Healing with Ayahuasca: An Amazonian Approach to Addiction and Emotional Recovery
By Conor Watters, NDOriginally published in NDNR, adapted for NaturalPath Can a Sacred Amazonian Brew Help Heal Addiction? Across the lush, living rainforests of South America, a sacred plant medicine has been quietly transforming lives for centuries. Known as Ayahuasca, this traditional brew—crafted from a vine and a leaf—has long been revered by Indigenous cultures […]
Might Mindfulness Be for YOU, Too?
Mindfulness–being in the moment and aware of your feelings and thoughts without judging–has been shown to lessen pain in veterans. Could it help you as well? A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine reported the efficacy of telehealth-delivered mindfulness-based interventions (MBI). Over 690 Veterans with chronic pain and psychiatric comorbidity completed a mindfulness-based intervention that produced a […]
Neuroscience of the Future May Look at the “Collective Brain”
Razi Berry In a new paper, scientists suggest that efforts to understand human cognition should expand beyond the study of individual brains. They call on neuroscientists to incorporate evidence from social science disciplines to better understand how people think. “Accumulating evidence indicates that memory, reasoning, decision-making and other higher-level functions take place across people,” the […]
Cholesterol in Brain Regulates Alzheimer’s Plaquing
Razi Berry A team co-led by scientists at Scripps Research has used advanced imaging methods to reveal how the production of the Alzheimer’s-associated protein amyloid beta (Aβ) in the brain is tightly regulated by cholesterol. Appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the scientists’ work advances understanding of how Alzheimer’s disease develops […]
Poverty Correlates to Smaller Brain Areas
Razi Berry Children in poverty are more likely to have cognitive and behavioral difficulties than their better-off peers. Plenty of past research has looked into the physical effects of childhood poverty, or documented mental health disparities between socioeconomic classes. But Deanna Barch, chair and professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences in Arts […]
Shape of Nanomaterials Impact Ability to Cross Blood Brain Barrier
Razi Berry Nanomaterials found in consumer and health-care products can pass from the bloodstream to the brain side of a blood-brain barrier model with varying ease depending on their shape — creating potential neurological impacts that could be both positive and negative, a new study reveals. Scientists found that metal-based nanomaterials such as silver and […]
Brain Hardwired for Spirituality
Razi Berry More than 80 percent of people around the world consider themselves to be religious or spiritual. But research on the neuroscience of spirituality and religiosity has been sparse. Previous studies have used functional neuroimaging, in which an individual undergoes a brain scan while performing a task to see what areas of the brain […]
Training the Brain to Overcome ADHD
Razi Berry Scientists explored a technique called ‘neurofeedback,’ which enables ADHD patients to train their attention, based on instant feedback from the level of their brain activity. The team of neuroscientists found that not only did the training have a positive effect on patients’ concentration abilities, but also that the attention improvement was closely linked […]
Brain Cell Lipid Balance Important Factor for Alzheimer’s
Razi Berry Alzheimer’s disease is predominant in elderly people, but the way age-related changes to lipid composition affect the regulation of biological processes is still not well understood. Links between lipid imbalance and disease have been established, in which lipid changes increase the formation of amyloid plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. This imbalance inspired […]
Brain Exercises to Help Kids with Math Skills
Razi Berry Young children who practice visual working memory and reasoning tasks improve their math skills more than children who focus on spatial rotation exercises, according to a large study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The findings support the notion that training spatial cognition can enhance academic performance and that when it comes […]