Philosophy
fromPsychology Today
1 day agoThe Power of Positive Choices and Taking Control
Personal empowerment and responsibility begin with the choice to engage with the internet and the content it offers.
On a sunny and warmish late-November day, my husband and I were meeting some close relatives to deposit our brother-in-law's ashes in a columbarium beside the remains of his late wife, my husband's only sibling. She had died during the pandemic, and her husband had subsequently moved away, but none of us were going to let the grim reaper separate a couple who had been conjoined by a lifetime of shared experiences.
It felt like I had a needle through my back, and it was coming out my front, and I couldn't twist past it. Your mental health is affected. You get brain fog, you're tired, you're fatigued. You can't function as a woman and that's every day for 10 years.
Artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning is making a difference in assistive technology to help restore movement for the paralyzed. A new study in the American Institute of Physics journal APL Bioengineering shows how AI has the potential to restore lower-limb functions in those with severe spinal cord injuries (SCIs) by identifying patterns in brain signals captured noninvasively via electroencephalography (EEG).
Betley and his colleagues were curious about what happens in the brain as people get stronger through exercise. They decided to focus on the ventromedial hypothalamus, a brain region that regulates appetite and blood sugar. The team then zeroed in on a group of neurons in that region that produce a protein called steroidogenic factor 1 (SF1), which is known to play a part in regulating metabolism. A previous study found that the deletion of the gene that codes for SF1 impairs endurance in mice.
If we told them to look at the face, they could usually manage it. But they were mostly looking at the hands. The Prakash children eventually learn to look at faces when spoken to - usually a few months after their surgeries. Their experiences reveal that seeing doesn't come naturally the moment a person is cured of blindness. Newly-sighted people must learn to see.
It might come as a surprise to learn that the brain responds to training in much the same way as our muscles, even though most of us never think about it that way. Clear thinking, focus, creativity, and good judgment are built through challenge, when the brain is asked to stretch beyond routine rather than run on autopilot. That slight mental discomfort is often the sign that the brain is actually being trained, a lot like that good workout burn in your muscles.