Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neuromuscular disease that attacks motor neurons until muscle weakness, atrophy and paralysis lead inexorably to death. Victims of this monstrous malady could be forgiven for feeling unlucky.
How, then, can we explain the attitude of the disease’s namesake, baseball great Lou Gehrig? He told a sellout crowd at Yankee Stadium: “For the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.” The Iron Horse then recounted his many …

Why do some people have all the luck while others never get the breaks they deserve?
I set out to examine luck, 10 years ago. Why are some people always in the right place at the right time, while others consistently experience ill fortune? I placed advertisements in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me.
Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research and over the years, have been interviewed by me. I have monitored their lives and had them take part …

We live in a world today that is full of perceptions, deceptions and misconceptions; it is often hard to tell one from the other when learning about new things.
Hypnosis is no stranger to an incredible amount of misconceptions, which is why it is important to really understand what those misconceptions are before assuming you can or cannot accomplish an objective through hypnosis. To really understand what hypnosis, or anything for that matter, is you must first understand all that it is not.
Once you know what hypnosis is not, everything …

Until just a few years ago, doctors believed that the brain stopped making new neural connections – meaning that the memory began to get irreversibly worse – when the body stopped developing, usually in the early 20s. And doctors knew that, like any other part of the body, neurons weaken as people age. Loss of brain function due to neural breakdown was assumed to be a normal, unavoidable part of aging. It turns out they were wrong.
In the past few years, it has become clear that you can, in fact, …

Even the shortest of catnaps may be enough to improve performance in memory tests, say German scientists.
Just six minutes “shut-eye” for volunteers was followed by significantly better recall of words, New Scientist magazine reported.
“Ultra-short” sleep could launch memory processing in the brain, they suggested.
One UK researcher disagreed, saying that longer sleep was needed to have an impact on memory.
This demonstrates for the first time that an ultra-brief sleep episode provides an effective memory enhancement – University of Dusseldorf researchers
Dozens of studies have probed the relationship between sleep and memory, with …