Word: gray
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...agile as you age, one of the things that may help it do so is the amount of glue you carry around in your brain--glia (Greek for glue) being what the 19th century German anatomists called it. Only about half the mass of the brain is composed of gray matter, or nerve cells; the rest is white matter, the connecting tissue that, in a sense, glues it all together. Much of that white matter is made of conductive nerve strands, and covering each fine wire is a fatty sheath of myelin that keeps nerve signals from sputtering...
...recent study found evidence that the daily practice of meditation thickened the parts of the brain's cerebral cortex responsible for decision making, attention and memory. Sara Lazar, a research scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, presented preliminary results last November that showed that the gray matter of 20 men and women who meditated for just 40 minutes a day was thicker than that of people who did not. Unlike in previous studies focusing on Buddhist monks, the subjects were Boston-area workers practicing a Western-style of meditation called mindfulness or insight meditation. "We showed for the first time that...
...think back to that fiendishly complicated puzzle of stars and planets and whirling gas clouds whenever I think about the promise of human-intelligence enhancement. How much quicker and more acute do people really want to be? How many more bits per cubic inch of gray matter do people wish they could store? People whose minds are generally healthy, that is. People who, for their age and condition, are already smart enough...
...Luck Club, a novel that parses the complex relationships of Chinese mothers and daughters. Growing up in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., Liu dated only white boys. She hated speaking Mandarin, the language her parents used at home. She added a y to her name and changed the pronunciation to Gray-cee to distinguish herself from two other Asians at school named Grace. "I didn't want to be like other Asians," she recalls. But The Joy Luck Club turned her into a "born-again Asian." It gave her new insights into why her mom was so hard...
...state capital's inhabitants are addicted to partisan warfare. And trying to simultaneously keep his base happy and build bridges across the aisle is proving arduous?as shown by the reaction to his hiring of Kennedy, an openly gay former Democratic Party executive and deputy staff chief for Governor Gray Davis. Schwarzenegger said Kennedy will help him work with Democrats to carry out his plans. But rather than viewing it as the practical move the Governor said it was, or drawing comfort from Kennedy's pro-business voting record while serving on the state utilities commission since 2003, both moderate...