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Great.  Our brains don't shut off even when we sleep. True, they're used when we're dreaming and also those awful times when we're just drifting off to sleep and jerk awake.  (That's called a hypnic jerk.  See?  You learned something today.) But I for one always thought that my brain rested at night so it could get ready for rousing my kid out of bed (actually, fighting is more like it), slicing fruit and pouring Cheerios for his breakfast, showering, making sure he's getting dressed, signing on to the computer to see what's going on at work, making sure he's getting dressed, making his lunch (easy -- he eats only Goldfish, go figure), warming up the car, making sure he's getting dressed, and finally, getting him in and driving to school, then to the grocery store, and on to work. It's amazing I have any brain left at all. And that doesn't count making sure my husband stops exercising long enough to take the garbage out. Ah, it'...

You got back to your car just in time to dodge the parking ticket.  You were the 100th customer at the supermarket and qualified for free groceries.  And your son just got into the college of his choice, all in one day. On a winning streak ?  Not likely, say experts.  Humans have a well-documented tendency to see winning and losing streaks in situations that, in fact, are, well, random, according to newswise.com. We're not alone.  Monkeys do it, too.  Researchers find that monkeys also share our unfounded belief in winning and losing streaks. "The results suggests that the penchant to see patterns that actually don’t exist may be inherited—an evolutionary adaptation that may have provided our ancestors a selective advantage when foraging for food in the wild, according to lead author Tommy Blanchard, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester," newswise reports.  This inborn tendency to feel that w...

Wow.  Imagine this.  Scientists have discovered that men are more forgetful than women.  According to Medical News Today, during an experiment testing memory, for eight out of nine questions, men had a harder time remembering the answers (probably the question they got right was, would you like a beer?). And it doesn't matter how old you are.  If you're a man, you will never remember things as well as a woman. Is it laziness, as some have suggested, or, as, often, in the case of my husband, convenience? Or is it really that our brains are just different? Researchers did not delve into that, although they considered whether, since cardiovascular events like heart attack and stroke afflict more men than women, that could be it. But that turned out not to be the case, too. Maybe it's just that, as moms, we have to know where the kids are, where they left their shoes, what time is dinner, what is dinner, visit the orthodontist, schedule teacher conference. Oh y...

Now I know I must take responsibility for this.  Even though I tried not to, I took being pregnant as license to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.  As a result, I gained 50 pounds (that took nine months to gain and over two years to lose). A new study just out says that women who eat high-fat foods while pregnant may not only produce big babies, but actually change their offsprings' brains in the way they think about food. I'm in the stats for the first part -- my son, who was delivered at 39 weeks because of his size, weighed in at nine pounds (though the doctors, who actually set up a betting pool, were thinking a 10- or 11-pounder), but not the second.  This kid, at 12, doesn't even tip the scales at 80 pounds. The study, done by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, found that "exposure to a high-fat diet in the womb and after birth can permanently change the cells in the brain that ...

We may learn from cow brains how cellphone radiation affects ours. http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/mri-maps-heat-from-cellphone-radiation-in-jarred-cow-brains/8951?tag=main;river