Travel!
Forget the staycation. Get a doctor’s prescription for a week in, say, Greece. And go!
Essayist, Heidi Mitchell, recently declared in the Wall Street Journal:
Research reveals that travel can build stress resilience, sharpen cognitive health and ward off depression far better than staying home. Apparently it has got to do with exposing the brain to new experiencing forcing greater mental engagement than do those usual routines at home.”
She explained:
At home, the brain
The critters in your bowels could make you psycho saith researchers from the University of Porto, Portugal, and the University of Oxford, U.K., in “Gut and Oral Microbiota Composition Is Associated with Psychopathic Personality,” set for publication—but not yet peer-reviewed—in Translational Psychiatry.
It is bound to be controversial, but the authors claim to have discovered a link between the specific balance of microflora in the gut and psychopathic behavior—a
Lotto!
Seconds can cost you money. In this case, seven seconds cost Joel Ifergan $13.5 million Canadian (about $9.5 million US).
Scooping millions on the lottery would be a life-changing event for most people. Ifergan, likewise, expected that to be the case. But, alas, the guy never saw a penny of the payout.
One night several years ago, he went into a convenience store in Quebec, Canada, shortly before the 9:00 pm deadline, to buy tickets that evening’s Lotto Super 7 draw. The
Odor!
You can, apparently, odorize your way into resistance training.
Or so say scientists from the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur in “Chocolate Odor Enhances Resistance Exercise Performance Through Appetite Suppression in the Fasted State,” published recently in Frontiers in Physiology.
Smelling chocolate between sets at the gym pushed men to complete far more repetitions than they managed with no scent at all, they found.
Olfactory (pertaining to smell) stimuli may
Another Interview
Here is an interview that aired on Right Theology Forum in India a few months ago ….
Words?
Apparently, people speak fewer words a day in 2019 than they did in 2005. So claimeth psychology researchers from Universities of Missouri–Kansas City and Arizona, in “Sliding Into Silence? We Are Speaking 300 Daily Words Fewer Every Year,” published recently in Perspectives on Psychological Science.
We aren’t just missing those long conversations; we are losing thousands of small, incidental daily interactions (like chatting with a cashier or neighbor), which
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching.