I have an announcement so earth-shaking that I will, just for today, suspend all scientific citations. I am here to liberate you from a great deal of suffering.

I hereby give you permission to go to bed angry.

Here are ten perfectly good reasons: Read more →

Recently I heard about a patient who was involved in a motor vehicle accident. He suffered a major pelvic injury and required surgery to fix his pelvis. His only other medical history was that he suffered from significant anxiety and panic disorder.

A few days after his surgery he became very agitated and was apparently found in his room on his feet. The problem was that his surgeon instructed him to not bear weight on his affected side. Thus, the patient was probably affecting the surgical repair when he was up on his feet. 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 →

Maybe, finally we know, why cramming all night in the weeks before the test, isn’t such a good strategy after all.

New research suggests that poor memory as a result of sleep deprivation is not so much as a result of not getting enough sleep that will allow the visual memory to consolidate in the brain; it has more to do with a fundamental defect of the sleep-deprived brain failing to “see” patterns it expects to. Read more →

It’s pretty well known that sleep deprivation affects memory formation. Getting a good night of sleep after a long day of learning helps consolidate memory formation of the prior day. What hasn’t been known is whether sleep deprivation affects new memory formation. Some research out of Harvard published this month shows that sleep may be critical not only for solidification of memories from the current day, but also in preparing the brain for next-day memory formation. Read more →

Sleep is one of our most enigmatic functions. The uncertainties of why we sleep and the utter necessity of sleep are being incessantly investigated. Based on what we do know, it is fairly safe to assume that sleep is certainly vital to our well-being. The necessity of sleep can be determined by each one of us by simply observing and evaluating the effects on our body after just one sleepless night. Read more →