Would you like to live longer? Of course! I can remember as a child having what could initially appear as a morbid fascination for cemeteries. I used to drag my parents into each and every cemetery we walked or drove by…just so I could calculate how long people had lived! Perhaps my curiosity in longevity…
For some time, I’ve been puzzled about what constitutes a healthy diet. Surely I can’t be the only one? We’re fed so much conflicting and fluctuating advice that it’s difficult to know what to believe…and that’s without even delving into the plethora of commercial weight-losing fad diets out there! I think we can all appreciate…
This amazing book by Norman Doidge (psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and researcher) is about neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is a process by which the structure and function of the brain changes through thought and activity. Scientists previously believed that the brain had a fixed number of cells that gradually died as we aged. It’s now scientifically accepted that the…
I recently read William Broad’s new book ‘The Science Of Yoga – The Risks and the Rewards‘. William Broad has practised yoga since 1970. He works as a science journalist and is a 2-time winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. It took him 5 years to write this book. It covers the history, the origins of…
Although mainly about the effects of emotion on reason, ‘Descartes’ Error‘ by Antonio Damasio contains a few fascinating nuggets on pain. He distinguishes 2 components to pain: Sensory perception from skin, mucosa, muscle, organ, etc. – the nerve endings stimulated in an area of the body lead to a ‘pain image’, a temporary representation of body…
I read an interesting passage in ‘Mindfulness’, Ellen Langer’s insightful book on social psychology. “Patients are often certain that pain is inevitable in a hospital. Caught in such a mindset, they assume that, without the help of medication, pain cannot be controlled. In our experiment, we tried to learn whether people could control their experience…
Last year I wrote an article on hydration, the signs of dehydration and how much water we need to drink each day. We now know how much water to drink but what water is best? I found a great little book called “Healthy Water for a Longer Life” by Martin Fox. It reviews an extensive…