The good news: Your self-control never runs out. The bad news: That's one less excuse you can use if you break your New Year's Resolution.
New research published in Trends of Cognitive Sciences says that self-control isn't limited, and as long as you find the right ways to motivate yourself you should be able to control your impulses.
The theory used to be that “self-control waxes and wanes throughout the day,” but the new research shows otherwise. “What waxes and wanes is not people’s ability but people’s motivation to take on these behaviors,” said study author Michael Inzlicht, PhD, associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.
Experts say finding motivating reasons that matter to you, like figuring out why it would make you happier or healthier, is the key to keeping your self-control.
New Hep C Drugs Highly Effective
The combination of new hepatitis C drugs Solvadi and daclatasvir cured the disease at a 98 percent effectiveness rate, according to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The current common treatment for hepatitis C, a liver disease, is injections of interferon. This has severe side effects and only works 40 percent of the time.
“Armed with highly effective and tolerable treatment, we will have the ability to cure hepatitis C in most patients with this chronic infection, which is responsible for more deaths in the U.S. than HIV,” said study investigator Mark Sulkowski, MD of Johns Hopkins University.
Sight and Sound Don't Match in Autistic Kids
Children with autism may have delays in their brain where the information received by the eyes and ears aren't received at the same time.
Researchers at the Vanderbilt Brain Institute found that for kids with autism it takes about a half second for the brain to recognize sights and sounds that go together. In normal children, it takes about a quarter of a second.
"They're perceiving the world in a really interesting and fragmented way, where the visual signal and auditory signal are sort of mismatched in time relative to one another," said study author Mark Wallace, director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute. "And if you think about it, that can have all kinds of consequences for the language abilities of these children and even their social interactions."
Celebrity Health Snafus
Some celebrities are great for raising awareness for a certain cause or condition (think Michael J. Fox and Parkinson's disease), but others draw the wrong kind of attention to serious diseases.
Katie Couric faced criticism for allowing two moms who claimed their daughters faced severe side effects from the HPV vaccine on her talk show, without allowing researchers or her own medical correspondent to respond. A CDC-FDA report has also found no serious side effects related to the vaccine.