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Brain Cells: How to Preserve Them

ziyadmd:

The brain is not too different from the rest of your body. It needs to be well-nourished. All animals except humans know this instinctively; because the head is elevated whenever an animal moves, sleep is the best time to feed an animal’s brain the blood they need for brain nourishment. An animal is always in a prone position during sleep, and its head falls lower than the rest of its body.

Unlike animals, we humans sleep with our heads elevated on pillows, making the workload to feed the brain — its essential blood — even harder. (We could say this is a true uphill struggle, as the blood must go up and against the ever-present force of gravity to get to the tops of our bodies, the residences of our brains.) If you hold an animal up by its front feet for long enough, the animal will die because its heart and arteries cannot pump enough blood into its brain to keep it alive. Think of what we do to our own brains by insisting that our blood always travel uphill to our brains. It is an unrecognized disease by traditional medicine, but perhaps we all suffer from “brain anemia;” perhaps we’re all losing brain cells and brain functioning unnecessarily from having undernourished brains.

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Smoking in Movies: Why Your Brain Thinks It’s Cool

ziyadmd:

Two things people say when they hear about research on smoking tobacco are: “Why do research on smoking? We all know it’s bad for you,” and “Smoking is just a bad habit. You can quit if you have enough willpower.”

Now it turns out that a new study published in the The Journal of Neuroscience shows that those people who said, “smoking is a bad habit,” were partially right. In addition to activating brain areas linked to addiction, watching movies in which people smoke activates brain areas that drive the body movements a smoker makes hundreds of times a day while puffing on a cigarette. The physical habit of reaching for a cigarette and moving it up for a drag is learned so well that watching people smoke in the movies makes brain areas responsible for those movements more active, which could contribute to relapse.

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What Are The Hidden Dangers of BitTorrent Sites?

So, let’s start off by explaining what a torrent site is, and then I’ll answer your question about whether they’re dangerous.

A “torrent” is short for “BitTorrent” which is a technology used to distribute files over the Internet. Like any technology, it can be used positively or negatively.

Torrents can potentially speed up the downloading of large files (downloading is the process of copying a file “down” to your computer from another one, usually over the Internet — when sending a file it’s called uploading).

It speeds up downloads by basically chopping up (so to speak) a file into tiny pieces which can be sent in a “swarm” from dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of computers at once, each only having to send a small amount of the file.

While there are many legitimate uses for this, perhaps the most common use for torrents is to share pirated movies, music and other copyrighted files.

Now I’m not going to go into a moral lecture on whether or not it’s right to take other people’s content without paying for it, but I will warn you that there are a lot of risks involved in using the “torrent sites” you’re asking about.

Now as I said, there are many completely legal and legitimate uses for the BitTorrent technology, but when people talk about “torrent sites”, they’re generally referring to the ones using BitTorrent to distribute copyrighted material without paying for it.

Those sites you do need to be wary of. Let me explain why…

Source: Are BitTorrent Files & Sites Dangerous? Hidden Risks Revealed - Computers

Changing Your Life by Hacking Your Brain?

sciencetechnology:

Lifehacker.com has posted an article on how to “hack your brain” to help effect change in your life.  An interesting read:

You are not who you think you are. Your personality and identity is significantly more malleable than you realize. With a few simple tricks, you can exploit your brain’s innate functionality to change just about anything about yourself. Here’s how.

Source: How to Hack Your Brain

(Source: sciencetechnology)