Health News

Three news stories I thought were interesting--nothing about gardening. Well, one of them is about healthy food, so let's do that one first.

#1. The 11 Best Foods You Aren't Eating. Number 11 is canned pumpkin. "A low-calorie vegetable that is high in fiber and immune-stimulating vitamin A; fills you up on very few calories. How to eat: Mix with a little butter, cinnamon and nutmeg." I would like a bowl of that right now.

#2. Play Tetris after trauma to innoculate yourself against PTSD. An experiment is described wherein a group of volunteers were made to view gruesome images of injury and death. Afterwards, half played Tetris, and the other half sat and did nothing.

What saved the Tetris-playing group from post-traumatic stress symptoms was the limited powers of their brains to perform two similar operations at the same time -- to multitask -- the authors wrote. In the hours after witnessing a horrifying scene, a person would normally commit two different versions of the scene to memory -- the sensory-perceptual processing version, which records the upsetting sights, sounds and physical sensation of the event -- and the verbal-conceptual version of the event, in which the brain renders the events witnessed into a more dispassionate narrative.

In the crucial period following the film, the Tetris players were too engaged in the game-playing task -- which taxed their visual and spatial processing skills -- to consolidate the upsetting memory of the film's sights and sounds and their own physiological distress upon watching them, the authors conjectured.

#3. Finally, studies of oxtocin and vasopressin--hormones important to human sexuality and love--may offer insights into disorders like autism and schizophrenia. Also, "reducing love to its comprehensive parts helps us understand human sexuality and may lead to drugs that enhance or diminish our love for another."