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Daily marijuana use has a measurable effect on the brain, a new study finds.
Teenagers who smoked marijuana daily for three years performed poorly on memory tasks and showed abnormal changes in brain structure, according to a Northwestern Medicine study. Researchers in Chicago observed the brains of teenagers who were heavy users of marijuana. In those individuals, memory-related structures in the brain appeared to shrink and collapse inward, possibly indicating a decrease in neurons.
These abnormalities were recorded two years after the teens stopped using marijuana, possibly indicating long-term effects, and look similar to schizophrenia-related brain abnormalities.
The brains were shaped more abnormally for individuals who began marijuana use at a younger age, according to the reports, which suggest that memory regions of the brain are more susceptible to the drug at earlier ages.
The research was published in the December issue of Schizophrenia Bulletin.
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breathing
When we come out of the womb and take our first inhale and when we pass away and take our last exhale the breath is primal and fundamental to are being.
Since breathing is something we can control and regulate, it is a useful tool for achieving a relaxed and clear state of mind. Here are some simple breathing exercises:
Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound.
Close your mouth and inhale quietly through your nose to a mental count of four.
Hold your breath for a count of seven.
Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound to a count of eight.
This is one breath. Now inhale again and repeat the cycle three more times for a total of four breaths.
Place one hand on your chest and the other on your abdomen. When you take a deep breath in, the hand on the abdomen should rise higher than the one on the chest. This insures that the diaphragm is pulling air into the bases of the lungs.
After exhaling through the mouth, take a slow deep breath in through your nose imagining that you are sucking in all the air in the room and hold it for a count of 7 (or as long as you are able, not exceeding 7)
Slowly exhale through your mouth for a count of 8. As all the air is released with relaxation, gently contract your abdominal muscles to completely evacuate the remaining air from the lungs. It is important to remember that we deepen respirations not by inhaling more air but through completely exhaling it.
Repeat the cycle four more times for a total of 5 deep breaths and try to breathe at a rate of one breath every 10 seconds (or 6 breaths per minute). At this rate our heart rate variability increases which has a positive effect on cardiac health.
Once you feel comfortable with the above technique, you may want to incorporate words that can enhance the exercise. Examples would be to say to yourself the word, relaxation (with inhalation) and stress or anger (with exhalation). The idea being to bring in the feeling/emotion you want with inhalation and release those you don’t want with exhalation.
In general, exhalation should be twice as long as inhalation. The use of the hands on the chest and abdomen are only needed to help you train your breathing. Once you feel comfortable with your ability to breathe into the abdomen, they are no longer needed.
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Relapse Stages
One of the hand outs I use with groups. This is a shorten version of Relapse Stages and just a starting off point for further discussion.
First stage – I am un aware. I don’t see it, and have no idea I am in trouble. (people around us may notice subtle changes in attitude and behavior).
Second Stage – We become restless, incurable and discontent. Our focus shifts from internal to external, we stop focusing on ourselves and start focusing on other people around us. We start blaming; acting the victim, fear and anger start to become evident.
Third stage – Unresolved feelings occur and they are not dealt with in a healthy manner. We go into the emotional and physical withdrawal, than start to isolate. Negative attitudes start to predominate such as compulsive behavior, we start discounting recovery, we may engage in magical thinking.
Fourth stage – A crisis in our life provides the excuse for us to start using it again, or we create a crisis that rationalizes are returned to use. In other words, we have made the decision to use, and are ready to light the fuse.
As we move through the stages of relapse, a few different things are occurring. Firstly, the need to regain our ‘right’ to re-engage in our addiction seems to make sense. We talk ourselves into the false belief that this time we can control it.
There’s a gradual and progressive destabilization of our lifestyle. Lastly, Stress and Stressors will accelerate this process.
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How racial stereotypes impact communication
Racial stereotypes and expectations can impact the way we communicate and understand others, according to UBC research.
The new study, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, highlights how non-verbal “social cues” – such as photographs of Chinese Canadians – can affect how we comprehend speech.
“This research brings to light our internal, biases, and the role of experience and stereotypes, in how we listen to and hear each other,” says Molly Babel, the paper’s lead author and an assistant professor with UBC’s Department of Linguistics.
One of the study’s tasks involved participants from the UBC community transcribing pre-recorded sentences amid background static. The sentences were recorded by 12 native speakers of Canadian English. Half of the speakers self-identified as White, and the other half self-identified as Chinese. All speakers were born and raised in Richmond, B.C., which is south of Vancouver.
The pre-recorded sentences were accompanied by either black and white photos of the speakers, or by an image of three crosses. Overall, listeners found the Chinese Canadians more difficult to understand than the White Canadians – but only when they were made aware that the speaker was Chinese Canadian due to the photo prompt.
Participants were also asked to rate the strength of the accents of the speakers. They were asked to listen to two sentences from each speaker – one accompanied by the speaker’s photo, the other by an image of crosses. “Once participants were aware that they were listening to a White Canadian, suddenly the candidate was perceived as having less of a foreign accent and sounding more like a native speaker of Canadian English,” says Babel.
“It tells us as listeners that we need to be sensitive about the stereotypes that we carry,” notes Jamie Russell, the study’s co-author who was an undergraduate honours student in UBC’s Department of Linguistics during the project.
Background
The study, “Expectations and Speech Intelligibility,” is published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The authors are Molly Babel and Jamie Russell, both of UBC’s Department of Linguistics.
The study involved five tasks: speech perception in noise, accentedness rating, an implicit measure of ethnic bias, an explicit measure of ethnic bias and a social network self-assessment.
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Top Songs I listened to in 2019: Laboratorium Pieśni
I have a 16,000 plus digital audio collection and I use Media Monkey to manage my files. One feature of Media Monkey is you can sort your collection based on the number of times played. This playlist is based on the top music and/or music video files I played/listened/streamed from my server in 2019.
Laboratorium Pieśni – Song Laboratory (world/ethno/spiritual/mystic folk music) is a group of female singers from Poland, created in 2013. Using traditional, polyphonic singing they perform songs from all over the world, mainly: Ukraine, Balkans, Poland, Belarus, Georgia, Scandinavia and many other places. They sing a capella as well as with shaman drums and other ethnic instruments (shruti box, kalimba, flute, gong, zaphir and koshi chimes, singing bowls, rattles etc.), creating a new space in a traditional song, adding voice improvisations, inspired by sounds of nature, often intuitive, wild and feminine.
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change
“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.” Harriet Tubman
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more snow plants
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Japanese Textile Designs 119
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Pomeranian & Chiuahua Coloring Page
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Yoga & Depression
From an article on the Yoga International web site:
Anyone who has suffered from depression understands how deep, abiding sadness or worthlessness can infiltrate and affect every aspect of our being. Our psychological makeup, physical health, mental outlook, and even our ability to interact with friends and family and be present to the world around us can get shaken to their core. Why? Because we identify with and attach ourselves to things that will inevitably change. As our feelings and other symptoms of depression persist, we have an increasingly difficult time imagining a life in which we break free from their spell and avoid “becoming” them.
Yoga teaches us that we aren’t our feelings or our symptoms but live in multidimensional relationship with them. One way to grasp this paradox is to picture the Self (purusha or pure, undifferentiated awareness) as pervading all nine interlocking and interdependent spheres of influence without being any one of them. See More here.
https://yogainternational.com/article/view/yoga-for-depression-an-integrated-practice
