Imagine, for a moment, that you are facing a very difficult decision about which of two job offers to accept. One position offers good pay and job security, but is pretty mundane, whereas the other job is really interesting and offers reasonable pay, but has questionable job security. Clearly you can go about resolving this dilemma in many ways. Few people, however, would say that your decision should be affected or influenced by whether or not you resisted the urge to eat cookies prior to contemplating the job offers. A decade of psychology research suggests otherwise. Unrelated activities that tax the executive function have important lingering effects, and may disrupt your ability to make such an important decision. In other words, you might choose the wrong job because you didn’t eat a cookie. Read more
Those who don’t engage in complex mental activity over their lifetime have twice the shrinkage in a key part of the brain in old age, according to researchers from UNSW.
The researchers found that people who have been more mentally active over their lives have a larger hippocampus – which relates to memory – and critically that it shrinks at half the rate of those who have lower mental activity.
This is the first time that researchers have compared participants’ brains over a period of time in relation to mental activity patterns, adding weight to previous work which shows that complex mental activity helps prevent dementia. [continue reading…]
Viagra’s effect in women has been disappointing, but a new small study finds those on antidepressants may benefit from taking the little blue pills. The research involving 98 premenopausal women found Viagra helped with orgasm. But the benefits did not extend to other aspects of sex such as desire, researchers report in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association. Read more
