Hot MedFax

Who hasn't heard the saying, the only way to heal from pain is through it. Now a new study is saying that it's the way to recover from failure , too. According to newswise.com, our emotional responses to mistakes can lead to improvement. Feeling the pain of failure leads to more effort to correct your mistake than simply thinking about what went wrong, the study says. Researchers found that people who just thought about a failure tended to make excuses for why they were unsuccessful and didn’t try harder when faced with a similar situation.  In contrast, people who focused on their emotions following a failure put forth more effort when they tried again.  “All the advice tells you not to dwell on your mistakes, to not feel bad,” says  Selin Malkoc , co-author of the study and professor of  marketing  at The Ohio State University’s  Fisher College of Business , at newswise.com.  “But we found the opposite. When faced with a failure, it ...

It sounds a little too simple.  Want a better memory?  Eat a Mediterranean diet . According to newswise.com, eating beans, leafy greens, seeds, nuts, cereals, legumes and fresh fruit and vegetables can all help to slow cognitive decline.  Yes, you can have meat, but stay away from a lot of red meat.  And olive oil is good, too.  In fact, it's the main source of fat in this kind of diet. "The most surprising result," says the study authors, "is that the positive effects were found around the world.  Regardless of being in a so-called 'Mediterranean' region, the positive cognitive effects were similar." Attention, memory and even language improved, researchers found.  Memory in particular was affected by the Mediterranean Diet, including improvements in delayed recognition, long-term and working memory, executive function and visual constraints.  (Does this mean I can stop wearing glasses?  Probably not.) The Med Diet is so effective be...

Admit it.  When you see someone stumble and fall, you can't help looking.  People seeing you looking will look, too. It's called "gaze following," and although it's been demonstrated in dozens of species, researchers have theorized that it may develop in a unique way in humans, because it plays a critical role in learning and socialization. Researchers, who have studied this in monkeys, believe it has deep evolutionary roots, according to newswise.com. "Even though it seems like it's a very simple thing, this is a foundational social and cognitive skill that humans have. And there has been little research on how this skill develops in other species," says Alexandra Rosati, Assistant Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology and the first author of the study.   "This is the largest study ever looking at gaze-following in monkeys. We followed how this skill developed through their whole lifespan and examined the psychological mechani...

When I worked for a large corporation back in the '80s, and they did these things, I went on a weekend jaunt, along with my department, to a workshop on how the brain works.  I remember being singled out by the teacher because some drawing or diagram I did showed that I had extreme activity in my right brain. Supposedly that meant I was very creative. Well, I am definitely right-brained (my husband might call it no-brained, at times, like when I broke my wrist last winter running on ice), and now a new study has found that pregnant women, too, mostly use their right brains during child-bearing.  According to medicalnewstoday.com (MNT), "New findings from scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London in the UK reveal that pregnant women exhibit increased activity in the right side of the brain - an area related to emotional skills." They say that might explain "baby brain," what most pregnant women go through where they're in an almost constant s...