Author: Erin Elizabeth

This month, the California Department of Health released guidelines warning residents about the dangers associated with putting cell phones up to our heads. While the guidelines have been in the works since 2009, for some reason, the state didn’t want to release them. However, thanks to a lawsuit from Joel Moskowitz, a Berkeley professor and director of the Center for Family and Community Health at UC-Berkeley’s School of Public Health, a judge compelled the state to publish. RELATED STORY: Yet another reason not to hold your cell phone The guideline says in part, “Although the science is still evolving, some laboratory experiments...

Last year Americans found out that we weren’t living as long as our counterparts in other nations and the news this year isn’t much better: we are still dying younger and our life expectancy is now down for the second straight year. This sobering news has not been seen in more than half a century.2 RELATED STORY: These Two Foods Are Making South Koreans’ Life Expectancy Soar to the Highest in the World Obviously, researchers are disturbed by these numbers. “A baby born in the United States in 2016 could expect to live 78.6 years, a decrease of more than...

New findings published in the journal Neuron have found that older brains may forget more because they lose their rhythm at night, “during deep sleep, older people have less coordination between two brain waves that are important to saving new memories.” The study was the result of an effort to understand how the sleeping brain turns short-term memories into memories that can last a lifetime. 4 RELATED STORY: 7 tricks to improve your memory The BIG question This new finding seems to answer a question researchers have long had: how does aging affect memory in people who do not have Alzheimer’s...

Dopamine is the brain’s master chemical. This single neurotransmitter is responsible for a plethora of mental and physical processes. By learning how to stimulate your own dopamine levels naturally, you can overcome depression, anxiety, apathy, and fear, while boosting feelings of pleasure created by this amazing little neuron. RELATED STORY: How to increase your sense of gratitude Dopamine is what rewards certain behaviors in us so that we do them again, and why certain drugs are so addictive. Cocaine, heroine and other opiates cause a dopamine “super reward” which makes their use highly desirable, until you experience the dopamine crash that comes once the...