I read the following story in different German newspapers:
Goettingen, Germany – A baby weighing just 275 grams has been born in Germany and survived, the lowest weight for a viable birth of a boy ever recorded, doctors said Thursday. Doctors normally assume that survival is impossible at birth weights below 350 grams.
The little boy was born in June last year in the 25th week of pregnancy, said Stefan Weller, a spokesman for the University of Goettingen Hospital. He spent six months in intensive care and was finally discharged in December after growing to 3.7 kilograms.
Weller said doctors had checked every available record worldwide of premature births and found no viable birth at a lower weight.
English version found at: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/312505,smallest-ever-baby-born-in-germany-and-survives.html#ixzz0hDwIdApm
In The Netherlands, abortion is legal until 24 weeks of pregnancy. So the difference between ‘a person whose life is worth it to be saved’ and ‘a bunch of cells which can be aborted’ is just one week in this case. Am I the only person who thinks this is mind-boggling?
Link to the image: sfkids.org
It’s that time of the year again. A few weeks ago the weather was cold and damp, but today temps hit 23 degrees Celsius over here and the trees are blossoming. It’s great, but for me it has one big disadvantage: allergies! I’m always late getting started on my allergy medicine, but this year I notice my allergies start extremely early. I remember from previous years that I had to order new ones late May, early June, so this year’s allergies are extremely early and it took a while before I made the connection. I thought I had the flu because I suffered from extreme fatigue, felt sick and wanted to stay in bed all day long. I felt to miserable to do anything.
I use a feedreader to keep up-to-date with internet news, and using that I read something in the New York Times about a simple and cheap way to get rid of allergies. It already exists for thousands of years in India but it gets more popular in the West right now: the Neti Pot. According advocates is good for about anything. The device itself is fairly simple: it’s a small ceramic jug, which looks like a flattened tea pot. You put a saline solution in it and rinse your nose and sinuses with it. It treats colds, sinusitis but also hay fever. At least, it claims it does.
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What if scientists would invent a pill which enables people to erase all kinds of unwanted memories? People wouldn’t have to suffer the consequences of traumatic life events, traumatised soldiers would be enabled to live a normal life. In certain respects it would be wonderful to choose which kinds of bad memories you want to erase from your “hard drive” and which memories you want to keep. What would be the impact of such an invention on the society as a whole, or the human conscience or even human life? It may all sound like science fiction, but it might actually become reality!
People who follow this for some time already know I studied neuro-psychology. I love the field of Cognitive Neurosciences, it’s a great geeky scientific field. It’s also a relatively modern academic field, but researchers get a lot of money to do their research which helps to grow the discipline a lot. In a relatively short period in time, our knowledge about our brain and our mind has increased rapidly. One of those recent discoveries is that of the “memory molecule” called PKMzeta. I know the name doesn’t sound really original or creative, but it is how scientists work. According to scientists, this PKMzeta thing will enable us to wipe out certain memories.
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I really like practicing yoga. It clears my mind and strengthens my muscles. On top of that I notice it improves my flexibility. I feel much better altogether after starting my yoga practice. I just read an article on Science Daily in which is argued that yoga is good for you and that there are scientific reasons to prove it. In the article they write that “scientists proved that” practicing yoga is related to higher levels of the neurotransmitter GABA in one’s brain and therefore it helps to decrease anxiety and stress-related symptoms. It also would decrease depression.
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For some reason or the other I’m just very interested in mental health, mental balance. I blame it to my education: I am a college student, studying cognitive neuropsychology. Maybe it is my education, but I think I would be interested in mental health anyway. Because it’s important. I think being mentally stable, finding your balance is of vital important also for you physical health. It’s the core of our existence, without a stable mind, you’ll have a very difficult life and you can even die.
Part of finding this mental balance is having good coping mechanisms when life gets tough. You need to train yourself to be like a spring: when it’s pressed upon it will go down, but as soon as you release pressure, it goes up again and expands. Unfortunately we are not born with this, it needs to be learned. Everybody has coping mechanisms, but not all mechanisms function equally well. Most of us will deal with setbacks in the same way their parents do, which can be very good, but also very bad.
Some coping mechanisms work well in some time of your life, but are dysfunctional in later stages of life. Changing things is very hard, because you cannot pull yourself out of the swamp using your bootstraps. That’s why I am so glad I see great examples of staying positive when life gets tough around me. I can learn from these great people.
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You don’t have to be a psychologist to know there are clear differences between a pessimist and an optimist. But did you know those differences go deeper than you think? In psychology, pessimism is associated with different psychological conditions like depression, low self-esteem, low self-efficacy and even higher accident-proneness. It’s very difficult to change a pessimist into an optimist, because this attitude is deeply engraved in someone’s personality.
In another field in psychology, cognitive psychology, a lot has been discovered about the ways people learn and how they process information. When you want to learn something new, you need to practice. One way of doing that is rehearsing the information you need to learn over and over again. The more often you repeat the information, the better the brain will retain it. This principle doesn’t only apply to academic skills like learning to speak a foreign language or acquiring technical skills, but also to behaviour.
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In my last post in this category I tried to explain what a person’s body does when it being put into starvation mode after someone systematically deprives himself of food, a.k.a. crash-dieting. In this post I want to point out why it’s actually dangerous to try to lose weight really fast, because it releases toxins and the danger of getting an eating disorder.
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When one wants to lose weight, it means that person needs to reduce the amount of body fat he has. Unfortunately there’s only one way to do that: burn it. For burning fat, the body needs energy. So in order to burn fat, you need to eat right. I can see that, at least for some people, this is counter-intuitive. But it’s true!
And precisely because this concept is counter-intuitive, a lot of people are trying to lose weight by depriving themselves of food. This idea is only re-enforced by retailers who try to sell all kinds of products with the promise that they will make it possible to lose a lot of weight without effort. Most ‘diets’ have short term effects because they drastically reduce the amount of calories a person eats, and hence make people lose weight. As soon as a person stops with the ‘diet’, all the weight they lost comes back, usually with some extra weight as a free bonus. So what do people do? Start all over again: (crash) diet, lose weight, stop dieting, gain weight (plus extra weight) so they ‘need’ to (crash) diet again. What’s causing this weight gain?
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I read the following story in different German newspapers:
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