Word: brained
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Past research by Walker and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, which was published in the journal Current Biology, found that in people who were sleep deprived, activity in the prefrontal lobe - a region of the brain involved in controlling emotion - was significantly diminished. He suggests that a similar response may be occurring in the nap-deprived volunteers, albeit to a lesser extent, and that it may have its roots in evolution. "If you're walking through the jungle and you're tired, it might benefit you more to be hypersensitive to negative things," he says. The idea is that with...
...sleep appears to not only improve our ability to identify positive emotions in others; it may also round out the sharp angles of our own emotional experiences. Walker suggests that one function of REM sleep - dreaming, in particular - is to allow the brain to sift through that day's events, process any negative emotion attached to them, then strip it away from the memories. He likens the process to applying a "nocturnal soothing balm." REM sleep, he says, "tries to ameliorate the sharp emotional chips and dents that life gives you along the way." (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
...that's the case, it may help explain the recurring nightmares that characterize psychiatric conditions like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Walker says. "The brain has not stripped away the emotional rind from that experience memory," he says, so "the next night, the brain offers this up, and it fails again, and it starts to sound like a broken record ... What you hear [PTSD] patients describing is, 'I can't get over the event...
Reunited--that sounds so romantic. We were doing our final auditions in L.A., and he was across the room. That was the first time I'd seen him since high school. It's one of those moments where your brain kind of caves in on itself. And then as soon as I asked him what part he was auditioning for and he didn't say my part, I was like...
...These quick alerts remind your brain of the goals you've set for yourself," says Barbara Sternfeld, senior research scientist at Kaiser Permanente and the study's lead investigator. "So instead of standing around talking to a co-worker for 10 minutes, you may decide to take a lap around the parking lot and back...