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Showing posts from May, 2017

Video Game Addiction

If you don't think kids get hooked on video games, think again. If you Google "video game addiction," you will find more than a dozen pages of Web sites dealing with this issue. There are also many pages of formal research papers found via search on Google Scholar. The point at which gaming becomes an actual addiction is hard to define, but some 7-21 criteria can measure the addiction. These criteria include modification of mood, conflict, behavioral problems, and, more tellingly, the same phenomena seen in drug addiction (tolerance and withdrawal symptoms). So many kids spend nearly every possible moment glued to a game screen that an addiction recovery program known as ReSTART was developed eight years ago in which addicts receive individual and group therapy in a resident campus. The ReSTART therapy program requires patients to take a 45-90 abstention from computer screens. Part of the reason that addiction develops in the first place is the strong positive reinforceme...

Forever Now. Living Life Without a Past

Imagine living every day where you don't remember what happened an hour ago, nor anything that happened to you for all the time before that. Imagine that you can't remember your old friends, even relatives. Imagine that you can't remember what you decided to do anytime in the future. Lonnie Sue Johnson, a former pilot, commercial artist, and musician, knows what that is like. As told in Michael Lemonick's new arresting new book about her life story, The Perpetual Now , Lonnie Sue experienced a catastrophic herpes simplex viral infection that spread into her brain, almost killed her, and left her with crippling memory failures after she survived. Normally, this virus just causes cold sores, but in a few cases the virus inflames and damages the brain. In Lonnie Sue's case, brain scans revealed that the virus destroyed the part of brain, the hippocampus, that forms past experiences (episodic memory) and general world knowledge (facts, ideas, meaning and concepts—semant...

Genes Change in Your Brain. Do They Change You?

A startling discovery of enormous implication has just been reported in the premier research journal, Science. Despite the accepted dogma that all of a person's cells have the same genetic coding, it turns out that this is not true, especially in neurons. The DNA in each nerve cell (we don't know about sex cells) has hundreds of mutations of the A-T, C-G nucleotides that constitute the genetic code for the neuron. Thus, no two neurons are alike. The study was conducted by 18 research teams at 15 U.S. institutions, formed as a consortium by the National Institute of Mental Health to examine neural genetic coding, using repositories of postmortem brain tissue taken from both healthy people and those with various mental diseases. The scientists have no explanation at present for what is causing so many mutations and why each neuron has a different genetic profile. The most obvious possibility might seem to be that the mutations occurred as transcription errors during cell division...