finebergpsychotherapy

The biggest genetic study of mental illness to date has found 128 gene variants to be associated with schizophrenia. The position that genetics play a role in schizophrenia has now irrefutable evidence in its favor. (Headlines, Scientific American MInd, 2014, 25(6), 7-9.)

Don’t memorize, store information. Using digiital or other methods to store information leaves more memory space to learn new material and frees more mental resources for creativity and problem solving. (Massachusetts General Hospital, 2015, March, 2015)

Memoirist Cheryl Strayed: Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore.

Breakthroughs for treating the brain are coming from research using focused ultrasound as well as magnetic and electrical fields. (Scientific American Mind, 2014, 25(6), 9)

Margaret Mead: Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

Toward the end of his 98 years, Bertrand Russel wrote about overcoming the fear of death by saying, “The best way to overcome it … is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river, small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue.”

In order to work more, Americans are sleeping less than the 7 to 9 hours recommended for adults by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. (IPA PsychBytes, 2/3/2015)

When the readers of Scientific American Mind (2014, 25(6), 8) were asked to chose only one brain function that they would like enhanced, 40% voted for memory.