Hot MedFax

You've had a hard day at work and now it's couch potato time.  You turn on the TV and there's that commercial for that car you've been eyeing for some time. You're really into the show but wait, here comes that commercial again.  And you know what?  The more you focus on it, the more you want it, at least, according to a new study, as reported by newswise.com. The relationship between desire and attention was long thought to only work in one direction: When a person desires something, they focus their attention on it.  Now, new research reveals this relationship works the other way, too: increasing a person’s focus on a desirable object makes them want the object even more—a finding with important implications for marketers and clinicians seeking to influence behavior. “People will block out distraction and narrow their attention on something they want,” says Anne Kotynski, author of the study and a PhD student in psychological sciences at Case Western Re...

How does our brain cut past all the clutter thrown at us every day to get to what it wants?  Tweets and texts, iPods and iPads, smart phones and smarter tablets.  Is it any wonder we're having a harder and harder time focusing on just about anything? That's where the beauty of our brain comes in.  According to newswise.com, a new study finds it's not tough at all.  It involves a special area of neurons.  “Most of the objects in any given visual scene are not that important, so how does the brain select or attend to important ones?”the Web site quotes study senior author David Freedman, PhD, associate professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago. “It does this in a very flexible way, changing moment by moment depending on what is being looked for.” The visual cortex of the brain possesses multiple, interconnected regions that are responsible for processing different aspects of the raw visual signal gathered by the eyes, newswise notes. "Basi...

Mindfulness .   The concept has been kicked around for some time.  You know, closing your eyes (or not) and just letting thoughts come in and out of your mind without following them, just being there, in the moment.  It's kind of like meditation but that word scares a lot of people away, so mindfulness was coined. You'd certainly want your doctor to do a little of this, before surgery, wouldn't you?  Well, now, Pauline Chen, herself a doctor, is writing at her New York Times blog that practicing it may just may help physicians avoid stress and burnout. " Research over the last few years has revealed that unrelenting job pressures cause two-thirds of fully trained doctors to experience the emotional, mental and physical exhaustion characteristic of burnout," she reports. "Health care workers who are burned out are at higher risk for substance abuse, lying, cheating and even suicide. They tend to make more errors and lose their sense of empathy for others....