can humans live forever

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying." So said American director Woody Allen. We've been raised with the belief that death is inevitable, so we must consider the legacy of what we'll leave behind. But what if you had unlimited time to pursue your life's work? What if you didn't have to die?

The idea of living forever might seem like one that's limited to fairy tales, particularly if you were born in 1800, when the average life expectancy was 35 years   Now, though, men in the U.S. have a life expectancy of 75 years; women 80  . If life expectancy can more than double in 200 years, then might it double again? Could it do so infinitely?

Some researchers believe that there's a limit on how many years a human being could live, the maximum being 125. Others see a world in which we have centenarians walking around with people who have lived for 500 or 1,000 years. Diseases related to aging, like dementia and  heart disease, currently block us from reaching that point. Our body parts wear out from use. In the quest for immortality, then, scientists are focused on how to stop aging from occurring within the body.

One method that has demonstrably increased the lifespan of creatures such as mice is a calorie-restricted diet. To follow this diet, you must cut your caloric intake by 30 percent while still consuming all necessary nutrients. This eating plan has proven difficult for humans to maintain, so researchers are trying to figure out how, exactly, fewer calories lengthen life. If they can solve that puzzle, they may be able to replicate the mechanism in pill form.

Anti-aging pills could also be used to halt the production of free radicals, which are molecules that cause increasing damage within the body as we age. Researchers are also considering whether compounds like resveratrol, which is found in red wine, could be effective in pill form, as resveratrol might have the ability to interfere with the aging process at the genetic level. Some scientists think that telomerase, an enzyme that mends protective coverings on cells, is the answer, while some would-be centenarians have begun injections of human growth hormone, hoping they will stop the body from aging.

As you might be able to tell, there are many theories on why we age and how we can stop it, and an anti-aging pill may be decades away -- if it ever appears at all. One challenge to the pursuit of an anti-aging pill is how long humans already live; while current studies with mice or yeast  cells are feasible, a study on a human could take, well, 75 or 80 years.
Some people aren't going to wait that long. Take Ray Kurzweil: He claims that by 2045, an event known as "the singularity" will occur, and humans will become one with machines [source:  

Flesh and blood aren't ideal materials for longevity, so we'll turn to materials that are a bit more durable. Other futurists envision a world in which a  computer serves as backup for our brain and silicone parts will take the place of frail limbs.

As scientists figure out whether we'll be part machine or hopped up on resveratrol, it's probably best not to abandon your life's legacy just yet.

Why is keeping a secret so difficult for some people

Though his 18-year-old patient Ida Bauer was “in the first bloom of youth,” Sigmund Freud wrote in 1905, she had come to him suffering from coughing fits and episodes of speechlessness. She’d become depressed and withdrawn, even hinting at suicide.

During one session, as he tried to help her uncover the source of her sickness, Freud observed Bauer toying with a small handbag. Interpreting the act as an expression of repressed desire, Freud concluded, “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”

Sometimes a handbag is just a handbag, but modern research does support the idea that secrecy can be a source of mental and physical distress.
 Keeping a secret, as the idiom suggests, requires constant effort. In one recent study, subjects asked to conceal their sexual orientation in an interview performed worse on a spatial-ability task, reacted more rudely to criticism, and gave up sooner in a test of handgrip endurance   And the bigger the secret, the harder it is to keep. Another study found that subjects asked to recall a meaningful secret perceived hills to be steeper and distances to be longer than those asked to recall a trivial secret.
When researchers requested help moving books from their lab, the subjects harboring meaningful secrets lifted fewer stacks  .

All of that mental exertion might actually wear a body down: research shows an association between keeping an emotionally charged secret and ailments ranging from the common cold to chronic diseases  .

 Other evidence in favor of disclosure includes multiple studies showing that writing about a traumatic experience can boost the immune system  and the finding that teens who confide in a parent or close friend report fewer physical complaints and less delinquent behavior, loneliness, and depression than those who sit on their secrets  .

One reason secret keeping is such hard work is that secrets, like unwanted thoughts, tend to take up more brain space the more one tries not to think about them. But not everyone is equally prone to this self-defeating cycle. Researchers have identified a small class of “repressors,” who experience fewer intrusive thoughts about sensitive information they are suppressing: these clandestine elite may keep their secrets so tightly wrapped that they manage to hide them even from themselves .

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Why do humans love sugar?

Why do humans love sugar?

We can blame our sweet tooth on our primate ancestors.
Millions and millions of years ago, apes survived on sugar-rich fruit. These animals evolved to like riper fruit because it had a higher sugar content than unripe fruit and therefore supplied more energy.
  
 And sugar offers more than just energy — it helps us store fat, too.

When we eat table sugar, our bodies break this down into glucose and fructose. Importantly, fructose appears to activate processes in your body that make you want to hold on to fat,
 At a time when food was scarce and meals inconsistent — hunting is significantly less reliable than a drive-through — hanging on to fat was an advantage, not a health risk.

This adaptation was a survival mechanism: Eat fructose and decrease the likelihood you will starve to death.

The sweet taste was adaptive in other ways as well. In the brain, sugar stimulates the "feel-good" chemical dopamine. This euphoric response makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, since our hunter-gatherer ancestors predisposed to "get hooked" on sugar probably had a better chance of survival .

In other words, anything that made people more likely to eat sugar would also make them more likely to survive and pass along their genes. 

All the food challenges our prehistoric ancestors faced mean that biologically, we have trained ourselves to crave sweets. The problem today is that humans have too much of the sweet stuff available to them.
"For millions of years, our cravings and digestive systems were exquisitely balanced because sugar was rare. Apart from honey, most of the foods our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate were no sweeter than a carrot. The invention of farming made starchy foods more abundant, but it wasn’t until very recently that technology made pure sugar bountiful."

Weight gain was not a real risk when our instincts meant we might scarf down the nutritional equivalent of a carrot whenever we happened to stumble across one. Drinking soda all day — the contemporary equivalent — is a different story.

Dance Therapy

Dance Therapy — History & Philosophy Throughout the ages, cultures have relied on dance to convey emotion, tell stories, communicate with each other and the supernatural — and to treat illness. Individuals embraced its rhythms as a therapeutic experience, and healers employed its movements as an intrinsic accompaniment to the ritual of healing. The power of dance to communicate, express, and restore underlies the ability of dance therapy to heal to this day. Modern dance therapy, also called dance/movement therapy, finds its origins with modern dance pioneers like Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. They transformed dance from stylized forms like ballet into a self-expressive, spontaneous form, where individuality was encouraged. In the 1940s, after turning to a career as a dance instructor, Marian Chace noticed that for some of her students dance was an emotional outlet for feelings they needed to express, not just a series of movements. She encouraged her students to concentrate on experiencing these emotions through movement, rather than focusing on the actual technique of the dance routine.  Chace said of her work, “this rhythmic action in unison with others results in a feeling of well-being, relaxation, and good fellowship.” Chace went on to study at the Washington School of Psychiatry and to teach her theory of dance therapy. She believed that the communication of the dance fulfilled a basic human need, and her work provided insights into the relationship of movements and their therapeutic effect, how speech or narrative can assist in both group and individual settings, how rhythmic movement helps with organizing and clarifying processes, and how dance serves to unify a group. The field of dance therapy was expanding. Around WWII, the work of psychoanalytic pioneers like Freud and Jung made their mark on the Dance Therapy movement. One of them was Mary Starks Whitehouse, who would become a Jungian analyst. She developed a process called “movement-in-depth” based on her knowledge of dance, movement and depth psychology. This form of dance therapy is known today as “authentic movement,” a process where patients dance their feelings about an internal image that provides insight into issues in their past or current life. Chase assisted in the formation of the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) in 1966 and served as its first president. The ADTA gave formal recognition to the field of dance therapy. According to the ADTA dance therapy is “the psychotherapeutic use of movement as a process which furthers the emotional, social, cognitive, and physical integration of the individual.” Dance therapists believe that the body, mind, and emotions, are interrelated and that the state of the body has a positive or negative affect on our attitude and feelings. Illness, injury, emotional and physical trauma can cause us to become out of balance and our way of expression and functioning in the world changes as well. Dance therapy seeks to open up these restrictions by allowing the patient to uncover and express them in movement, integrating and accepting them as part of the whole. It also provides a means of communication beyond the self, enabling the individual to go beyond any isolation to connect, share and express common ground with others. Dance therapy provides can be helpful for a wide range of patients and problems. It is useful for those with restricted movement of movement, whether from arthritis, aging, degenerative disease, or other causes. For the chronically ill or dying, it can aid in dealing with issues of death, pain and changes in body image.  Children, who don’t have the patience or attention span for other forms of therapy, can benefit from the openness that comes with expressive dance. Adults whose emotions have been buried or who are not in touch with their feelings, as well as victims of abuse who are otherwise unable to articulate their problem, may find insight and release through dance. Even those confined to wheelchairs can move their upper body in response to musical rhythms. Dance therapy can assist in interpersonal relationship within the family and can serve as communicator for those with speech and learning disabilities and autism. It is also a means of relaxation and stress reduction. Dance’s expressive element may also add an aesthetic and spiritual dimension to the experience. An evolving area of dance therapy is its in disease prevention and health promotion programs for the chronically ill. In her article “Healing in motion: dance therapy meets diverse needs,” Horowitz identifies the following as goals of dance therapy: 1. to foster a physically and emotionally safe, non-judgmental environment that is respectful of individual limitations and achievements 2. to facilitate individual expression and communication with other people 3. to increase body awareness, spontaneity, creativity and a healthy self-image 4. to promote and integrate emotional stability (including anger management and stress reduction) 5. to support personal growth through insight, energy, and an expanded movement repertoire Watching a patient’s movements during therapy provides tremendous insight into the dynamics of the individual or the group. According to Dr. Fran Levy, author of Dance and Other Expressive Art Therapies: When Words Are Not Enough, “body movement reflects inner emotional states and …changes in movement behavior can lead to changes in the psyche, thus promoting health and growth.” In 1993, the Office of Alternative Medicine, now the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health, awarded the American Dance Therapy Association one of the first grants to explore dance movement therapy in patients with medical illnesses.

how the completely blind dream. It turns out that if they went completely blind before around the age of 5-7 years old, they will typically dream without any visual experiences. In the very few cases where some report having visual experiences in their dreams, these experiences are more in the abstract sense where they feel like they were seeing something, even though they couldn’t actually recollect or describe when they woke up what the thing looked liked that they saw. This is similar to how occasionally in dreams you can just “know” something, even though there is nothing specifically that you are experiencing in the dream which should indicate what you know. For instance, in a dream where when you wake up, you remember feeling like you were in danger in the dream, even though nothing you can recall in the dream indicated any danger. There was just some abstract sense of it. Outside of the interesting “around the age of 5-7″ cutoff for visual dream experiences, the dreams of those who are completely blind before this age tend to be principally auditory in nature. However, what is also fascinating is that, compared to those who can see and hear, the blind report drastically increased taste/smell/touch sensations in their dreams, not just auditory sensations taking over for the lack of visual sensations. Now if they go completely blind after around the age of 5-7, the vast majority of completely blind people will at first dream very similar dreams to those who are not blind, albeit, once again, with more non-visual sensory experiences than is reported by those who can see and hear. But nevertheless, their visual experiences in their dreams tend to be quite similar to those who can see. If they had diminished vision early on in life though, perhaps only seeing colors, then their visual experiences in their dreams tend to be similarly diminished based on those visual experiences. As time passes, they typicall

How the completely blind dream.

It turns out that if they went completely blind before around the age of 5-7 years old, they will typically dream without any visual experiences.  In the very few cases where some report having visual experiences in their dreams, these experiences are more in the abstract sense where they feel like they were seeing something, even though they couldn’t actually recollect or describe when they woke up what the thing looked liked that they saw.  This is similar to how occasionally in dreams you can just “know” something, even though there is nothing specifically that you are experiencing in the dream which should indicate what you know. For instance, in a dream where when you wake up, you remember feeling like you were in danger in the dream, even though nothing you can recall in the dream indicated any danger.  There was just some abstract sense of it.

Outside of the interesting “around the age of 5-7″ cutoff for visual dream experiences, the dreams of those who are completely blind before this age tend to be principally auditory in nature.  However, what is also fascinating is that, compared to those who can see and hear, the blind report drastically increased taste/smell/touch sensations in their dreams, not just auditory sensations taking over for the lack of visual sensations.

Now if they go completely blind after around the age of 5-7, the vast majority of completely blind people will at first dream very similar dreams to those who are not blind, albeit, once again, with more non-visual sensory experiences than is reported by those who can see and hear.  But nevertheless, their visual experiences in their dreams tend to be quite similar to those who can see.  If they had diminished vision early on in life though, perhaps only seeing colors, then their visual experiences in their dreams tend to be similarly diminished based on those visual experiences.   As time passes, they typically will report more and more prevalence of experiences from the other senses and less and less visual experiences in dreams.  Often the visual experiences will become more vague and “blurry” as time passes, but they do seem to remain to some extent throughout the blind person’s entire life.

Left Brain vs.Right:It,s a Myth

 

Left Brain vs. Right: It's a Myth, Research Finds

It's the foundation of myriad personality assessment tests, self-motivation books and team-building exercises – and it's all bunk.
Popular culture would have you believe that logical, methodical and analytical people are left-brain dominant, while the  creative and artistic types are right-brain dominant. Trouble is, science never really supported this notion.

Now, scientists at the University of Utah have debunked the myth with an analysis of more than 1,000 brains. They found no evidence that people preferentially use their  left or right brain.All of the study participants — and no doubt the scientists — were using their entire brain equally, throughout the course of the experiment.

 
The preference to use one brain region more than others for certain functions, which scientists call lateralization, is indeed real, said lead author Dr. Jeff Anderson, director of the fMRI Neurosurgical Mapping Service at the University of Utah. For example, speech emanates from the left side of the brain for most right-handed people. This does not imply, though, that great writers or speakers use their left side of the brain more than the right, or that one side is richer in neurons.
There is a misconception that everything to do with  being analytic is confined to one side of the brain, and everything to do with being creative is confined to the opposite side, Anderson said. In fact, it is the connections among all brain regions that enable humans to engage in both creativity and analytical thinking.

"It is not the case that the left hemisphere is associated with logic or reasoning more than the right," Anderson told LiveScience. "Also, creativity is no more processed in the right hemisphere than the left."

Anderson's team examined brain scans of participants ages 7 to 29 while they were resting. They looked at  activity in 7,000 brain regions, and examined neural connections within and between these regions. Although they saw pockets of heavy neural traffic in certain key regions, on average, both sides of the brain were essentially equal in their neural networks and connectivity.
"We just don't see patterns where the whole left-brain network is more connected, or the whole right-brain network is more connected in some people," said Jared Nielsen, a graduate student and first author on the new study.

The myth of people being either "left-brained" or "right-brained" might have arisen from the Nobel Prize-winning research of Roger Sperry, which was done in the 1960s. Sperry studied patients with epilepsy, who were treated with a surgical procedure that cut the brain along a structure called the corpus callosum. Because the corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain, the left and right sides of these patients' brains could no longer communicate.
Sperry and other researchers, through a series of clever studies, determined which parts, or sides, of the brain were involved in language, math, drawing and other functions in these patients. But then popular-level psychology enthusiasts ran with this idea, creating the notion that personalities and other human attributes are determined by having one side of the brain dominate the other.
The neuroscience community never bought into this notion, Anderson said, and now we have evidence from more than 1,000 brain scans showing absolutely no signs of left or right dominance.

Anderson said he wasn't out to do some myth busting. His team's goal is to better understand brain lateralization to treat conditions such as Down syndrome, autism or schizophrenia, where the left and right hemispheres have atypical roles.

So, should you trash your app that tries to determine if you are a left-brain or right-brain thinker? Both sides of your brain, as well as neuroscientists, say yes.

Plantanas

The wonderful thing about plátanos (plantains) is that they truly are a versatile food. As a plátano ripens, its high starch content changes to sugar. Plátanos are good at any stage; it just depends on what you want to make. Plátanos are a relative of the banana, but are bigger, less sweet and need to be cooked before they are eaten. Plátanos also keep their shape when cooked, unlike bananas, which get mushy.

Green or "unripe" plátanos are starchy vegetables. They can be used in soups, stews, boiled and mashed. Most Puerto Rican recipes that use plátanos call for green plátanos and need to be VERY green without a hint of yellow.

The next stage of ripeness is when the skin is mostly yellow with a few black speckles. In this stage of ripeness, the plátanos has lost some of its starch and is slightly sweet. Plátanos "amarillos" are usually fried but can be boiled and baked as well. To fry them just peel, slice, and fry.  In Puerto Rico both green and amarillos are served with meals as a side dish.

If you need ripe plátanoss and only have green ones, they ripen at room temperature, out of direct sunlight, in a few days.

Did you know that there are over 500 different types of bananas. That means if you ate a different kind of banana everyday, it would take almost a year and a half to eat every one.

Although generally regarded as a tree, this large tropical plant is really an herb. That means it does not have a woody trunk like a tree. The compacted, water-filled leaf stalk is composed of leaf sheaths that overlap each other and grow from an underground stem called a rhizome..

The banana plant can grow as high as 20 feet (or 6 meters) tall. That's as big as a 2 story house. They are the world's largest herb.
Bananas are not just green and yellow, some bananas are red.
Bananas are almost fat free. One banana is about 99.5% fat free! An average banana contains about 90 calories.
Bananas are great source of potassium. Potassium helps build muscle power and keeps your body fluids in balance.

Plátanos are a type of banana that is treated like a vegetable. It is not eaten raw and needs to be cooked.

Plátanos and banana trees can be purchased in plant nurseries. Keep indoors as houseplants. They like moisture and heat. Mist the leaves often.

As the green color of bananas turns to yellow, the starch in the fruit turns to sugar. .