May 2010

The heartache of dementia

We recently had the opportunity to review “The Daughter Trap” by Laurel Kennedy. In her book Laurel champions the need for a “superhero” – she urgies caregivers of adults to stop suffering in silence, and the need for high profile figures who can bring to the fore the plight of caregivers and the growing need to highlight eldercare issues and the stress of caring for a loved one suffering with dementia. Former UK ITN presenter John Suchet is just that. Last year he announced his wife Bonnie had dementia. The reaction –

“It was a tsunami. I received hundreds of thousand of e-mails and letters from all across the world, all from carers saying that’s what we’re going through. Thank you for talking about it.”

LInk to read more: BBC

Source: BBC

Will we succeed?

Can you help you? Recent research by University of Illinois Professor Dolores Albarracin and Visiting Assistant Professor Ibrahim Senay, along with Kenji Noguchi, Assistant Professor at Southern Mississippi University, has shown that those who ask themselves whether they will perform a task generally do better than those who tell themselves that they will. Little research exists in the area of self-talk, although we are aware of an inner voice in ourselves and in literature. From children’s books like “The Little Engine That Could,” in which the title character says, “I think I can,” to Holden Caulfield’s misanthropic musings in “A Catcher in the Rye,” internal dialogue often influences the way people motivate and shape their own behavior. [continue reading…]

An Atlas of the Brain

Delicious images of the brain. This is the ventral view of a fresh specimen before it is processed at the Allen Institute. Fewer than 15 highly distinct individual human brains will provide the data for the Allen Brain Atlas.

With $55 million, a collection of frozen human brains and robots capable of processing 192 brain slices a day, the Allen Brain Institute is attempting to do the impossible: systematically map out the expression patterns of more than 20,000 genes that make our grey matter tick. Read More
Source: Wired

  • One in ten people feel lonely often
  • Loneliness a common experience yet ’embarrassing to admit’
  • Feeling alone linked to physical and mental ill health
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According to a new report released today by the Mental Health Foundation, relationships that are vital to health and well-being are under threat by modern life, which can isolate people from one another and lead to loneliness. UK-wide research* carried out for The Lonely Society? shows that one in ten people often feel lonely (11%) and half think that people are getting lonelier in general (48%).  [continue reading…]