All Articles by Sudip Ghosh, MD
Dr. Ghosh is a surgeon at the University of Manchester, UK and a medical writer.
How to Recharge the Batteries in our Brain
In recent years, sleep has been less of an enigma than it was in the 70s and 80s. Memory consolidation is now well known as the prime reason why we actually need sleep, but there is still a lot of controversy regarding the exact mechanism by which sleep alters the learning characteristics of the brain. While the effects of long-term sleep deprivation are much better studied and characterized, the role of napping as opposed to deep slumber has been the subject of a recent study.
Mind your Immune System
Another significant piece in the mind-body puzzle comes from this new study where obsessive-compulsive behavior in mice was cured by a bone marrow transplant.A rare form of a genetic disorder in mice causes a "hair pulling" disorder, very similar to its human counterpart trichotillomania. In their new findings published in Cell, Mario Capecchi and his team at Salt Lake City, Utah found that the basis of this psychological aberration was a reduced population of microglia, which are the immune system cells in the brain. These cells have been long known to be the brain’s scavenger system, playing a vital role in clearing breakdown products and microbes, but its surprising that its depletion leads to a specific form of behavioral disorder.
Why Infidelity May Not Be Cheating Anymore
Cheating implies some sort of deviation form the norm -- staying faithful. But as new research suggests, the chances of infidelity in a relationship now varies between 40 and 76%; and this implies that infidelity itself could be the new norm."It's very high," according to researcher Genevieve Beaulieu-Pelletier, a PhD candidate at the Universite de Montreal's Department of Psychology and author of this new study. According to her findings, people with avoidant-attachment styles are particularly likely to have multiple sexual encounters, and they are afraid of intimacy.
The Scent Trail – Encoding Memory
Marcel Proust's 3,200 page novel À la recherche du temps perdu has in it the famous scene where dipping pastry into his tea flooded him with his childhood memories. It was the odor which provoked it, and it has gone into psychoanalytical literature as the most famous literary evidence of the power of scents in retrieving long-lost memories.In a recent controlled study over sleeping mice at the Duke University Medical Center, neuroscientists Stephen Shea and Richard Mooney have tried to elucidate the cellular and molecular basis of how memory of scents are locked up in the brain, only to be retrieved later years afterward, and provoking a strong recall of original incidents.
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