Herbal Health
Herbal Remedies Blog
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ACNE
Just about everyone gets it at one time or another
Anti-Psychotics
Acne vulgaris refers to a spectrum of skin eruptions — blackheads, whiteheads, pimples, cysts and nodules — that can be sore, painful or itchy. Few people escape adolescence without a pimple or two.
Acne begins when a fatty oil, called sebum, and dead cells are manufactured too quickly and clog the pores around small hair follicles. The results can range from whiteheads to blackheads and pimples.
Acne tends to occur in areas where there are high concentrations of these sebaceous glands — the face, neck, shoulders, and upper and center back. In both sexes, elevated secretion of androgen hormones during puberty stimulates these glands to produce extra sebum, increasing the likelihood of acne.
What you can do
PRACTICE SMART PERSONAL HYGIENE
Use a cleansing agent or soap that dries the skin enough to cause minor shedding (avoid too much drying since this can cause further irritation).
Use a clean washcloth — gently.
Never scrub the skin. If acne is not too severe (skin is not infected, pussy or raw), cleansing with a gentle abrasive such as Buff-Puff may help.
Always rinse thoroughly.
Give yourself an occasional mini-steam bath by placing a warm, wet towel on your skin for 10 to 15 minutes. This will help open pores and allow deeper cleaning.
For infants with acne, wash the face daily with a clean cloth, water and mild soap.
SKIN MEDICATIONS
Acne medications unblock pores by drying up oil and promoting peeling. Many are available without a prescription and come in solutions that help cover up redness and scarring. Sunlight may temporarily clear up skin, but it can have other damaging effects — especially if drying agents or antibiotics are being used.
A doctor can prescribe stronger versions of topical skin medications or a special formulation of vitamin A, called retinoic acid (Retin-A), and antibiotics. Vitamin A also may be prescribed for severe cases and should be taken only as directed by your doctor — too much of it can be toxic.
Final notes
Carefully follow the directions, warnings and precautions on any drugs you use. Call your doctor if you have questions. And be patient — it may take two to six weeks or more to see progress with any of these self-care treatments or medications.
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BRAIN DUALITY IN ACTION: A LIFELONG SHIFT
Now let’s consider a lifelong perspective. In most studies of the changes in brain function with development, the implicit question is, “How do children differ from adults?” But recently, with the growing interest in aging, the question has been extended to “How do younger adults differ from older adults?”
Anti-Psychotics
Over the last decade, this question was asked in a number of functional neuroimaging studies using PET and fMRI. The patterns of brain activity were compared in adults at different stages in their lives. The findings showed an ongoing progression of the right-to-left shift of the “center of cognitive gravity” throughout the life span. In younger adults, a decidedly greater extent of activation is present in the right prefrontal cortex than in the left prefrontal cortex. But in older adults, the left prefrontal cortex becomes much more active. Again the effect does not seem to depend on the nature of the task, whether it is verbal dike word recognition) or visuospatial (like facial recognition). The right-to-left shift of the center of cognitive gravity seems to be a lifelong phenomenon extending from childhood through middle age through advanced age. This idea, first proposed by two prescient friends of mine, Jason Brown and Joseph Jaffe, is finding increasing empirical support.
So it appears that the right-to-left shift in the locus of cognitive control is a fundamental cycle of the journey of our mind not only in our passage from childhood to adulthood, but also throughout our whole life span. In the beginning of this chapter, we discussed how these changes are studied in the laboratory. But now we know that similar changes occur on the scale of human life. Contrary to previously well-entrenched beliefs, the right hemisphere is the dominant hemisphere at early stages of life. But as we move through the life span it gradually loses ground to the left hemisphere, as the latter accumulates an ever-increasing “library” of efficient pattern-recognition devices in the form of neural attractors. The right hemisphere is of foremost importance in our youth, the season of daring, of navigating uncharted waters. The left hemisphere is of foremost importance in mature years, the season of wisdom, of seeing new things through the prism of vast past experience.
How can we understand the differences in knowledge representation in the two hemispheres that account for their different roles at various stages of learning? As I am writing this book, these differences are the focus of intense research both with functional neuroimaging and with computational methods. But for now, the more scientifically minded readers of this book may find the following analogy helpful. The analogy involves descriptive statistics, the simplest way of representing large data sets even before any elaborate analysis (“inferential statistics”) is conducted. In descriptive statistics, the same set of data can be represented in two different ways: as group data and as a cloud of individual data points. The first representation is a grand average that captures the essence of the totality of all previous experiences, but in which the details, the specifics, are lost. The second representation is a library of specific experiences, but without the ability to extract the essential generalities.
Group data are represented by means and standard deviations. By contrast, individual data points are represented by scatter-plot diagrams. When new information arrives, the two respective representations will be updated in two very different ways. The group data will have to be recalculated every time such new information is received, resulting in a new mean and a new standard deviation. By contrast, the scatter-plot diagram will be updated by merely adding individual new data points.
Think of the right hemisphere as representing the organism’s cumulative knowledge through some cortical means and standard deviations of sorts, as the “grand means” of all prior experiences, but with the loss of details. Think of the left hemisphere as a cortical scatter-plot diagram of sorts, as a library of relatively specific representations, each corresponding to a relatively narrow class of similar situations.
Suppose now that the organism encounters a new cognitive challenge. If it resonates with at least one of the specific representations (attractors) contained in the left hemisphere, the cognitive challenge is recognized as familiar and is dealt with according to previously acquired experience specific to that type of situation. But if no such resonance occurs, the cognitive challenge at hand is recognized as truly novel. Since it does not correspond to any situation-specific knowledge at the person’s disposal, the only way to approach the situation is through the default “averaged” information contained in the right hemisphere.
Suppose, for instance, a jar with a jelly-like substance turns up in your kitchen. If your left hemisphere recognizes it as fruit jam, you may decide to eat it. If your left hemisphere recognizes it as liquid soap, you may put it in the dishwasher. But if you fail to recognize it as anything familiar at all, if in other words you don’t know what it is, the default option contained in the right hemisphere would be to treat it with caution and maybe throw it away.
So as we age, we accumulate the generic memories, which allow us increasingly to employ shortcut problem-solving skills to escape the grinding mental work required to crack new mental challenges, and to condense it into pattern recognition. Our “library of patterns” accumulates throughout our lifetimes. These patterns are stored in the left hemisphere. As a result, with age we rely increasingly on our left hemisphere and decreasingly on our right hemisphere. As we accumulate mental patterns, the ratio of hemispheric use, so to speak, shifts inexorably from right to left. This, in turn, is fraught with its own set of profound consequences for the brain and for the resistance of the two hemispheres to the effects of aging. We will discuss this later in the book, in chapter thirteen.
But meanwhile it is time to examine the relationship between novelty, cerebral hemispheres, and the frontal lobes. The right hemisphere is not the only part of the brain that is important for dealing with cognitive novelty. We know from the previous chapter that the frontal lobes also play a critical role in this regard. Functional neuroimaging studies have shown that the frontal lobes are particularly active when the organism is faced with novel challenges. As tasks become familiar, autonomous, and effortless, the role of the prefrontal cortex diminishes.
Not surprisingly, creativity depends on frontal-lobe function as well. Ingegerd Carlsson and her colleagues studied prefrontal regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in people with low and high creativity (where creativity was measured with a special psychological test). Resting frontal rCBF levels were higher in the high-creativity group. When a cognitive challenge was introduced, the high-creativity group showed bilateral frontal activation, and the low-creativity group showed only left frontal activation. So it appears that both right and left frontal lobes participate in problem-solving in highly creative individuals, but in less creative individuals only the left prefrontal cortex participates. A similar study suggested that faced with a task requiring ingenuity, creative people rise to the occasion with an increased right-hemisphere activity. Right-sided activation is particularly pronounced in the frontal lobes. By contrast, the less-creative people remain at the mercy of the left hemisphere, with the right hemisphere being relatively inactive.
Since the transfer of the “center of cognitive gravity” from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere seems to be a universal phenomenon of moving through life, the following question is in order: Does this mean that it occurs in all people with clockwork uniformity, or is there some room for individual differences? Knowing what we already learned about the brain and cognition, one might expect the latter.
Indeed, in some people creativity is a lifelong trait, undiminished by aging. Are their brains wired differently, and how? Consider the following mental experiment. Suppose we had a psychological test at our disposal allowing us to measure wisdom. Suppose that with the help of this test we could identify wise and not-so-wise people. Suppose, further, that we faced our subjects with a problem whose solution required wisdom. What would be the differences between brain-activation patterns in the wise and not-so-wise people? I believe that a particularly strong activation of the left prefrontal regions would emerge as the hallmark of wisdom. And those among us who attained wisdom with age while retaining the gift of creativity will exhibit a particularly strong activation of both right and left prefrontal regions.
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