Posts Tagged ‘brain’
CES 2013, Digital Health Revolution: Body, Mind & Soul
01/15/2013
On the first day of CES I attended a Digital Health Summit panel discussion hosted by Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post. To introduce the discussion, she described Americans’ increase in antidepressants, sleep medications, and stress, and how 75% of healthcare spending is spent on preventable diseases, and 80% of medications are for pain. All of these conditions are preventable through other means, she said.
The panel discussed a perfect storm of multiple trends: (1) stress (and I’d add sleep deprivation) is a killer, (2) our broken & expensive sick care system, and (3) technology & wearable devices that can help us focus on health & wellness. Market researchers note that 30 million wearable devices shipped in 2012, going to 60 million in the next year. In addition, 44 million health apps will be downloaded to smartphones and tablets this year.
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CES 2013, GPS for the Soul and Digital Health Revolution
01/14/2013
I attended CES in person this year instead of monitoring the show from the comfort of my home office and writing my traditional report, CES in Pajamas. On the first day I attended “The Digital Health Revolution: Body, Mind and Soul,” a panel discussion hosted by Arianna Huffington and am thrilled that Huffington Post is so prominently promoting conversation and innovation supporting better health & wellness. Its GPS for the Soul smartphone app, for example, complements lifestyle articles around the theme “Less Stress, More Living.” Here’s an article that Arianna published on the first day.
CES 2013, GPS for the Soul and the Digital Health Revolution
By Arianna Huffington, 1/07/2013
Greetings from Las Vegas, where I’ve landed in the midst of a perfect storm. I’m not talking about the weather — it’s a crisp, beautiful day here. No, I’m talking about one of those moments in which several trends converge to create something larger, a moment we will look back on as the time everything changed. Read the rest of this entry »
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Bringing Dead Back to Life & Envisioning a Healthy Future
01/01/2013
The beginning (or end) of a year is a good time to remember & reflect on the past while pondering & planning the future. So today’s post comes from Huffington Post, with ties into other articles about Personal Memoirs & Memories, Perpetual Websites & Memorials, the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, and Future Forecasts. It’s about the well-known futurist and inventor, Ray Kurzweil.
- Recalling & Recording Your Life’s Story,
- The Legacy of a Digital Generation,
- Friends from Beyond and Your Digital Will,
- CES in PJs – 2011,
- CES 2012… in Pajamas,
- A Consumer Electronics Christmas 2012,
- Getting Ready for CES 2013,
- Future Forecasts, and
- Market Research Resources & Articles.
Adding Kurzweil to the executive staff at Google may help the company stay vibrant and even increase its impact on information technology. Google also invested in Kurzweil’s Singularity University, which strives to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially-advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges. He envisions using a search engine to access a database of your thoughts, stored in the Cloud, in a way that mirrors your values and personality.
Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director Of Engineering, Wants To Bring The Dead Back To Life
Inventor Ray Kurzweil hopes to develop ways for humans to live forever, and while he’s at it, bring back his dead father (at least virtually). Behind him is the support of a tech giant. This month, Kurzweil, a futurist, stepped into the role of Director of Engineering at Google, focusing on machine learning and language processing.
The Benefits of Napping
07/23/2012
When was the last time you let yourself have a nice, leisurely nap?
Past articles promoted the health & productivity benefits of good sleep, but what about a short nap? The folks at Patio Productions shared this great infographic on the science and statistics of napping, spent inside or in the majestic outdoors. Enjoy, and pass it along to friends.
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You Need More Sleep (INFOGRAPHIC)
04/08/2012
I wrote several articles lately about the relationship of Sleep and good Health, including How Light affects Melatonin and Sleep. This infographic emphasizes important statistics, some of which I added to our Health Statistics page. Read the rest of this entry »
How Light affects Melatonin and Sleep
04/02/2012
You heard me mention color temperature before, and the effect of watching TV or reading on the iPad before bed, but here’s why it’s important. This WebMD article examines the hormone melatonin, which helps regulate sleep & wake cycles (the circadian clock). Melatonin production in the body is triggered by darkness and inhibited by light, and that explains why we have trouble with jet lag, shift work, and winter months with fewer daylight hours.
This Wikipedia article describes light therapy and melatonin supplements as treatment for sleep disorders like insomnia. It also describes the light color temperature, from the warm yellow of incandescent light bulbs, to blue light of the new fluorescent and LED bulbs (or the bluish tint of the iPad and TV screens).
One way to fool the body into producing melatonin earlier so you can go to sleep earlier is to select warm-color light bulbs and have them dimmed in the evening. Another way is to wear DARK AMBER or ORANGE sunglasses in the evening to block blue light (short light wavelengths). And of course, that’s why sleep experts advise against using a computer or watching TV shortly before bed.
The Economic Value of a Good Night’s Sleep
03/06/2012
We live such busy lives that we’re stressed out and try to fit too much into each day, ignoring our sleep in hopes of getting more accomplished, but that’s effecting our health, work productivity, and sports performance.
What if I told you that not getting great sleep could easily cost you — an extra $300,000 in medical bills and more than $700,000 in net worth? Not getting great sleep could even cheat you out of some $8 million in lifetime earning capacity? Do I have your attention yet? That’s what my conservative spreadsheet model revealed.
It’s National Sleep Awareness Week, so today I write about the importance of sleep and refer to these previous articles by Dr. Bruce Meleski, an intelligent sleep consultant.
- Sleep Balance: Your Path to Better Sleep – “It is not just the amount of sleep but also need the right type of sleep. Slow wave sleep allows the body to restore at the cellular level. Without this cellular repair, the risk of disease increases for obesity, diabetes, depression, and hypertension. Loss of sleep also affects our day to day performance. Sleep loss impacts athletic performance, memory recall, focus acuity, and reaction time.”
- Brain Entrainment for Better Sleep and Health – We humans have many pulses, rhythms, and frequencies that can be measured and recorded, including heart rate, respiration and brain waves. This article describes the various brain frequencies as we rest, sleep, work or play, and ways to induce the desired state.
The two main types of sleep are (1) Non Rapid Eye Movement Sleep (NREM) and (2) Rapid Eye Movement (REM). NREM sleep has four stages or depth levels.
Stage One is characterized by high frequency (fast), low amplitude (small) brain waves. As we move to Stages Two, Three and Four, the brainwaves get slower and slower (lower frequency), and bigger and bigger (larger amplitude), signaling that we are getting deeper and deeper into sleep. Each stage of sleep delivers a specific renewal, rejuvenation, and recharging function for specific systems of the body.
Most of our hormones are generated during sleep, including the human growth hormone that affects how we grow, age and metabolize food. Since this hormone is what helps keep our weight under control, poor sleep contributes to obesity, diabetes and other conditions that can shorten our lifespan and increase health care costs.
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Modeling the Economic Benefits
Poor Sleep , studies show, contributes to decreased energy and work & athletic performance, as well as memory lapses, anxiety, irritability, depression, stress, mood swings, weight gain, marital strife, and a host of health problems. These factors have a significant impact on your lifetime earnings capacity and health care costs, and they can shorten your lifespan. As shown in the model below, not only did the person die earlier, but their health care costs were over twice as much, and their earning capacity was less than half. The model also shows that the lifetime cost of poor sleep easily exceeds $150,000 in accumulated net worth. That would have been a good inheritance for your kids.
Great Sleep, on the other hand, increases your energy, work productivity and athletic performance, and with better memory and a better attitude comes quicker and larger raises and promotions. And that offers you the ability to invest and grow your net worth more quickly. My conservative and realistic approach shows that net worth from great sleep increases over half a million dollars during a lifetime per person. If that savings could be applied to all 100+ million Americans, the total benefit of good sleep would exceed $60 trillion, so policy makers should consider ways to promote good sleep.
The model below is based on my own estimates from anecdotal evidence I’ve seen in other articles, but I’ve not seen any studies that attempt to quantify the economic value over a lifetime. If you know of credible sleep studies that quantify that value, please leave a comment pointing to them.
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What makes you sick? Ask Dr. Watson
01/25/2012
Watson is IBM’s natural language artificial intelligence supercomputer that last year competed on the quiz show Jeopardy and consistently outperformed two record holding humans, one with the longest winning streak (74 wins), and one winning the most money. Watson can process 200 million times more instructions per second than all of the computers on the recently retired Space Shuttle.
In just 3 seconds, Watson was able to parse and analyze the equivalent of 300 million books to find relevant information. For perspective, if those books were placed on a long bookshelf, the shelf would be longer than 7 football fields.
Watson in Healthcare
WellPoint is pioneering the use of Watson in healthcare, giving physicians better insight to help improve patient outcomes. (See infographic below.)
Related articles on Watson in Healthcare
- IBM’s Jeopardy-winning computer is delving into medicine
- Watson on Wikipedia
- Seven Questions With IBM’s Manoj Saxena About Watson and Cancer
Watson in Other Industries
The Infographic
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11 Holiday Gift Ideas for Better SLEEP
12/16/2011
The gift of Sleep has benefits beyond the gift itself since it can improve your loved one’s health, vitality, productivity, and even earning capacity.
As Dr. Bruce Meleski (Dr. Mell) wrote in previous articles here and here, good quality sleep impacts your life in a positive way. But it’s not just the amount of sleep; it’s also the quality of sleep. Slow wave sleep allows the body to recover and the cells to rejuvenate. Without this cellular repair, there’s a higher risk of disease, obesity, depression, and hypertension. Quality sleep also impacts work productivity, memory recall, focus acuity, athletic performance, and reaction time.
11 gift ideas presented below (Holiday Gift Ideas: Sleep Gifts For Better Zzz’s provides details & high-res photos).
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Is Your Midlife Just “A Long Slide Home?”
12/01/2011
By Douglas LaBier, Ph.D. (from Huffington Post)
Is Your Midlife Just “A Long Slide Home?”
That’s how a man in his 50s described his life to me not long ago: “It’s my long slide home.” He was feeling morose, anticipating the long holiday period from Thanksgiving through the New Year and what he knew it would arouse in him. I often see the “holiday blues“ strike people during this time of multiple holidays (Hanukkah and Christmas; as well as Ashurah, Bodhi Day, and Kwanzaa). The tendency to reflect and take stock of one’s life often triggers sadness, regret, or depression — especially during midlife.
For example, this time of year can intensify feelings of losses you’ve experienced as well as fears about change, in general. In a previous post I described how you can become frozen into a mindset and perspective that your life is fixed and will spiral downward from your middle years onward. Such a mentality restricts your vision. You can’t see that it’s possible — and necessary — to continue evolving your life, while reframing your emotional attitudes about the life changes that will continue to occur. I’ve always liked a line from one of Norman Mailer’s novels, “It is a law of life… that one must grow, or else pay more for remaining the same.”
