Does perceiving violent acts — real or imagined — change the shape of your brain and how it processes information? The blunt — and likely unpopular — answer is, “Yes.”
Continue reading → Violent Imagination Shaping Brain Reality
We have lost our Melancholia and our Black Bile and we’re the worse for the eradication. We now seek happiness through the pit of a pill and the trough of psychotherapy instead of actively working to remove ourselves from despair and founding ourselves in happiness and contentment even though they can never truly be achieved.
It is that struggle to raise our bodies and our thoughts that makes the life worthy of the living. Melancholia has a rich and deadly history in the mark of humankind and no other state of being has been rendered so beautifully in art than that of the Melancholic mind. It’s fascinating how “head on hand” is the rich semiotic used throughout antiquity to indicate this mournfulness of the memory for the living:
Continue reading → The Necessity of Melancholia and Black Bile
Are we our minds? Or are we our bodies? I believe we are our minds and never our bodies. The body is disposable. The mind, with the right protections and preservations, can live forever. The brain is a container for the mind and the mind is a neural network of memories.
Those memories, both the learned and the innate, form a perception of us and others. When the container is unexpectedly corrupted — when the brain is damaged by injury or disease or psychic trauma — strange things begin to happen.
Continue reading → Traumatic Brain Injuries Erasing the Mind
With the crazy skyrocketing cost of healthcare in America one is always on the search for ways to save a penny or two to get well and feel healthy. I’m sure some of us have even wondered about the cost-to-benefit ratio of going to a surgeon over preparing yourself for life under your own scalpel. We don’t recommend the self-surgery path, but Anatomical.com provides a glimpse into the wonder of the science of the body and while you won’t find your brain on drugs there, you will find your brain on a pedestal:
I was sorry to learn from Rosie O’Donnell’s blog that Broadway actor/singer/dancer and all-around-great-guy Jason Opsahl is dead. She misses him and so do I. Jason died of a brain tumor called “anaplastic astrocytoma” on Oct. 25, 2002. He was 39.
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