Recent Brain-Related Articles worth reading

The way I get my news is to subscribe to the news-clipping emails put out by all of the publications that I subscribe to, including Mozilla's "Pocket" which collects "must read" articles from all over - although some of those are behind paywalls. I also subscribe to the NYT, Seattle Times, National Geographic, NPR, Vox, and, most recently, Wired. So I get a chance to scan the titles and choose what I want to read in more detail - which helps me to follow the advice in the first article below, and to find great content instead of spending time mired in the so-called news.

Regarding mental health, there's this article from Wired, about the current news and related existential stress and threat - an issue which I bring up often because I feel it is overlooked by many folks due to repression by our TMS brains. The article explains WHY we are addicted to absorbing so much news, what it does to us, and how to find a balance between staying informed vs. doom-scrolling. This section stands out:

Price says ingesting a lot of negative news can cause anxiety and depression, at least for some period of time, but it’s especially likely to “exacerbate” anxiety, depression, and PTSD in people who have a history of experiencing those conditions. He says that people often doomscroll [or, Jan would add, let a TV or radio news station stay on all day] because there’s something bad going on and they want to find a way to fix the problem they’re reading about [Jan's emphasis]. “When we’re doomscrolling, we’re kind of looking for the resolution to the issue. Read some more posts. Read some more articles. If I get more information, then maybe I’ll understand the problem,” Price says, describing the doomscrolling cycle.

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This article from the MIT Technology Review, about virtual reality for pain/fear reduction of medical procedures, is a good read on its own, but in a section about the potential of VR for chronic pain, is this excellent and scientific explanation of the neuroscience of chronic pain:

Chronic pain is long term, and often life altering. “You have now literal changes in your nervous system as a consequence of experiencing pain long term,” Darnall says. “You have stored tension, you have maybe persistent anxiety, your activity levels have changed, you have sleep problems.” The alarm bell rings long after the danger has passed, for months, years, or even decades.... “We are helping people unlearn some physiologically hardwired pain processes that over time become unhelpful,” Darnell says. “It’s fundamentally skills-based.” ​

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