MENTAL AWARENESS

Dr Daniel Amen: The most important lesson from 83,000 brain scans

Dr Amen tells us that through SPECT imaging, a nuclear medicine study, we can have a better understanding of the brain in terms of blood flow and activity, and how the brain works. SPECT imaging has helped psychiatrist get more information such good activity, too little activity or too much activity just by having a visual representation of the patient’s brain.

With the use of Imaging, treatment can be tailored to individual brains, not clusters of symptoms. The Brains we have can become better over time just by improving in the areas of blood flow, memory and mood.

behavior is really an expression of the problem, it’s not the problem.

Memory in Animals – ABC NEWS 24
Karl Kruszelnicki showed us that The Nutcracker Bird used its memory to recollect where it had buried its seeds in different locations months after. Goldfish also have social and associative memories.

Dr Guy Winch: How to practice emotional first aid – Guy Winch
Dr Guy Winch wants us to maintain good mental health, just as we sustain physical injuries on our body so do we sustain psychological health wounds.
The point is to give focus and pay great attention to psychological health as we would to any other part of our bodies, because we sustain more psychological injuries- Failure, rejection, or Loneliness more often than physical wounds.
Most notable psychological injuries are – failure, Rejection, loneliness and rumination

Recommendations
Treat yourself with compassion
Fight the feeling of helplessness
Gain control over the situation.
Change your responses to failure and battle negative thinking.
A two-minutes distraction is sufficient
Concentrate on something else
Protect your self esteem
By doing all these, you will heal your psychological wounds and build emotional resilience

Tali Sharot: How to motivate yourself to change your behavior
Using fear as a means of threat to persuade people usually has little impact, people will always change or move towards a more desirable opinion because it is positive. Positive information makes us feel good, because we tend to learn from good news and negative information will make us feel bad.

3 interventions that are positive change agents:

• Social Incentives: People act better when they know that the world is watching or when they know it will conform to societal norms. Highlighting what other people are doing is a really strong incentive.
• Immediate reward: Getting rewards in the now moment is more satisfactory than receiving it in the future, which helps in preventing negative outcomes in the future.
• Progress Monitoring: Emphasize on the progress made and not the decline, this way you can get their attention.
  There is room for advancement. To modify our own and others’ behavior, we should employ positive techniques rather than threats that leverage on the human capacity for improvement.

Chris Bailey | How to Get Your Brain to Focus!
Daily activities can sometimes drown our attention, causing the brain to become overstimulated and, in the long run, submerging our capacity to concentrate, causing the brain to desire attention.
With this realization, we should change the narrative by turning off outside noise, which causes the brain to become unnecessarily distracted. By doing this, we might lower the level of input to the brain, enabling it to produce more imaginative and useful ideas.