Optimal Being

Consider the prospect of restoring a damaged brain or reconnecting a severed nerve. In news that could be significant for patients with brain or nerve issues, researchers at Rice University have developed a new material that they say can stimulate neural tissue in a less invasive manner than previous treatments, and also allow nerve signals to flow again despite a severed connection. The research team at Rice says they've developed a magnetoelectric material, meaning it converts magnetic fields into electric fields. Doctors have long pondered whether such a biomedical material could help patients suffering from brain and nerve problems, but previous experiments on magnetoelectrics had a difficult time making neurons react to the converted electrical signal. "We asked, ‘Can we create a material that can be like dust or is so small that by placing just a sprinkle of it inside the body you’d be able to stimulate the brain or nervous system?’" asked lead researcher Joshua Che...

  Sometimes, a well-timed email can make a real difference. For Michael Collins, age 53, that life-changing message arrived from his employer’s wellness initiative in October 2020. It was the Monday after his doctor had told him that he was “in trouble” and needed to get his weight and diabetes under control.  Michael, a resident of Boaz, Alabama, and a mental health advocate for his state government, explained the extent of his health crisis: “The doctor told me that he couldn’t promise me [I would live] two weeks or six months. I mean, I was having heart palpitations… my heart was messing up. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t sleep. I was in bad shape.” The fateful email included an invitation to apply to a diabetes reversal program offered by a company called Virta Health. Michael filled out the forms and enrolled, initiating a remarkable health journey. He was one of more than 1,100 government employees who signed up (a mix from both state and local governmen...

  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...

It involves complex mental engagement; a wide range of deep, intense emotions; and diverse, novel and interesting experiences. “I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man’s life. As we live, we grow, and our beliefs change. They must change. So,  I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.”—Martin Buber What does it mean to live a good life? This question has been  debated and written about  by many philosophers, thinkers and novelists throughout the course of humanity. In the field of psychology,  two main conceptualizations  of the good life have predominated: A  happy life  (often referred to as “hedonic well-being”), full of stability, pleasure , enjoyment and positive emotions, and a  meaningful life...

It is imperative to use strengths-based ways to cope with life stressors. Key Points Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, or various types of stressors. Resilience is important for optimal physical and mental health functioning. Meditation, stress management, and accepting mistakes can help you cultivate resilience. Resilience is important for optimal physical and mental health functioning across a variety of populations and settings, and across the human life span (Tsai and Freedland, 2022; Koliou et.al., 2020). The American Psychological Association defines individual resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress—such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. As much as resilience involves “bouncing back” from these difficult experiences, it can also involve profound personal growth (APA, 2020). Psychologi...

A diet with relatively many sources of natural nitrate, such as beetroot, arugula, lettuce and spinach, increases the concentration of nitric oxide [NOx] in the blood. Athletes are now fully aware that such a diet can improve physical performance. A nitrate-rich diet may also keep bones strong as the years go by, suggests Japanese research. In February 2023, Japanese researchers published an epidemiological study involving 871 women. The researchers used data collected since 1993 in the Nagano Cohort Study. The average study participant was about 67 years old when the project started and could be followed for almost 9 years. When the study began, the researchers took samples of the women's urine and blood. In the course of the study, 267 women broke a bone. Results The more NOx was present in the women's blood, the lower their risk of a bone fracture. Mechanism The more NOx was present in the women's blood, the less type I collagen cross-linked N-telopeptides [NTx] was in t...

You can boost your speed by taking 100 mg of the co-enzyme  Q10  every day. To be more precise: your ability to perform fast and explosive movements in quick succession will increase slightly, according to a human study done by Turkish sports scientists at Selcuk University and  published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. You can boost your speed by taking 100 mg of the co-enzyme  Q10  every day. To be more precise: your ability to perform fast and explosive movements in quick succession will increase slightly, according to a human study done by Turkish sports scientists at Selcuk University and  published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. The results of these studies are mixed. Many show no effect, some show a little effect.  A 2008 study  showed that if you get people to cycle to the point of exhaustion Q10 supplementation will improve their endurance capacity a little. Endurance athletes who have been tra...

Theory has it yawning helps cool the brain—and it turns out animals with bigger brains do indeed tend to yawn longer. Christopher Intagliata reports. Not many scientific studies begin like this: "Many hours of watching YouTube clips. Trying to find as many yawns as possible." But for Andrew Gallup, an evolutionary psychologist who studies yawning at the State University of New York, it was all in a day's work. Gallup says yawns have traditionally been known as a sign of sleepiness, or boredom. "But recent evidence suggests that yawning may function to promote brain cooling." The idea being, when you breathe in deeply, the incoming air slightly cools the brain. And stretching the jaw increases blood flow to the brain too--another cooling factor. Reason we do it at night? "At night time when we're about to go to sleep our brain and body temperatures are at their highest point throughout the day." And so Gallup and his colleagues found themselves hunt...

Subjects suffering insomnia got more wrong answers in a face-matching task—but they were paradoxically more confident of their responses. Christopher Intagliata reports. Standing in line at passport control isn't the most relaxing experience. The officer looks at your passport… at you… back at your passport… back at you. Kind of nerve wracking. But put yourself in their shoes. They're trying to figure out if your face is actually the same one as that little thumbnail image on the page. Not the easiest task. "People are often surprised at how poor they are." David White, a cognitive psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He's even tested  Australian passport agents at the task. "Their performance was no better than a group of untrained university students." In his latest study, White and his colleagues investigated how poor sleep--less than six and a half hours a night--might affect facial recognition. Turns out, bad sleep did lea...

N eural responses decline after repeated acts of dishonesty, research suggests. As the U.S. presidential campaign has highlighted, the more a person lies, the easier it seems to become. But politics is not the only realm where dishonesty abounds. In 1996 Bernard Bradstreet, co-chief executive of the technology company Kurzweil Applied Intelligence was sentenced to jail for fraud. His initial transgressions were relatively minor: To boost quarterly accounts he allowed sales that had not quite been closed to go on the books. But before long customers' signatures were being forged, documents altered and millions of dollars in fake sales reported—allowing the company to show profits when it was losing money while investors paid millions for company stocks. Similar tales emerged after the Enron scandal, one of the largest bankruptcy cases in U.S. history. Anecdotal reports of dishonesty escalating over time are common, so a team of researchers from University College London (U.C.L.) and...

In search of answers, a neurobiologist looks to rodents. One minute you’re enjoying a nice buzz, the next your brain stops recording events that are taking place. The result can mean having vague or no memory of a time period ranging anywhere from a few minutes up to several hours. Scary—isn’t it? Unfortunately, alcohol-induced blackouts aren’t a rarity, either. A 2015 survey of English teenagers who drank showed 30 percent of 15-year-olds and 75 percent of 19-year-olds suffered alcohol-induced blackouts. In medical terms this memory loss is a form of temporary anterograde amnesia, a condition where the ability to form new memories is, for a limited time, impaired. That means you can’t remember a stretch of time because your brain was unable to record and store memories in the first place. Neuroscientists do not fully understand how blackouts occur. Researchers long assumed alcohol impairs memory because it kills brain cells. Indeed, long-standing alcohol abuse can damage nerve cells a...