Escaped Thoughts

Activating Your Brain's Healing Power

We are more likely to experience depression than our parents were.

Blame our automated, online world? How about the reduced physical effort we make to survive?

Neuroscientist Kelly Lambert finds compelling evidence that having to work hard for rewards significantly improves mood and prevents depression.

Mixing research from anthropology, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology, her theory suggests that physical effort directed toward tangible outcomes activates particular regions of the brain and builds resilience against the emotional emptiness and negative thinking associated with depression.

In other words, get out of your funk not by changing your mental activity and thoughts, but by physical activity.

She wrote Lifting Depression: A Neuroscientist's Approach to Activating Your Brain's Healing Power about her brain research into how using your hands-on crafts projects can be as beneficial to the body as taking psychoactive medication.

 

It's Officially Winter

The last time we had a lunar eclipse on the Winter Solstice was 21 December MDCXXXVIII.

I'll bet that when the Full Moon was in total eclipse from 1:12 to 2:47 UT and the solstice occured later in the day at 16:05 UT, it would have been quite a strange time at Stonehenge.

I'm glad I stayed up to watch. The next one is in 2094 and I don't think I'll be awake for that one.

Winter Solstice sun seen rising
through the trilithon at Stonehenge

And the Earth's axis just hit full tilt. The North Pole angled 23.5 degrees away from the sun at 6:38 p.m. EST.

Sun rise was at 7:16 today for 9 hours and 12 minutes of day (the sun set at 4:28) and then we gradually start adding to the day's length - until the summer solstice in 2011.  By New Year's Day, we will have added 3 minutes of daylight.  I feel warmer already.