Welcome to the thirtieth edition of Brain Blogging — a semi-monthly blog carnival that aims to review posts “related to the brain and mind that go beyond the basic sciences into a more human and multidimensional perspective.”

Please remember to submit your blog entries using the online submission form. We will do our best to review and include your entry! Enjoy your readings… Read more →

Parkinson’s disease is the second commonest neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s, affecting 1% of the over-65 population and 2% of the over-80’s. Recent research (1) published in Biological Psychiatry from the Institute of Biophysics, Academia Sinica in Beijing indicates that polyphenols in green tea have a protective effect on neurons that could be put to potential clinical use.

In a laboratory study carried out on rats, serving as the animal model for Parkinson’s disease, damage was inflicted upon dopamine-secreting neurons of rats — simulating the disease in humans where the loss of such neurons leads to debilitating disorders of movement. Read more →

The U.S. Senate declared September 19th to be ADD Awareness Day. To celebrate, I’m going to lose my car keys.

What a Shame About Me

Perhaps the biggest problem with attention deficit disorder (ADD or ADHD or AD/HD or ADD/ADHD), is that superstitious and stereotyped social attitudes keep people from focusing on results and cultivating gifts in order to make a positive difference in people’s lives. Read more →

To my utter delight, at last there is a book that lashes out at the spectra of thinness and beauty that sets off millions of our young girls, on an obsessive path of starvation and self-punishment.

Perfecting oneself has been mainly a matter of self-discipline and education for the most major part of human history. The association of perfection and thinness is a mysterious recent phenomenon, which is hard to explain. For young girls it’s a difficult cycle to get out of — media pressures, the continuous barrages of images of successful, “thin” women on screen and television, pages and volumes of slimming diets and exercises exhorting an “all out war” on fat. This in turn creates a paradigm of personal based on one’s body weight and “slim and trim” looks. It does not take time for it to develop in to a full-scale obsession, and the focal point of the lives of millions of young girls. And no wonder anorexia and bulimia have now become two of the commonest psychiatric disorders in this age group. Read more →

A researcher at the University of Buffalo’s Institute of Addictions won a five year, $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to investigate the role of “endocannabinoids” (the brain’s own marijuana) in combating stress and anxiety, an integral part of modern lifestyles. The study, as recently revealed on the University of Buffalo’s website, is an attempt to address one of the most widely acknowledged reasons why people abuse marijuana worldwide — to relieve stress. Read more →

The genetic basis for Alzheimer’s disease has been a focus of research in recent years, and the gene most studied so far has been the ApoE gene, which codes for apoprotein E, a blood protein concerned with the transport of lipids in blood. Specifically, ApoE is thought to be associated with the development of atherosclerosis, the laying of fatty plaques inside the walls of our arteries. Read more →