brain

The cell phone on the nightstand is not “frying” your brain, but science is beginning to understand why it prevents you from resting

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It is practically a ritual today: connect your phone to the charger, set the alarm and leave it on the nightstand just 30 centimeters from the pillow to sleep. According to the data, for 95% of adultssleeping with your phone within reach is a logistical necessity; For a growing stream of longevity experts, It’s a biological miscalculation. because we rest less. To do this, we have analyzed the bibliography to know exactly the effect of having your cell phone next to you. The culprit confirmed. Before entering the swampy terrain of the possible problems that radiation can generate when it is around us, we must point out the “elephant in the room.” The most solid evidence we have today does not blame antennas for having a bad sleep, but to the screens and what we do with them. To give us an idea, a meta-analysis over 36,000 participants concluded that excessive use of smartphone increases the risk of having poor quality sleep by 228%. The double responsible. The first is the suppression of melatonin, since the blue light emitted by the LED panels of mobile phones tricks our brain making him believe that it is still day. This delays the release of melatonin and fragments the architecture of sleep. But not only the blue light is information, since responding to a WhatsApp or doing doomscrolling on TikTok before bed keeps the brain alert. A study of medical students suggested that nighttime cell phone use corresponded to poorer sleep. The radiation debate. It has always been a mantra for many: having your cell phone nearby is having a large source of radiation that causes many health problems. In this case, organizations such as the WHO or ARPANSA have traditionally maintained that evidence of damage from low-level electromagnetic fields is “insufficient.” However, it does not mean that it is non-existent. The most recent studies They are beginning to see the non-thermal effects that mobile phones have. One of the most interesting was done with baby monitors that have a frequency of 2.45 GHz, similar to Bluetooth or Wifi, to simulate environmental exposure. The result was that the exposed group, compared to the placebo, showed a worse subjective quality of sleep and alterations in heart rate variability, suggesting that sensitive people do notice the invisible “presence” of the electronic device nearby. Brain wave modulation. Other research on 5G signals found that exposure to 3.6 GHz waves affected sleep spindles during N2 phasethat is, light sleep that accounts for 50% of the total rest time. The curious thing about this study is that the effect depended on genetics: only carriers of certain variants of the CACNA1C gene showed alterations in the electroencephalogram. This qualifies the warnings of some experts, since radiation may not affect us all equally, but for a genetically predisposed subgroup, sleeping next to a continuous emission source could be fragmenting their N2 phase, crucial for memory consolidation. The habit factor. It is often cited Sinha’s studio to demonize radiation, but what this study really measured were habits in a sample of 566 participants. In this case, it was seen that those people with high mobile phone use took longer to fall asleep, their sleep was less efficient, and 22.6% reported worse quality of sleep. In this way, the conclusion was not that the waves prevented them from sleeping, but that the habit of having their cell phone nearby inevitably leads to using. If it’s on the table, you look at it. If you look at it, you become active. It is a behavioral rather than a radiological vicious circle. Hygiene protocol. The question in this case is inevitable: should we wrap the room in aluminum foil? It’s not necessary. In this case, physics works in our favor thanks to the inverse square law: the intensity of the radiation falls drastically with distance. That is why the most important thing is to move the device at least one meter away from the bed, since at this distance the exposure falls to negligible basal levels, making Sleeping with your cell phone under your pillow is the worst possible decision. If we want to go a little further, we can put it in airplane mode, although the best advice, as the Spanish Society of Neurology points out, is to have a sacred hour, where the recommendation is to leave the screens an hour before going to sleep. Images | Nubelson Fernandes In Xataka | We thought insomnia was just not being able to sleep. Now we know that there are five different disorders

Snacking between meals is not a lack of will, but a battle that we lose in our brain

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A fairly typical scene in the lives of some people can unfold in the middle of the afternoon or even after dinner, where an inner force drags us to the pantry or the refrigerator to have some chocolate or some small pecking. And although this is something that we try to justify within a “lack of will”the reality is that our brain and hormones are fighting a battle with us in which we usually lose. And to understand what is happening here, you have to look at the scientific literature. A sleep problem. Blame lack of sleep of an imbalance in our hormones is undoubtedly one of the most solid pillars of current metabolic medicine, and the truth is that it is not any type of myth. This is something that was evidenced in a study published in 2004 which showed that when healthy young people restricted their hours of sleep, an endocrine disaster occurred. Here, your levels of leptinwhich is the hormone that sends the satiety signal to the brain so that we stop eating, plummet, while ghrelinwhich is the hormone that tells us to keep eating, it shoots. Greater intake. The result here cannot be other than consumption of 328 extra kcal per day through snackslooking almost exclusively for quickly absorbed carbohydrates because our brain is telling us that we need foods that provide us with energy quickly. Although in truth it is something that is not needed, so these foods directly end up forming more fat deposits. A more recent review goes further and confirms that even a single night of bad sleep is enough to disrupt insulin and orexin, physiologically preparing us for a day of uncontrollable cravings. Eat dinner early. This is something that in many countries, such as France, is totally normal, but not in Spain. Here the science is pretty clear because it has been more than proven that our body does not process food in the same way at 2:00 p.m. as it does at 10:00 p.m. Here the different trials suggest that aligning our meals with circadian rhythms drastically modulates appetite hormones, so eating while our central biological clock is active reduces the average daily germin levels and increases satiety hormones in the evening. This is the same as what a study published in 2023 which confirms that eating at times aligned with sunlight improves the synchronization between the central biological clock and the peripheral clocks in the different organs. The message we should take home here is that eating early literally turns off the physiological desire to eat at midnight because the body understands that the eating cycle has ended and the repair cycle begins. Protein to calm satiety. In this case, the field of nutrition has stopped focusing only on calories to focus on the hormonal response that each food generates in our body. The different reviews suggest that eating around 25-30 grams of high-quality protein per meal not only optimizes muscle protein synthesis, but also suppresses appetite in the long term and, therefore, reduces the temptation to snack between meals. A 2020 meta-analysis corroborated Likewise, seeing that this amount of protein in a meal reduces ghrelin levels and increases the production of hormones that inhibit appetite, such as famous LPG-1 on which medications such as Ozempic. Stress and cortisol. Snacking has an important emotional and brutal stress management component, since it has surely happened to you that when you have more things on you that’s when you eat the most. This is where scientific literature defines hedonic hunger as the strong desire to eat for pure pleasure, in the total absence of physical need for calories in our body. And the blame lies in the extra production of cortisol, which is the hormone classically related to stress. But the most interesting thing here is that in people who eat because of an “emotional” desire and not because of a physiological need, it was seen that when they already saw that a stressful situation was going to come (such as exam time for students), ghrelin levels increased. In this way, if you are nervous, bored or mentally tired, the brain will ask for food rich in fats and sugars, such as sweets, as a dopaminergic compensation mechanism. And here it is not that you are hungry, but that there is great stress. Images | Madalyn Cox Denny Muller In Xataka | We believed that a vegetarian diet guaranteed longevity. In extreme old age, the data says just the opposite

Spain has started its most ambitious defense program. It is not a tank or a drone, it is the brain to control Europe’s troops

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Spain built its land defense looking outward, integrating into foreign programs and adapting doctrines from when the tank symbolized power, deterrence and industrial sovereignty. From joining NATO in 1982 to the missions in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army was accumulating operational experience, but always with one constant: the key technology came from outside. Today, the debate no longer revolves around how many vehicles you have, but rather What role do you want to play? now that the war changes again. From cannon to code. The Ukrainian experience has finished burying the idea of ​​the battle tank as an isolated and self-sufficient platform, pushing Spain to rethink its land doctrine from the roots. Instead of investing in more armor and weight, the Ministry of Defense has opted for a conceptual leap: prioritizing information, connectivity and speed of decision as key factors of survival in a “transparent” battlefield, saturated with sensors, drones and smart munitions. In that context PAMOV is bornnot as a new tank or a combat drone, but as the nervous system that must govern all those that come after. PAMOV, the brain. The Superior Ground Combat System program, awarded to Indraseeks to define the digital architecture of the future Spanish armored combat beyond 2040. We are talking about an initial investment around the 45 million euros and a strong R&D component, one whose objective is not yet to manufacture platforms, but design and mature subsystems that will allow the integration of manned and unmanned vehicles, sensors, weapons and command and control into a single cooperative tactical network. The tank, therefore, stops being the physical center of combat and becomes just another node within a distributed “system of systems.” INDRA The tactical cloud. One of the pillars of PAMOV is the creation of a combat tactical cloud capable of fusing in real time information from on-board sensors, aerial and ground drones and external sources. As? Through artificial intelligencethe system detects, classifies and prioritizes threats, reducing crew cognitive overload and accelerating decision-making in high-pressure environments. The 360 degree visionsupported by AI and augmented reality, allows you to “see through” the armor and regain freedom of maneuver against the proliferation of drones and loitering munitions. Less tons, more platforms. Plus: the lessons of Ukraine have highlighted the limits of the continued growth in weight of battle tanks, some already close to 80 tons, with enormous logistics costs and restrictions of mobility. In this sense, Indra’s approach is committed to distribute capabilities between multiple lighter platforms, many of them unmanned, that operate in tandem with the main tank. Here are names that are common today in the Ukrainian war, such as UGVs and UASwho would advance ahead “taking on the most exposed missions and acting as extenders of ISTAR capability“, in addition to (obviously) reducing human risks. Modularity and weapons of tomorrow. The PAMOV is conceived as an open architecturemodular and scalable, one capable of being integrated into different present and future vehicles. This allows on paper to progressively incorporate new technologies, from advanced active protection systems to directed energy weapons and, in more distant phases, even future hypersonic systems without having to redesign the entire platform. Hence, it is emphasized that the key is not in the specific weapon, but in the system being able to govern, coordinate and exploit it within the tactical network at the right time. Technological sovereignty. The concept is going to be repeated more and more in the old continent. In the case of Spain, with a 95% of national developments and the participation of SMEs, startups, universities and technology centers spread across several autonomous communities, PAMOV is presented as a strategic commitment for the country. As we remembered yesterday, the nation seeks to stop being just a simple buyer or late integrator to become technology provider criticism in European programs like MARS and, in the long term, the MGCSseeking to be on par with France and Germany. The final objective is that the Spanish contribution to the European car of the future is not only steel, but intelligence that governs it. Another way to fight. Finally, and if you will, beyond technology, the impact of PAMOV points above all to doctrinal. For the Army it means moving from individual platforms to cooperative networkschange the way we command, train and operate, and prepare for high-intensity scenarios with fewer personnel and greater dependence on software. From that perspective, the future Spanish battle tank will not be defined by its caliber or its weight, but by its capacity. to connect systemsdominate the information and decide faster than the opponent. Image | Rheinmetall Defense, Oscar in the middleIndra In Xataka | Spain has been a weapons exporting power for decades. Now he has made a decision: keep them In Xataka | Ukraine has found what it needed in an unexpected ally. Spain had the missing piece against the shahed drones

The brain asks for ultra-processed foods when it has nothing to do and science thinks it knows why

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There is a fairly classic scene in the lives of many people: not being hungry but wandering around the kitchen, opening the refrigerator, looking and closing it. Minutes later, this operation is repeated. The final result? End up eating something we probably didn’t needwhich is what can be popularly known as ‘gluttony’, but nutrition science has a more precise term: emotional eating. Investigation. Reference researchers in Spain such as Dolores Corella and Jordi Salas-Salvadó from CIBERobn, have focused on how factors more than calorieslike emotions or genetics, determine our weight. And the conclusion is quite clear: boredom is as real a metabolic risk factor as sugar. The boring brain. When we get boredthe brain detects a stimulation deficit that it tries to compensate with the fastest route to pleasure. And this is where the ultra-processed darlings come in. In this case, science indicates that these foods not only nourish us poorly, but activates dopaminergic reward circuitsin a very similar way to how certain addictive substances do. In this case, we have, first of all, a stimulus that is boredom that causes our mood to drop. Here the brain looks for a quick peak of dopamine and an apple is usually not enough, but rather it looks for fats and refined sugars, since their consumption causes a peak of pleasure followed by a sudden drop. Something that promotes excessive consumption and therefore favors gaining weight. The danger of getting bored. Not having things to do during the day or even at night, the truth is that it can be the ideal seed for consuming more calories than necessary. And above all, boredom tends to attack more strongly at the end of the day, when obligations end and this is where “boredom eating” collides head-on with chrononutrition. Researcher Marta Garaulet has shown that the moment in which we eat is critical, since snacking out of boredom after 9:00 p.m. is metabolically disastrous, especially in Spain. Why Spain. We Spaniards have a much worse time eating for boredom beyond 9 at night due to a genetic load in half of the population related to the MTNR1B gene. In this case, whoever has this gene and eats late, the consequences are quite clear: the body secretes less insulin and tolerates the glucose that we are introducing less well. The result here is that what is eaten due to nocturnal boredom it makes you fatter and more inflammatory than if you eat during the day, due to the desynchronization of circadian rhythms and the enzymes necessary to process food. How to counter it. If boredom is the trigger for this situation and ultra-processed foods are the gasoline, the solution to break this vicious circle is in PREDIMED studies. In this case, they pointed out that increasing fiber intake through fruits, vegetables and legumes improves glucose regulation. Something that enhances the reduction of glucose drops that can encourage the brain to eat some sugar urgently. In addition to this, the PREDIMED study confirms that the Mediterranean diet Supplemented with extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) or nuts, it reduces anxiety about eating. Unlike ultra-processed foods, which leave you wanting more, a handful of nuts activates long-lasting satiety mechanisms that prevent us from falling into eating a muffin or chocolate ice cream during the night. Routine vs. chaos. Since intermittent fasting lacks solid long-term evidence, experts like Salas-Salvadó suggest focusing on marked routines: bringing forward dinner to extend your overnight fast naturally. Having a fixed schedule reduces moments of “down time” where hunger attacks due to boredom. With all this, what has been achieved is that the brain does not adapt to situations with high levels of dopamine, such as a time of large, very copious late-night dinners. That is why the strategy is not about prohibiting, but about understanding that when you open the refrigerator at eleven at night without hunger, it is not the stomach that speaks but the brain looking for the entertainment it needs. Images | Toby Towfiqu barbhuiya In Xataka | Scientists have found the key to obesity in a protein: mice that do not gain weight even if they consume a fatty diet

positive thoughts can “hack” your brain and improve your immunity

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For decades, science has looked askance at the famous placebo effect with medications. We know it exists, we know it worksbut he as exact has always had gray areas that have prevented us from exploiting it to the fullest. Its presence is such that in scientific studies it must be kept in mind in order to be able to avoid your bias. Discovering it. Now, a recently published study in Nature Medicine has just shed light on this mechanism, and the conclusion is fascinating: training your brain to have positive expectations can physically boost the immune response. Something that can cause a drug or vaccine to work with great effectiveness thanks to having ‘positive thinking’. And a team of researchers led by Nitzan Lubianiker has shown that there is a direct biological connection between the brain’s reward system and the body’s ability to generate antibodies after a vaccine. A training. The experiment, which sounds like something out of a white science fiction novel, recruited 85 healthy participants. The objective was not to give them drugs, but to subject them to neurofeedback sessions using functional magnetic resonance imaging. That is, activating a part of your brain to generate an organic response. Specifically, the goal is to activate the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA)a key deep brain region in the reward circuit and motivation. The same one that ‘turns on’ when we eat something very delicious or receive a ‘like’ on the last published reel. In this way, during four sessions the participants learned to increase the activity of this area by evoking pleasant memories or positive mental strategies. They were literally flooded with Mr. Wonderful quotes. A vaccine. After doing this training with the brain to activate the reward zone, the participants received a vaccine against hepatitis B. The researchers’ objective was to see if having previously received good motivation with positive thoughts had an influence on the effectiveness of the vaccine. The result. A week after receiving the vaccine, blood tests revealed a key fact: those subjects who achieved greater activation of the VTA showed higher levels of antibodies. That is, they had developed a greater body response against the virus. Something that would offer better resistance in the event of being exposed to the hepatitis B virus. A missing link. What this study puts on the table is solid evidence for psychoneuroimmunology. It’s not magic, it’s biology: the brain’s reward circuits seem to have a “direct line” with the immune system that until now we had not had controlled. Ignacio J. Molina Pineda, professor of Immunology at the University of Granada, highlights the importance of the discoveryor by pointing out that it demonstrates how positive expectations modulate immune potency. It is the other side of the coin nocebo effectsomething we already saw during the COVID-19 vaccine trialswhere fear of side effects caused real symptoms in patients who had only received saline water. But there is fine print. Although in this study there was a correlation between brain activation and the presence of more antibodies, there were no large differences in the average total antibody concentrations between the trained and control groups. It must be taken into account that the antibodies were only measured a week later, meaning that we do not know if this ‘super protection’ lasts months or years. Something that also adds to a very small sample of 85 people that could require replicating the study on a large scale. Future applications. This is undoubtedly the most important thing we can think of with these results. And if it ends up being confirmed, we could be facing the birth of complementary therapies where, before an immunological treatment or an important vaccination, the patient goes through a brief mental training to maximize the effectiveness of the drug. Images | Robina Weermeijer Tim Mossholder In Xataka | Adolescents up to 32 years old: neuroscience explains why the brain takes much longer than we thought to mature

science already knows what happens to your brain

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after one night intense partya phrase that can become common is “yesterday I drank so much that I have blackouts.” For years, popular culture has treated these episodes as the fact that alcohol is a kind of eraser of memories in our brain, but the reality is very different: It’s not that memories are erased, it’s that they never existed.. The notice. Our parents didn’t say it anymore: drinking a lot of alcohol and smoking controversial substances is something that can fry the brain. And they were partly right. different experts point out in connection with research and meta-analysis on alcohol consumption and brain health, which shed light on what exactly happens in our heads when we go too far. A blackout. What we usually call a ‘gap’, memory loss the morning after a drunken night, is technically anterograde amnesia, or blackout. During a blackout a person can continue talking, walking (not always straight) and even having apparently normal conversations, but your brain has stopped transferring information from short-term memory to long-term memory. The person responsible for all this It is in the hippocampus itselfa region of the brain that acts as the logistics center for our memories. They arrive here to be stored in long-term memory, which is what interests us to remember what we did the next morning. A chemical interference. When the blood alcohol concentration begins to rise rapidly, quite significant chemical interference occurs. In this case modulates NMDA and GABA receptors which alters the communication between neurons and interrupts the ‘Long-term empowerment‘ (LTP). The latter is the physical process by which neural connections are strengthened to consolidate a memory. In short: during a heavy drunk, the hippocampus is still on to store memories, but the ‘save button’ is completely switched off. Therefore, the next day no matter how hard we try: there is nothing to recover because nothing was recorded in the hippocampus. They fry the brain. If we recover the idea that our grandmothers and parents transmitted to us about the effect of alcohol on the brain, the reality is that neuroimaging studies show As in chronic users there is significant hippocampal atrophy. This does not mean that memories become like water, but rather that the volume of brain matter is decreased. As brain tissue shrinks due to neuronal and connectivity loss, the empty space is occupied by cerebrospinal fluid. And this can give us the myth that the memory turns into water or black spots appear on the imaging tests when they pass. The effect on young people. In this population it has traditionally been said that they can handle alcohol much better and with several drinks they continue to be in top shape. But scientifically a great paradox occurs: the adolescent and young brain is extremely plastic, which makes it much more vulnerable to external aggressions. This is why binge drinking in developing brains not only causes blackouts more easily, but can also generate persistent changes in brain structure. Science has shown in this case that even moderate consumption (more than 14 units per week) is linked to greater hippocampal atrophy and worse long-term cognitive performance. He doesn’t forget who he is. Excessive alcohol does not cause us to suddenly forget our names, something that would fall squarely into the realm of serious dementia. But what is clear is that the blackouts repeated are an obvious risk marker. Not only because of silent structural damage, but because of behavioral vulnerability: a person who is not creating memories is a person who has lost the ability to learn from the consequences of their actions in real time, drastically increasing the risk of accidents and dangerous decisions. Images | Nate Holland Alyona Yankovska In Xataka | Forgetting things is not a bug, it is a feature of your brain: how not remembering things makes us think better

If you haven’t trained it before, your brain will ignore any attempt to relax.

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A very typical (and frustrating) situation can certainly be in the middle of a heated discussionwith pulses racing and jaw very tight. And right at this moment someone blurts out the most irritating advice in the world: “come on, take a deep breath and calm down“. you trybut not only does it not work, but it seems to make you angrier. A reality. It’s not that you are a lost case of emotional management. It is that, according to experts and recent scientific studiesbreathing like technique Immediate help in a “rush” of anger is often a lost battle if prior work has not been done. The ‘high’ problem. Sonia Díaz Rois, coach specialized in anger management, is blunt about it: Trying to breathe to calm yourself in the midst of an emotional peak does not work because the body, in a state of maximum alert, does not recognize slow breathing as a safety signal. And it makes a lot of sense, because when anger flares, we go into ‘fight or flight’ mode. The sympathetic nervous system take command, cortisol triggers and the brain prioritizes survival over reflection. Literally all the machinery is active to deal with the ‘threat’ that has been detected. A sudden change. If at this moment of extreme peak of the organism we want to stop it suddenly with slow breathing without having previously trained, the brain can interpret this abrupt change even as an additional threat or an obstruction. In this way, the only thing that is generated is a feeling of lack of air that will increase the stress you are experiencing. That is why the solution to anger is not to turn it off, but to listen to it. But for breathing to be a useful tool, you must first train it in the calmest moments. This is what is known as creating an ‘anchor’. There are different breaths. Science has an opinion in favor of the need to train this relaxation method when you are not angry. But it has also begun to distinguish which techniques are most effective in these high-stress situations. To this end, a 2023 randomized controlled study compared various techniques of breathwork with the mindfulness medication traditional. The result was finding a very effective technique to improve mood above meditation. It is known as Cyclic Sighing (cyclical sigh in Spanish). The way to do it is very simple, since you only have to do a deep inhalation followed by a short inhalation and a very long exhalation. In this way, those who practiced it for just 5 minutes a day showed greater long-term emotional resilience. Because. Neuroscience explains that by prolonging exhalation (as in the 4-7-8 technique, where you exhale twice as long as you inhale), we directly activate the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for “slowing down” the body. Scream or breathe. For years, popular culture defended the theory of catharsis with very typical phrases such as “let it all out”, “hit a cushion” or “scream loudly and say everything you think.” However, it does not seem the most appropriate as indicated. a study published in 2024 about activities to manage anger that has totally denied it. And his reasoning is quite logical. A high-arousal activity such as boxing or literally shouting tends to increase arousal more than it should, and is something that maintains or increases the aggressiveness that you are trying to control. In contrast, low-arousal activities like deep breathing or yoga are the only ones that significantly reduce anger. Even in contexts of acute stress, as seen in studies with COVID-19 patients in 2024guided deep breathing exercises dramatically reduced anxiety and stress, although interestingly they did not have the same effect on depression. Train when you are well. The conclusion of researchers and experts like Díaz Rois is quite clear: breathing is not a panic button that can be pressed for the first time in a fire, but rather it is something that must be trained to be in full shape when necessary. To do this, you must enter when you are well, practicing the sigh technique that we mentioned before or counting your breaths. In this way, the nervous system is being trained to relate the respiratory pattern we are doing with the message that we are safe. Other important points. In addition to all this, science is quite clear that slow breathing practiced just before a negative emotional stimulus reduces its impact. This is something that we can keep in mind when, for example, we are going to enter an exam or a place where we think we are going to be very uncomfortable, where taking a few breaths beforehand can save us a bad drink. What you have to say. With all this that we have discussed, the next time someone tells you to “breathe” while you are angry, remember that they are scientifically right, but that for this trick to work you have to go through a series of training. Images | engin akyurt In Xataka | Resolving one of the most intriguing debates in philosophy: whether or not “altruism” exists among animals

It’s a warning signal from your brain.

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in a world where insomnia is the order of the dayhearing people saying the phrase ‘it’s like putting your head on the pillow and going cold’ can make you very envious. An attitude that in some cases is seen as a great skilland that certainly seems like an evolutionary advantage. However, science has a much darker reading: it is not efficiency, it’s debt. The thermometer of fatigue. In sleep medicine, the time between getting ready to sleep (such as turning off the light in the bedroom) and entering the first phase of sleep is called Sleep Onset Latency (SUN). A time that has been measured to establish how long is normal for a person, and science estimates it between 10 and 15 minutes. That is to say, between turning off the light and lying down until we start to sleep, the normal thing for an adult is that about 10 minutes pass. When we are below. If there is a range, being above or below it can trigger alarms, such as when the value in a blood test is not within the normal ranges. If it is below, the brain enters a state of “homeostatic hyperexcitability” according to research done for the Sleep Foundation. By this they mean that when the system is so desperate to recover, it ends collapsing when given the chance. And that is why we have three different stages depending on how long it takes us to sleep: The normal range is between 10 and 18 minutes. We speak of pathological drowsiness when it lasts less than 8 minutes. We refer to severe sleep deprivation when we spend less than five minutes. The brain shuts down very quickly. The idea, replicated by experts and based on principles of chronobiology, suggests that instant sleep is the response to chronic restriction. In this way, if for weeks or months you sleep less than necessary, the body accumulates a “bill” that tries to charge himself in every microbreak. Science has wanted to delve into this aspect, and that is why different studies that have been published in Nature and PMC link this ultra-short latency not only with fatigue, but with metabolic alterations and a decrease in cognitive performance. That is why the idea that falling asleep quickly is synonymous with better rest is completely wrong. In fact, research shows that people with this “short latency” often suffer from involuntary lapses of attention and accumulated fatigue which, in environments such as driving or precision work, can be fatal. A long process. The sleep debt is not erased with a night of ‘bingeing’ in bed and getting up at 3 in the afternoon, but studies suggest that this latency can persist during the day. It all depends on what sleep deprivation we have faced our body with. But logically you also have to be careful with this false belief of having rested a lot because the onset of sleep is very rapid. The quality of sleep is only measured by its phases, but in no case does the variable of how quickly I enter the sleep phase come into play. What needs to be done. In the case of a person who falls exhausted at the first yawn, the first thing is to check sleep hygiene. But also be attentive to other indicators such as a possible sleep apneasince this value of sleeping quickly or in any situation is an indication of the presence of this disease that can be really serious and difficult to diagnose. The important thing is that one of the initial symptoms What must be checked in these cases is this poor rest. Images | Shane In Xataka | We thought insomnia was just not being able to sleep. Now we know that there are five different disorders

Scientists have investigated what happens to your brain when you play video games. And they have surprising news

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There is something strangely comforting about dissonance. Sometimes, while I’m fighting with a crochet hook trying to make a scarf not end up looking like a dish towel, I like to put the TV channel in the background. TacticalGramma. Michelle is 59 years old, she is a proud grandmother and, while I clumsily count wool stitches, she is annihilating entire squads in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 with a precision that any teenager would want for themselves. The scene has that visual irony: technology has not come to isolate us in a basement, but to rescue our neurons from rust. For decades, the social narrative sold us that video games “rot” the brain; Today, science is beginning to suggest that, if you want to reach 60 with good mental agility, perhaps you should take control. The brain clock. A study published by Nature has managed to compare the health of neural connections with the person’s actual age—what is known as brain clocks. The team led by Carlos Coronel-Oliveros has discovered that players who are experts in strategy titles like StarCraft II They have a mental structure that is much more resistant to the passage of time. On average, the brains of these players function with the agility of someone four years younger, according to a statistical estimate based on neuroimaging models. An efficiency phenomenon that neuroscience calls Brain Age Gap (BAG). When Sudoku is no longer enough. While classic brain games are isolated and repetitive tasks, an action video game forces the brain to manage an avalanche of information in real time. This level of constant demand—planning movements, reacting to attacks, and filtering out distractions simultaneously—forces neurons to reorganize. To reach this conclusion, the research team used research techniques whole-brain modelingcombining fMRI with machine learning algorithms capable of detecting subtle patterns in connectivity. The results showed more efficient integration in the so-called “frontoparietal hubs”, key regions for attention and executive function that are usually among the first to deteriorate with age. Changes in brain hardware. This apparent rejuvenation has a physical reflection in the structure of the brain. Science has found that, just as a muscle develops with exercise, certain key areas of players become denser and more robust. Studies in Scientific Reports and Translational Psychiatry reveal that those who regularly play action titles have more “gray matter” in regions responsible for coordination, attention and making quick decisions. It is as if the brain had expanded its information highways to react sooner and better to each stimulus. But the most useful change is the refinement of our visual “filter.” Research in PLOS ONE show that the players They develop a superior ability to ignore unnecessary noise. It’s not that they see more, it’s that their brain has learned to process only the information that really matters to win the game, optimizing the energy expenditure of the visual cortex. The ‘learning to learn’ factor. What is truly significant is not being more precise within the game, but the impact on the ability to continue learning. A study in Communications Biology showed that video game training Action speeds up the speed at which people learn new tasks, even when they are unrelated to the game. As they explain psychologists Daphne Bavelier and C. Shawn Green, these games train the brain’s attentional control. The result is improved cognitive adaptation, valuable in an ever-changing technological world. But experts still debate the degree of “far transfer”—that is, the extent to which being a keyboard whiz makes you better at managing a real crisis or a complex spreadsheet. When the benefit runs out. Even so, it is advisable to lower your enthusiasm. Most of these studies they are correlational: they do not allow us to state with certainty whether playing transforms the brain or whether certain already “agile” brain profiles are more inclined to enjoy video games. Furthermore, the effects vary depending on age and life context. Side B is not minor either. Researchers warn that excessive exposure can cause cognitive fatigue and sleep disturbances. The World Health Organization recognizes the video game disorder as a real problem when gambling becomes a compulsive behavior. The neural benefit depends on the balance that if the challenge stops being stimulating and becomes automatic or addictive, the protective effect disappears. Not just any game will do. Another key point is that not all video games produce the same effects. The strongest benefits are seen in action and real-time strategy games, which require quick decisions and multitasking. As experts point outonce a game stops being difficult and becomes mechanical, brain plasticity stagnates. Speed ​​and time pressure seem to be essential ingredients for keeping machinery in shape. There is something hopeful about seeing someone like TacticalGramma master a digital environment. The science doesn’t say that video games are a panacea, but it does suggest that brain aging doesn’t have to be a one-way path to decline. Perhaps the secret to a healthier brain is not in a pill, but in our ability to continue to face what is difficult and accept the frustration of constant learning. For now, I’m going to leave crocheting for a while. Image | freepik Xataka | The art of self-deception: why our brain defends our mistakes even if it knows we are wrong

Neuroscience explains why the brain takes much longer to mature than we thought

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The idea we have about adolescence right now it ends at 25 years old, this being the age at which supposedly the brain has just been ‘cooked’ forever to give way to a functional adult. But the reality is very different as the new studies point out, since we would continue to mature the brain until at least 32 years old. Where did the current idea come from? To understand why scientists pointed to 25 years as the age at which brain maturity ends, we must go back to studies of the past. Specifically to Resonance studies from the 90s and early 2000s like the classic Nitin Gogtay who mapped brain development and discovered that the cortex matures from “back to front.” This means that the sensory and motor areas are consolidated soon, but the prefrontal cortex which is in charge of executive functions, impulse control and planning is last in line. The problem is that many of those studies stopped following the subjects when you reach 20 or 21 years oldsince seeing that the curve continued to rise, it was assumed that the “peak” of maturity would arrive shortly after, around the mid-20s. But we had no idea what happened after this. Just assumptions. A new frontier. In order to solve this ‘blindness’ of neuroscience used the analysis of more than 4,000 brains using connectivity neuroimaging techniques at the University of Cambridge. What they saw was clearly five ‘epochs’ or milestones in brain wiring throughout life. Different turning points. And as if our life were a game, in the brain we have like five different screens that begin at a specific age that acts as a turning point. These ages are: 9, 32, 66 and 83 years. What interests us in this case is the period between 9 and 32 years, since the brain is characterized by a continuous increase in the efficiency and integration of neural networks. It is what the authors describe as an ‘extended adolescence’. It’s not that at 30 you think the same as a 15-year-old, but that the architecture of connections has not yet reached its final ‘adult’ form. Something that occurs at age 32 and remains stable until age 66, when brain activity begins to decline. To understand it better. Researchers wanted to use a simile to illustrate this new paradigm. To do this, they ask us to think of our brain as the union of several “functional neighborhoods” that specialize in specific tasks such as vision, language or logic. All of these are integrated with each other through different highways that are high-speed connections. Well then, between 20 and 32 years old The brain is balancing these two processes, so that the connections between different areas of the brain are well connected and organized. And it is precisely this typical pattern of the adult network, where the brain is capable of integrating complex information fluidly, which does not appear until after the age of thirty. Teenager at 30? This is where the important nuance comes in. Just because the brain continues to mature structurally does not mean that we should redefine adolescence in legal or clinical terms. All this because maturation is a gradient, not a switch of ‘now I’m a teenager and now I’m not’. To understand this, you have to know that the different elements of the brain and executive functions have a very different development curve. In this way, saying that the brain matures at 32 is a simplification that is as useful (or as erroneous) as saying that it matures at 25. What science really tells us is that there is no sudden development “blackout”; We remain biologically plastic and dynamic much longer than we thought. An opportunity for habits. This prolonged maturation is good news for all of us, since if the brain continues to actively ‘wire’ itself throughout our 20s, it means that structural plasticity is especially dynamic at this stage. In this way, science is quite clear: aerobic exercise, learning new languages ​​or facing cognitively demanding tasks during this “third decade” of life helps to improve the volume and organization of the brain’s white matter. On the contrary, factors such as chronic stress can affect the integrity of those connections. In short, a brain at 28 years old is not a finished product, but rather a work in progress that is finishing paving its best highways. The next time someone tells you that you should have your life figured out now because “you’re an adult,” you can tell them that, according to the University of Cambridge, your brain still has a couple of years of baking left. Images | Hal Gatewood Robina Weermeijer In Xataka | From 27 to 36 years old the brain reaches its peak concentration. And from there, bad news

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