FEAST OR FAMINE

    Grow a New Body: How Spirit and Power Plant Nutrients Can Transform Your Health (2019) is a book about healing your body with food and eating: what you eat and when you eat.   Drawing upon ancestral wisdom and his years as a medical anthropologist, Villoldo  presents ‘a plant-based diet, low in protein, high in fats, and supported by superfood and brain nutrients.’ He provides information on how to increase metabolism, lower insulin levels, and eat food for the brain. He describes how to upgrade your brain with neuronutrients and explains that what you eat results in what you feel and think: mind, emotions, and relationships with food.    The book contains some interesting and scary chapter titles, such as ‘What Happens in the Gut Doesn’t Stay in the Gut’ and ‘Perils of a Leaky Gut.’    Villoldo gives anecdotes, lessons, examples, and homework exercises, as well as recipes and a 10-day meal plan. To date, I’ve only made the walnut tapena...

      There has been many research articles about the health benefits of listening to music. Recent research has again mentioned the benefits – for brain health, better physical coordination, improved sleep, pain relief, and dementia benefits.   Neurologic music therapist Brian Harris from the Harvard Medical School says that listening to calming music stimulates the part of the brain stem that controls heartbeat and respiration. So, music may lower the heart rate and blood pressure.   Neuroscientist Julia Jones (Dr Rock and founder of The Music Diet) says the foot-tapping, dancing, and playing an instrument – even air guitar – activates the motor cortex and sensory cortex of the brain. This can lead to better brain-to-body coordination and synchronisation.   Listening to relaxing music can trigger the body to mimic sleeping patterns by regulating the heart rate and breathing to reduce anxiety and improve sleep. This seems to be especially if music is heard...

Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and Their Journey through Schizophrenia (2006) is the true story of American identical twins Carolyn and Pamela Spiro growing up in the 1960s. It spans from 1958 to 2003.   Author Pamela Wagner was always the quieter twin until adolescence. As she entered her teenage years her life became more prominent due to the onset of her ‘illness’ – chronic paranoid schizophrenia.    Pamela begins the story of the twin’s lives in 1999, recalling the years when she is at university in the 1970s, has psychotic episodes, and is hospitalized in a psychiatric ward – ‘empty. Alone.’ Pamela is desperate to get to the telephone in the hospital so that she can call Carolyn (Lynnie). This is when their identical lives becomes divided lives. In trying to stay together with her twin, although they connect frequently, they do not have the same minds. One has a healthy, stable mind and the other does not.    Pamela reflects on her childhood with her sister i...

Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (2007) is Daniel Tammet’s memoir, explaining how his high-functioning autistic mind works. Articulate first-hand accounts of how a person thinks, in terms of processes, is a rarity, and hence these insights are all the more amazing – especially to psychologists and neurologists. His message is that for him, and others, it is ‘ultimately possible to lead a happy and productive life.’ British-born Tammet is 27 years old at the time of writing – with Asperger’s syndrome. He acquired his savant abilities after childhood epileptic seizures and central nervous system trauma. He explains the difficulty in interacting and communicating with people, and his frustrations. He can learn a language in a week, and he has the capacity to memorize almost everything and solve complicated calculations with the speed and accuracy of a computer. Like Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal in the 1988 film Rain Man about Raymond Babbitt...

Recent research published in the Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience journal  reveals that a ‘young at heart’ mentality could be the secret to brain health.    Jeanyung Chey from Seoul National University in Korea wanted to investigate the link between subjective and real brain age. Her team recruited 68 healthy people aged 59-84 years and performed MRI brain scans on each of them to analyse the amount of grey matter in different areas. The participants also completed a questionnaire about how old they were and whether they felt older or younger than their actual age. Their cognitive abilities and perceived health were also assessed. The participants who said they felt younger than their actual age were more likely to get a better score on a memory test. Also, they appeared to consider themselves more healthy, and were less likely to be depressed.  It wasn't just performance results that were better. Participants who felt younger had increased...

A recent British study shows that sheep have a highly developed ability to recognise the faces of celebrities.   Although it has long been known that sheep are able to recognise the faces of their human owners and handlers, scientists have now shown that sheep can be trained to recognise images of famous people. Professor Jenny Morton, the lead scientist in the Cambridge University study, said that the study showed that sheep have face-recognition abilities comparable with those of humans or monkeys. Morton’s team trained eight sheep to recognise the faces of four celebrities: journalist Fiona Bruce, actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Emma Watson, and former US president Barack Obama. In the tests, each animal was shown two faces in which one was the celebrity face. Each animal was given a reward of a cereal pellet (food) if it approached the correct image. The sheep were put in an enclosure and tested on whether they recognised the celebrities without the cereal rewards...

Autistic Pride Day is celebrated annually on 18 June . This observance celebrates neurodiversity of people and recognizes that autistic people have a unique set of characteristics. Autism is not a disability, but a condition that requires treatment. E vents are conducted around the world to persuade neurotypicals, people not on the autism spectrum, that autistic people are unique individuals who should not be seen as cases for treatment. Autistic Pride Day was first celebrated in 2005 by Aspies for Freedom, and it quickly became a global event which is still celebrated widely online.  According to Kabie Brook, the co-founder of Autism Rights Group Highland (ARGH), “the most important thing to note about the day is that it is an autistic community event: it originated from and is still led by autistic people ourselves. The rainbow infinity symbol is used as the symbol of this day, representing “diversity with infinite variations and infinite possibilities.” Al...