PBS_Braincraft

Twas the night before Christmas, so here are some scientific gift giving tips.

A story about ethics, commenting on mental health, and why Dr Oz is still a doctor.

Do you remember the times when you had to remember the phone number of your best friend in order to call her? There was no such thing as speed dial and there was no virtual phonebook on your phone. If you wanted to remember a number, you either had to write it down in an address book or try to dial the correct number time and time again. Do you even remember a phone number right now? Chances are, the only phone number you do know by heart is your own because you’ve had to repeat it time and time again when giving out information. Well, the same thing applies to your relationship with search engines. There are two types of <a href="https://rumble.com/v3265p-test-your-memory-with-this-quiz.html" target="_blank">memory</a>, nondeclarative and declarative one. The first type is basically muscle memory, it’s remembering all the steps you need to do in order to ride your bike or let’s say dial your best friend’s phone number. Declarative memory is basically remembering all of that non-material information, like your best friend’s number. What’s happened in the age of <a href="https://rumble.com/v4bwab-10-cool-google-searches-that-will-blow-away-your-mind.html" target="_blank">Google</a> and search engines in general, is we’ve been expanding our declarative memory. We learn new things, but we don’t store them in our brain as we did before. Instead of keeping them in our memory, we just remember the path to finding them on the internet. This is both good and bad because we can obtain even more information than before and we are always thirsty for more, but we do it at the expense of not being able to store it in our mind and reach it in the events when we don’t have access to a search engine. This makes us even more dependent on the Internet.

Chocolate has become one of the most popular food types and flavors in the world, and a vast number of foodstuffs involving chocolate have been created, particularly desserts including cakes, pudding, mousse, chocolate brownies, and chocolate chip cookies. Many candies are filled with or coated with sweetened chocolate, and bars of solid chocolate and candy bars coated in chocolate are eaten as snacks. Gifts of chocolate molded into different shapes have become traditional on certain Western holidays, such as Easter, <a href="https://rumble.com/v4esa5-valentines-day-ideas.html" target="_blank">Valentine's Day</a> , and Hanukkah. Chocolate is also used in cold and hot beverages such as chocolate milk and hot chocolate and in some alcoholic drinks, such as creme de cacao. In this video however, we have an interesting research on countries with highest award winning achievements depending on the <a href="https://rumble.com/v31x9x-chocolate-cake.html" target="_blank">chocolate</a> intake per capita. This lady explains the in and outs of how chocolate can modify and even enrich your capability of being able to remember information more significantly. She has also done some research on how chocolate plays a significant factor on scholars and their career achievements. She mentions a couple of them and explains the hows and whys on the part that chocolate plays in their lives. There is also significant data showing that chocolate plays a part on elderly people and the enhancing factor that chocolate plays on their memory capabilities. So, does our favorite sweet actually help boost our intelligence?

We've all heard about neurons, but what else is there to discover inside our heads?

We all know that exercise is good for your health. That is no great secret. But what about our mental health? Can exercising help us with our emotional problems, our intellectual problems or our addictions? The answer to all of these is a resounding YES. Exercising is one of the best things you can do for yourselves, not only for the sake of your physical body, but for your mind as well. In this video you will be provided with a couple of clues as to why exercising a few times a week will help your overall your mental health. If you happen to be one of those people that just cant seem to make them self get off the couch and do something that evolves physical progress, you might want to take a look as to how important <a href="https://rumble.com/v42fhd-improve-your-memory-with-simple-exercises.html" target="_blank">exercise</a> actually is. Not only that it provides you with a healthier life and a more fit looking body but it also has a big effect onto your mental capacity. This video is bound to show you a very interesting example of this girl explaining her <a href="https://rumble.com/v2zukb-extreme-human-achievements-break-records.html" target="_blank">achievements</a> and upgrade if you will before and after exercise. So, yes it might be a stretch some days to get out of bed or even find the time to exercise, but this video may change your mind no matter what kind of job you work. Take a look as here is one of the amazing powers of exercise.

Could a slight rise in narcissism from increased use of social media actually make us better, more self-aware people?

Studies with athletes show that using imagery techniques to train your brain can improve your physical performance.

Some people are notoriously bad at setting deadlines and estimating time. The comforting fact is that it's largely not our fault. Many factors play a part in our distorted perception of time, and most are difficult or impossible to modify. Time itself is not something we can change either, despite all our dreams of time machines. Why does life seem to speed up as we get older? Why does the clock in your head move at a different speed from the one on the wall? Why is it almost impossible to go a whole day without checking your watch? Is it possible to retrain our brains and improve our relationship with it? Why time slows down when we’re afraid, speeds up as we age, and gets warped when we’re on <a href="https://rumble.com/v3l6bf-next-stop-big-island-hawaii-vacation-travel-guide.html" target="_blank">vacation</a>? We construct the experience of time in our minds, so it follows that we are able to change the elements we find troubling - whether it’s trying to stop the years racing past, or speeding up time when we’re stuck in a queue, trying to live more in the present, or working out how long ago we last saw our old friends. Time can be a friend, but it can also be an enemy. The trick is to harness it, whether at home, at work, or even in social policy, and to work in line with our conception of time. Time is not only at the heart of the way we organize life, but the way we experience it. What can we do? To fix our <a href="https://rumble.com/v4igjb-a-timelapse-of-a-grasshopper-eaten-by-ants-and-wasps-over-a-day..html" target="_blank">broken perception of time</a>, we can reevaluate our relationship with it, become more aware of how we spend our days, and understand how our perception of time influences productivity. We can also seek time-management methods that will make us feel more in control of our time and less like its victims.

Our brain uses some nifty tricks in helping to remember faces.

We are sure you all have experienced jet lag before. Studies have shown that people experiencing jet lag have trouble learning and recalling memories. A study suggests that jet lag is simply a math problem and you can solve it by controlling your exposure to light or darkness. <a href="https://rumble.com/v3bqqk-bye-bye-jetlag-3-travel-comfort-necessities.html" target="_blank">Jet lag</a> is a question that comes out of biological rhythms. You have probably heard of circadian rhythms before - the roughly 24-hour biological rhythms that influence when you sleep or wake up. The lady in the video, Olivia, developed a schedule of exposure to light and darkness that allows your circadian rhythms to adjust to new time zones as quickly as possible. She figured this out by thinking of us as robots and it is connected to your body temperature. Your alertness and body temperature parallel each other. When your body temperature is rising you become more alert and when it is falling, you are getting closer to the bottom and you become less alert. When you travel to a new time zone, you can speed up the process of entrainment - a scientific term for fully adjusting to a new <a href="https://rumble.com/v47q00-flat-earth-proof-time-zones.html" target="_blank">time zone</a> by timing your exposure to light. In your eyes, cells sense a light and send that information to your brain’s internal clock. To adjust the clock you have, you need to experience one block of the brightest light and one block of the dimmest darkness each day. What you really have to worry about is dawn and dusk. Now, you don’t have to do the math since there is an application for that called “Entrain” available on AppStore and you can use it to see your light and dark schedules. The app was developed in collaboration with Danny Forger from University of Michigan and Kirill Serkh from Yale.

A 24-year-old guy known as Z decided he had enough sleeping in this lifetime so one day in 1930, he approached a couple of researchers and ask them if they could help him stop sleeping. He was convinced that sleep is a habit and that with proper procedures the habit could be broken. On several occasions, he would have gone without sleep for four or five days. There are many experiments like this in the past and in this one, the guy Z thought if he could be stimulated by tasks and other people to stay awake more than a week he would never need to sleep again. He would break the habit. So, the researchers gave him a typewriter and ask him to type for thirty minutes a day marking each minute of typing. They would compare his typing speed and accuracy as one measure to find out the effects of sleeplessness. Throughout the ten days of not sleeping, his pulse, his blood pressure and the chemicals in his pee all stayed the same. He did a bunch of intelligence tests every day and his marks belly changed. But his typing speed declined and after day four he couldn’t type any more. He couldn’t fixate on letters and numbers and he said his eyes were sore. Still, Z stayed up and didn’t complained of <a href="https://rumble.com/viral/v1217871-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-information.html" target="_blank">mental or physical fatigue</a>. He didn’t become easily irritated. He started reporting hallucinations. On the last day of the experiment he wrote a nice poem and when the experiment ended, he slept. The researchers concluded that it was possible to go with practically no sleep for ten days without any known physiological effects or damage to mental functions. Similar studies found no damage from sleeplessness. Now after 50 more years research we know that sleep deprivation leads to depression, high blood pressure, diabetes, <a href="https://rumble.com/v3he57-natural-weight-loss-and-anti-aging-secrets-to-regain-your-health.html" target="_blank">weight gain</a> and heart diseases. A good night sleep is kind of a big deal. We need 7-9 hours at night for our memory to function. If we don’t sleep, we will never learn. Your body needs sleep, just as it needs air and food to function at its best. So, don’t forget to sleep.

Hunger impacts everyone differently...especially if you have amnesia.

Knitting is making a comeback and the benefits might just surprise you.

Your love of social media may have a bigger impact than you thought.

The scientific reasons you're into your bae.

Neuroscience is being used in Hollywood to measure and predict audience reactions. Could your brain direct an Oscar winner?

Do you know brain facts from fiction?

A look at some awesome people behind discoveries in psychology, neuroscience and biology.

This is Lois. He lives in St. Lois, Missouri, with a disproportionate number of other people named Louis. We’re unconsciously attracted to people, places, and things that resemble ourselves. And it affects our life in some pretty bizarre ways. In one study, researchers analyzed the public records of 66 million Americans and found that people are disproportionately likely to live in places whose names resemble their own. Just like St. Lois and it’s Louises, Jacksonville is inhabited by more Jacks, Philadelphia by Philips and Virginia Beach by Virginias. While some gravitate towards these places, it is also possible that parents living in Georgia are more likely to name their children George or Georgia. The researchers also found that people are more likely to live in cities that names began with their <a href="https://rumble.com/v2zho0-hilarious-huge-dog-birthday-party.html" target="_blank">birthday</a> numbers. Interesting facts! If you were born on the second of the month, you would live in Two Harbors, Minnesota. The third? Three Oaks, Michigan. Also, people were more likely to choose careers whose labels whose labels resemble their names. Dennis or Denise are over presented among dentist. Laurie, Lawrence, and Lauren among lawyers. The researchers called this effect of unconscious self-love “Implicit Egotism”. And it doesn’t stop there. A recent study of undergraduate students found that when you work in a group, sharing initials with other members of the group increases the overall quality of your group work. Bizarrely the study was authored by three researches named Polman, Pollmann, and Poehlman. We write our name thousands of times throughout our lives, so the more we are merely exposed to something like those letters the more we like it. And finally, there’s a scientific explanation about why Susie sells <a href="https://rumble.com/v45r2i-gaza-artist-fights-unemployment-by-selling-sea-shell-artworks.html" target="_blank">sea shells</a> by the sea shore!

The trillions of bacteria in your gut have more of a relationship <a href="https://rumble.com/v4eeep-our-brain-takes-shortcuts-all-the-time-how-to-communicate-like-a-mind-reade.html" target="_blank">with your brain</a> than you may realize. Not the one in your head but the ‘second brain’ as it is called. The second brain isn't really a brain at all. It's more of a 'brain' that happens to live in our stomach and helps regulate an amazing number of feelings and emotions. Known as the enteric nervous system, this is the mechanism behind all those ‘I'm going with my gut on this’, ‘I'm having a gut reaction’ - phrases that have become so much a part of our everyday parlance. You probably already know that we have a whole lot of neurons - nerve cells that form the basis of our central and peripheral nervous systems - in our spine, but did you know that we have the same number lining the long tube of our gut? The complex make-up of our gut means it's able to create intense cravings - why do I suddenly need a cheeseburger immediately? - without even communicating with <a href="https://rumble.com/v4luxe-its-good-for-your-brain-to-know-random-stuff.html" target="_blank">our actual brain</a>. And it's not just the neurons packed into our stomach that pretty much tell us what to do, the buzzing microcosm inside is also busy exerting its influence. Called the microbiome, this colony of bacteria is determined by many factors, such as how old you are, where you live, what you eat, and even how stressed-out you are, and it can communicate with our central nervous system to control everything from how anxious you are about a particular task, to how likely you are to approach things with positivity. Watch the video to find out what's actually going on down there, and if you happen to be craving chicken nuggets dipped in Sprite, you now know what part of you is to blame.

Being a human isn’t an easy task. We often focus only on our exterior shell, but we forget about the wonders hidden on the inside. The human body is more complex than a computer. It is made out of tiny particles that form the cells that later form the tissues and organs to create the perfection that is the human organism. But in reality, we’re not all that perfect. What makes us different than just a random plastic object is that every second in our body there are a million of things happening all at once. Deep within our cells, the nucleus communicates with other organelles to keep the cell functioning. On a higher level, cells communicate with the ones surrounding them, organs communicate between themselves via blood and above everything else, the brain communicates with each and every particle in the body through hormones. Hormones give the orders to move a muscle, create a new cell, to <a href="https://rumble.com/v3noad-how-exercise-improves-your-mental-health.html" target="_blank">feel happy and to feel sad</a>. It is constantly happening, so the brain has devised a few shortcuts based on experience. Basically, what this means is that if something happens, we jump to the conclusion based on what our <a href="https://rumble.com/v3bet9-3-techniques-to-train-your-brain-like-a-mental-athlete.html" target="_blank">brain</a> tells us that has happened before and is the norm. But what if that’s not the case? What if those shortcuts lead us to misinterpret situations and make faulty decisions? Take a look at this video to understand why the human mind is imperfect.

Are you easily fooled? Why we fall for April Fool's Pranks.

Some ideas about the brain that seem weird now–They also shaped modern neuroscience.

Even the simplest video games can impact the structure of our brains!