee Berk and Stanley A. Tan at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, California, found that two hormones — beta-endorphins (which alleviate depression) and human growth hormone (HGH, which helps with immunity) — increased by 27 and 87 percent respectively when volunteers anticipated watching a humorous video. Simply anticipating laughter boosted health-protecting hormones and chemicals.

The concept of validation comes from Marsha Linehan, Ph.D, a clinical psychologist and creator of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT).

In her 1993 book Cognitive Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, Linehan notes the essence of validation:

The therapist communicates to the client that her responses make sense and are understandable within her current life context or situation. The therapist actively accepts the client and communicates this acceptance to the client. The therapist takes the client’s responses seriously and does not discount or trivialize them.

Validation is also a powerful parenting tool.

In fact, it’s one of the most important things you can do for your child, according to authors Karyn D. Hall, Ph.D, and Melissa H. Cook, LPC, in their book The Power of Validation.

 
In the early 1990’s, one thing was fairly certain about the expansion of the Universe. It might have enough energy density to stop its expansion and recollapse, it might have so little energy density that it would never stop expanding, but gravity was certain to slow the expansion as time went on. Granted, the slowing had not been observed, but, theoretically, the Universe had to slow. The Universe is full of matter and the attractive force of gravity pulls all matter together. Then came 1998 and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of very distant supernovae that showed that, a long time ago, the Universe was actually expanding more slowly than it is today. So the expansion of the Universe has not been slowing due to gravity, as everyone thought, it has been accelerating. No one expected this, no one knew how to explain it. But something was causing it.
Eventually theorists came up with three sorts of explanations. Maybe it was a result of a long-discarded version of Einstein’s theory of gravity, one that contained what was called a “cosmological constant.” Maybe there was some strange kind of energy-fluid that filled space. Maybe there is something wrong with Einstein’s theory of gravity and a new theory could include some kind of field that creates this cosmic acceleration. Theorists still don’t know what the correct explanation is, but they have given the solution a name. It is called dark energy.
More is unknown than is known. We know how much dark energy there is because we know how it affects the Universe’s expansion. Other than that, it is a complete mystery. But it is an important mystery. It turns out that roughly 68% of the Universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest – everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter – adds up to less than 5% of the Universe. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn’t be called “normal” matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the Universe.

WASHINGTON: Our brain uses subconscious mental categories to sort through everyday experiences, a new study has found.

The brain knows it’s time to cook when the stove is on, and the food and pots are out. When someone rushes away to calm a crying child, it knows cooking is over and it’s time to be a parent. The brain processes and responds to these occurrences as distinct, unrelated events.

 But it remains unclear exactly how the brain breaks such experiences into “events,” or the related groups that help us mentally organise the day’s many situations.

A dominant concept of event-perception known as prediction error says that our brain draws a line between the end of one event and the start of another when things take an unexpected turn (such as a suddenly distraught child)

Do you ever surprise yourself? Wonder why you got crazy-angry about something that now seems so small? Wonder why you made that dumb decision? Wonder why you shied away from a great opportunity? Wonder why you fell in love with a person you now consider a complete bozo?

I hope you do surprise yourself from time to time. Why? Because that’s a sign that you’re attuned to the complexity of your own psyche. You acknowledge (and forgive yourself) for not being a single, unitary, consolidated person. Instead, you are a person who is diverse, divided, growing and learning. Good for you – even though it may not always feel so good.

People with sleep apnea and hard-to-control high blood pressure may see their blood pressure drop if they treat the sleep disorder, Spanish researchers report.

Continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) is the standard treatment for sleep apnea, a condition characterized by disrupted breathing during sleep. The sleep disorder has been linked to high blood pressure.

Patients in this study were taking three or more drugs to lower their blood pressure, in addition to having sleep apnea. Participants who used the CPAP device for 12 weeks reduced their diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number in a blood pressure reading) and improved their overall nighttime blood pressure, the researchers found.

Good sleep can mean the difference between crazy and sane the next day… Between crying between meetings at work or lashing out at your husband over laundry and a semi-functional person who can fake it enough to keep her marriage and her job intact.

It’s one of the members of my holy trinity of good mental health (along with a good diet and regular exercise).

Over the ages, sleep and depression have proved to have a dysfunctional, angry relationship.

People who speak more than one language and who develop dementia tend to do so up to 5 years later than those who are monolingual, according to a study.

A team of scientists examined almost 650 dementia patients and assessed when each one had been diagnosed with the condition. The study was carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad (India).

They found that people who spoke two or more languages experienced a later onset of Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia and frontotemporal dementia.