Word: circuitousness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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EVOLUTION HAS BEQUEATHED TO OUR BRAINS A variety of mechanisms for handling the ups and downs of life--from built-in chemical circuit breakers that shut off the stress hormones to entire networks of nerves whose only job is to calm you down. The problem, in the context of our always wired, always on-call world, is that they all require that you take regular breaks from your normal routine--and not just an occasional weekend trip. You can try to ignore the biological need to periodically disengage, but there's growing evidence that it will eventually catch up with...
...series of experiments, for instance, Jeffrey Schwartz and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) can quiet activity in the circuit that underlies obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), just as drugs do. Schwartz had become intrigued with the therapeutic potential of mindfulness meditation, the Buddhist practice of observing one's inner experiences as if they were happening to someone else...
When OCD patients were plagued by an obsessive thought, Schwartz instructed them to think, "My brain is generating another obsessive thought. Don't I know it is just some garbage thrown up by a faulty circuit?" After 10 weeks of mindfulness-based therapy, 12 out of 18 patients improved significantly. Before-and-after brain scans showed that activity in the orbital frontal cortex, the core of the OCD circuit, had fallen dramatically and in exactly the way that drugs effective against OCD affect the brain. Schwartz called it "self-directed neuroplasticity," concluding that "the mind can change the brain...
...happens that I've been on the awards circuit lately, not as a recipient, thank you, but as a voting member of the New York Film Critics Circle and a presenter of a National Board of Review scroll. Both had their parties last week. So I've now heard Forest Whitaker stumble and mumble through three acceptances, apparently rendered incoherent by the ordeal of speaking in public - which, I would've thought, was his job. His manager ought to hire Bruce Vilanch to write Whitaker a speech to memorize on Oscar Night. As for Hudson, she choked back tears each...
Reid says he isn't part of the capital culture and doesn't care to be. He avoids the social circuit, preferring to spend his time reading nonfiction, power walking and doing yoga (yes, yoga--four times a week). "I try to be in the background more than the foreground," he says. "And I succeed most of the time." That's because Reid knows better than most where the real work gets done...