Something Bizarre Happens to Your Brain When You Don't Get Enough Sleep

What did you do last night? Careful — if you didn’t get enough sleep, your brain could be lying to you. Turns out sleep deprivation can do worse than give you memory loss. It can actually implant false memories in your brain. This discovery comes from a new study published this week in Psychological Science. “We examined the relationship between self-reported sleep duration and false memories and the effect of 24 hr of total sleep deprivation on susceptibility to false memories,” the researchers wrote. “We found that under certain conditions, sleep deprivation can increase the risk of developing false memories.” Note, though, that according to the study the effect doesn’t take place for actions completed before sleep deprivation.
So you’ll probably remember the day before just fine — it’s what you did when you were staying up at night that would cause problems. The background: The interplay of sleep and memory is still under plenty of scientific investigation. Even commonly held beliefs — like that REM sleep is necessary for memory retention — don’t always hold up to scrutiny.
Subjects in the study were kept awake for 24 hours, which is much longer than most folks stay up (college students notwithstanding). But we’re sleeping less and less thanks to busy schedules and numerous distractions. While there’s no magic number for how much sleep you should get, the CDC recommends about seven to eight hours a day for adults. More than memory: Lack of sleep has been linked to plenty of problems. Not getting enough shuteye can increase your risk of everything from heart disease and stroke to cancer and diabetes.

Can Alcohol Kill You?—Let’s Count the Ways

According to the World Health organisation, alcohol kills more than 3 million people worldwide each year, which translates to one person every 10 seconds. That’s more than the amount of people lost to AIDS, tuberculosis, and violence. The statistic includes alcohol-related driving fatalities, violence, and health issues arising from excessive alcohol consumption. Because alcohol is legal in most countries, and because—especially in the US and western culture in general—it is promoted in advertising and glamorised in film, its dangers are often minimised or disregarded by young people, and the warnings about problem-drinking and its consequences are viewed as the admonitions of uptight grownups. Unfortunately, the facts support the admonitions. So, how can alcohol kill you?
Here are a few ways it can—and does—end lives: Drunk driving accounted for ten thousand deaths in 2010—that was over thirty percent of all traffic fatalities. Acute alcohol poisoning kills over one thousand people each year. Nearly sixteen thousand people died in 2010 from alcohol-induced liver disease. Over fifty percent of people who die in fires have high blood-alcohol levels. One quarter of all emergency room admissions, one-third of all suicides and more than half of all homicides and incidents of domestic violence are alcohol related. Unintentional injuries related to alcohol consumption cause over eighteen hundred deaths each year among college students. Health problems, including increased likelihood of stroke, diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, oesophageal cancer, and compromised immune system can lead, if untreated, to premature death. Alcohol in combination with other drugs, especially pain medications, tranquillisers, and sleep medications, can cause death by slowing down respiration as well as by causing the aspiration of vomit. The simple fact is that alcohol impairs judgment, cognition, inhibitions regarding excessive risk-taking and acting out of aggressive tendencies, and other faculties that reduce the likelihood of accident or death. If alcohol consumption becomes regular, increases over time, or increases in amount, or if consequences of drinking are accumulating, treatment is indicated, because yes, alcohol can kill you. 

Revolutionary Addiction Treatment Methods to Be Shared in Live Seminar and New Book

Mind & Body Treatment and Research Institute is sharing its remarkable new methods for addiction treatment in an upcoming conference, July 12th in San Diego. Those who can't attend the "Face Your Addiction and Save Your Life Conference" can still benefit from Dr. Keerthy Sunder's treatment expertise, through a conference recording that will be available online, as well as Dr. Sunder's new book, "Addictions: Face Your Addiction & Save Your Life." Those who are personally struggling with addiction and friends and family of addicts are invited to attend in person or online after the conference. The conference will take place from 11 AM – 1 PM, Saturday, July 12th in San Diego at the Porto Vista Hotel in the Costa del Sol Meeting Room. A luncheon for registrants will be held at 1 PM. To register, visit http://mbtrins.com/register-now/. The conference recording will be made available on the Mind & Body Treatment and Research Institute website. From years of helping addicts, Dr. Sunder has developed strategies for addicts and their families to beat addiction for good, defying the alarming relapse statistics. He looks forward to sharing these tools and techniques at the seminar. Not only will participants learn how an individual's genetics make them vulnerable to addiction, they'll learn about dual diagnosis and about addiction's ability to alter someone's brain.

What Do The New Airport Security Measures Mean For You?

 

 

Travellers are being advised to power up electronic devices in hand luggage as part of new security measures introduced at UK airports.

The move comes as the US stepped up its airport security, although the Department for Transport (DfT) said there was "no change to the UK threat level, which remains at substantial" - the third of five possible threat levels. So what has changed and what will it mean for passengers? What are the new restrictions on charging devices in your hand luggage? Passengers passing through airport security will have to prove their electronic devices are powered up by switching them on.

What gadgets are included? As well as mobile phones and laptops, the DfT guidance includes devices such as electrical shavers, hair-straighteners and cameras or any other camera equipment. No complete list has been provided but the general advice applies anything "with a battery", so other items such as handheld games consoles and e-readers could also be checked. What will happen if my device cannot be switched on? The government guidelines say passengers carrying devices which they cannot switch on "face not being allowed to bring the device onto the aircraft". Passengers would then have to choose between charging the device if possible, leaving it behind (see below) or not getting on their flight. What will happen if I leave an electronic device? Some airlines have outlined ways customers can get their devices back. British Airways said passengers could either keep devices at airports for customers to collect or have them forwarded to another address, at the airline's expense.

Virgin Atlantic has said likewise. EasyJet said it was seeking clarification from the government on the new regulations and had not, so far, issued any specific instructions to passengers. Can I charge my device at the airport? To avoid the risk of missing your flight or having your device taken away, make sure it is fully charged and check that the airport you are travelling from has a charging point. If for any reason you have a device with a flat battery, charging points are available near security in most airports - so if you have enough time before your flight you should be able to charge it up.

Palcohol, a US-based company are hoping to launch their new powdered alcohol range later this year, featuring both vodka and rum varieties.

You know how sometimes people think it’s hilarious to try and get vodka into their bloodstream quicker by putting it in their eye? Yeah, well now there’s another way to digest it – snorting it.

Palcohol, a US-based company are hoping to launch their new powdered alcohol range later this year, featuring both vodka and rum varieties.

While their website suggests that users dilute the powders in water and flavoured mixers, comments already on the internet suggest there’s that 95 per cent of users will insist on trying to snort it, or rub it in their gums. Clever.You could be making your own drinks with powder and water (Picture: Getty)

It will also, according to their site, be available ‘in the United States and abroad’ which means we’re pretty likely to see it on this side of the Atlantic and you’ll probably spy videos of people you haven’t seen since your GCSE maths exam snorting it all over your Facebook. Goodie.



Naturally, there’s been lots of opposition against the product – with anti-alcohol campaigners suggesting it’ll make alcohol more available to minors and make drink-spiking more common.

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GLBT Addiction and Recovery

An interesting conundrum is that a lot of social service agencies, whether they’re community centers or AIDS advocacy organizations or whatnot, they can be fueled by alcohol-related donations. So Absolut Vodka could sponsor an AIDS fundraiser, and a lot of the men and women attending that fundraiser are impacted by alcohol or some other form of addiction. In that sense, it can be tricky to talk openly about addiction and recovery. Plus, there is absolutely a fair amount of exactly what you said – people thinking, We have been squashed down for so long, and we weren’t able to be who we wanted to be, and now we’re free to do as we please, so don’t you dare rain on our parade. We want to have a good time. Again, it can be a delicate balancing act to talk to those folks about addiction and the problems it causes.

Defeating Depression with a Pill

There was literally a time when patients suffering from depression used to talk about their problems. But times have changed and now talk therapy is becoming a rarer form of treatment in favor of psychotropic drugs. A pair of studies, which ran from 1998 to 2007, tracked the use of antidepressants versus psychotherapy to treat depression among inpatients. Both were a followup of sorts to similar research done a decade earlier which saw a doubling in the amount of outpatients treated with antidepressants for this population. From 1987 to 1997, the percentage of patients prescribed antidepressant medication rose from 37.3 percent to 74.5 percent. One of the more recent studies, put together by a team from the University of Pennsylvania, found the trend toward antidepressants continued. Researchers collected data from what is known as the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), which tracks depression diagnoses as well as means of treatment. The University of Pennsylvania study concluded that antidepressant use among outpatients remained relatively the same (73.8 percent in 1998 versus 75.3 percent in 2007). The use of psychotherapy as a treatment option declined from 53.6 percent in 1998 to 43.1 percent in 2007. Steven Corey Marcus, one of the study authors, noted that a similar study found the number of Americans using antidepressants jumped from five percent to 10 percent from 1996 to 2005. “(That’s) much faster than the rate of depression treatment rose,” Marcus said in a 2010 blog on Discovery Magazine’s web site. “In other words, the decade must have seen antidepressants increasingly being used to treat stuff other than depression. SSRIs are popular in everything from anxiety and OCD to premature ejaculation.”

 

BREAKING the Candy Crush habit.It Could Be Destroying Your Life

You sure have seen and heard of this game, even when you are fortunate enough to have avoided falling prey to this monster. While the brains behind this phenomenon continue to make millions, we present to you a list of reasons why you should not be playing this game. 1. It is simple. What do you have to do actually? Just arrange some candies in a row, right? Why would you want to spend your valuable time doing that? 2. It is destructive. Even if you don't pity your watches that you bought with your hard-earned money, and continue wasting your time playing a game, shouldn't your be playing something constructive? What's with the fetish to destroy things? 3. It is addictive. Yes, that 'only one more level' phase never seems to end. Ask yourself. 4. You can't anyway play it whenever you wish. Remember the 30-minute wait that never seems to end? High time you decide, who is the boss of your life? 5. You are most likely to spend some money when you are just about to complete a level, and are out of lives or moves or charms or whatever fancy words you can use. 6. You are most probably turned into a spammer. Yes, the repeated notifications in your friends' Facebook profiles and the continued Can you please give me a ticket face that you make when you meet your friends is not good for your reputation. 7. You can never complete it. Yes, even when you spend precious hours of your life hitting the keyboard or swiping the screen of your cell, you can never finish it because the last level is always under construction. Well, I hope that I have made my point clear and you would gather the courage to uninstall the game from your cell, system, and life. Happy quitting!