Got a lousy night’s sleep? Feeling kinda grouchy? Turns out waking up on the wrong side of the bed won’t just make you cranky. It will make others seem that way, too. A 2015 study from the UC Berkeley Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory found that a single sleepless night can fundamentally alter the way we perceive others—making even the mellowest of fellows seem like the strangest of dangers.
Scientists have long believed that the cortex, the outer layer of the brain, was responsible for figuring out the meaning in a sentence. But a new study out of UC Berkeley shows that the hippocampus, a brain structure long believed to act as a center for linking memories together, plays an active role in extracting meaning from language.
“This gives us a new insight into how memory works in humans, and how memory interacts with the rest of the brain to produce behavior,” says study co-author and Berkeley psychology professor Robert Knight.
Posted on November 3, 2016 - 10:57am
We all know that stress is bad for us. Stress kills, you’ll have a heart attack, you’ll have a breakdown. Here, squeeze a little foam ball, take a walk, practice mindfulness, pet a puppy, etc., etc. —just don’t stress out. It’s bad.
Except it turns out that, maybe (so far, it’s true for lab rats), some stress is good for our brains.
Posted on April 18, 2013 - 12:49pm