Optimal Being

Stimulating the sleeping brain may ease suffering from memory loss, stroke or mental health problem. It was late, and Sonia was alone in an unfamiliar town, trying to find her way home. The map showed a route through a dark forest lit by an occasional lantern. She viewed it with foreboding but, seeing other people also using this passage, took it. Walking fast, she neared a couple ahead of her—a man and a woman—who suddenly stopped, turned and grabbed her. The man covered her face with a cloth. She found herself on a stage with a ceiling spanned by a mirror. A crowd of men armed with guns and knives encircled her; she was about to be tortured and killed. Sonia picked up a stone and threw it at the ceiling, which shattered. Pieces of glass rained down, piercing her shoulder and foot. She fled into the forest, pursued by the couple, who could read each other's minds. The woman saw where Sonia was running and informed the man—Sonia knew she would be hunted down. This nightmare and sim...

Injections of no-longer-used growth hormone derived from cadavers may have “seeded” Alzheimer’s in some people, small study suggests. Researchers say they have uncovered more evidence to support a controversial hypothesis that sticky proteins that are a signature of Alzheimer’s disease can be transmitted from person to person through certain surgical procedures. The authors and other scientists stress that the research is based on a small number of people and is related to medical practices that are no longer used. The study does not suggest that forms of dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease can be contagious. Still, “we’d like to take precautions going forward to reduce even those rare cases occurring”, says neurologist John Collinge at University College London who led the research, which was published in  Nature Medicine  on 29 January. For the past decade, Collinge and his team have studied people in the United Kingdom who, during childhood,  received growth hormone d...

Short Naps Have Major Benefits for Your Mind I have a confession: I nap. Most days, after lunch, you will find me snoozing. I used to keep quiet about it. Other countries have strong napping traditions, but here in the U.S. it is often equated with laziness. In 2019 a U.S. federal agency even announced a ban on sleeping in government buildings. I'm going public about my nap habit now because, despite what bureaucrats may think, sleep scientists are increasingly clear about the power of the nap. That shift is part of the relatively recent recognition that the quality and duration of sleep are public health issues, says physiologist Marta Garaulet of the University of Murcia in Spain. For a time, research was both for and against napping. Many studies showed mood and  cognition benefits  from midday rest, yet others found links to poor health, especially in older adults. That left some experts hesitant to “prescribe” naps. More recent research, though, has clarified that differe...

Participants who smelled odors while they slept performed better on word-recall tests. Smell is probably our most underappreciated sense. “If you ask people which sense they would be most willing to give up, it would be the olfactory system,” says Michael Leon, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Irvine. But a loss of smell has been linked to health complications such as  depression  and cognitive decline. And mounting evidence shows that olfactory training, which involves deliberately smelling strong scents on a regular basis, may help stave off that decline. Now a team of researchers led by Leon has successfully boosted cognitive performance by exposing people to smells while they sleep. Twenty participants—all older than 60 years and generally healthy—received six months of overnight olfactory enrichment, and all significantly improved their ability to recall lists of words compared with a control group. The study appeared in  Frontiers in Neuroscien...

People over 60 who inhale essential oils of eucalyptus, rosemary or lavender, for example, improve their memory at night. They can better remember what they just heard. For 6 months, neurologists at the University of California at Irvine had 20 people over 60 sleep while an aroma diffuser in their bedroom diffused essential oils for 2 hours. The researchers had the diffuser filled with a different aroma every day of the week. The researchers used essential oils from roses, oranges, eucalyptus, limes, peppermint, rosemary and lavender. During the same period, 23 over-60s in a control group fell asleep every night while a diffuser in their bedroom diffused no detectable essential oils. Before and after the 6-month experimental period, the researchers tested the mental abilities of the subjects with a battery of tests. Results Overall, the researchers found no statistically significant changes in the test results. [Table] However, there was one exception: on the Rey Auditory Verbal Le...

  Fresh insights into accessing optimal psychological states. KEY POINTS During a flow state, individuals become deeply engrossed in an activity, losing their sense of time and self, which results in peak performance. Flow is influenced by nine precursors that encompass psychological, environmental, and social elements. Fully immersive experiences create lasting memories and contribute to identity development. Flow and mindfulness are incompatible. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, inventor of Flow Theory, would have been 89 on September 29, 2023. Now, you have undoubtedly tasted the sweet nectar of flow. It's that magical sensation when, 37 seconds into sharing an anecdote with friends, swinging a pickleball paddle, savoring a delectable meal, or simply observing a beaver's leisurely stroll through the grass, you become one with the moment. Time? It gracefully decelerates. Your ego and selfhood? They vanish, leaving only action and awareness in harmonious convergence. The outcome? A s...

A study shows how bursts of brain activity during sleep could boost memory Distinctive bursts of sleeping-brain activity, known as sleep spindles, have long been generally associated with strengthening recently formed memories. But new research has managed to link such surges to specific acts of learning while awake. These electrical flurries, which can be observed as sharp spikes on an electroencephalogram (EEG), tend to happen in early sleep stages when brain activity is otherwise low. A study published  in  Current Biology  shows that sleep spindles appear prominently in particular brain areas that had been active in study participants earlier, while they were awake and learning an assigned task. Stronger spindles in these areas correlated with better recall after sleep. “We were able to link, within [each] participant, exactly the brain areas used for learning to spindle activity during sleep,” says University of Oxford cognitive neuroscientist Bernhard Staresina...