brain

According to a study published some time ago in the journal Nature Neuroscience, flight attendants who constantly make transoceanic flights and cross several time zones, with little time to rest between trips, have a smaller area of the brain called the right temporal lobe. than normal.

Surely, more than once, you were late for work or an appointment and it has cost you horrors to remember where you left your house or car keys. In an article published recently in the journal Cognition, Grayden Solman, a researcher at the University of Waterloo, concluded that this very common phenomenon could be due to a lack of synchronization between neurons.

In 2000, the psychiatrist Andrew Stoll, from Harvard University (USA), showed that omega-3 fatty acids, present among other foods in salmon, had an antidepressant effect and stabilized mood. And a little later, a study from the University of Pittsburg School of Medicine found that healthy people with low omega-3 blood levels are more likely to have pessimistic ideas.

According to Judith Wurtman, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), proteins supply the brain with tyrosine, an amino acid that increases the production of neurotransmitters that keep the mind alert, focused and productive (dopamine and norepinephrine). When tyrosine levels drop we suffer from apathy and lack of motivation.

When faced with an email from a stranger asking for money for a noble cause or a message from a financial scammer selling valuable stocks at a ridiculous price, it has been found that young and old tend to be more easily fooled than middle-aged people. . American scientists have identified the area of the brain responsible for credulity, and have proposed a theory to try to explain why at certain ages we are less likely to doubt these types of messages.

We inherit three times more genetic mutations from our fathers than from our mothers, according to research just published in the journal Nature Genetics. The study, based on the DNA of 85,000 Icelandic residents, also shows that the number of mutations inherited from parents doubles as they age, from 20 to 58 years of age. The age of the mothers, however, does not matter.

70 percent of people say they have ever experienced déjà vu, a French term that can be translated as "already seen" and which gives name to the feeling of living an already experienced reality. It is a paramnesia, that is, a false memory. The explanation is not to be found in past lives or in prophecies, but in small lapses in the storage of memory by the brain.

Although it may seem like science fiction, it is not. According to a study published in the 'Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society' and conducted by experts from Northwestern University, there is a select group of people over eighty years of age, known as the "SuperAgers" or "superannians", who have an anatomy special brain that allows them to think and remember even better than people twenty or thirty years younger.