Jimini Health

Children conceived during the Dutch Hunger Winter went on to have higher rates of diabetes and obesity decades later. Their bodies had been prepared before birth for a world of scarcity that was gone by the time they arrived. On this week’s Neural Compass, Dr. Angus Macbeth takes that question to the psychological side: what do we actually know about how experience before birth shapes mental health? Angus is a clinical psychologist and senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Live this Wednesday. #MentalHealth #Epigenetics #NeuralCompass #JiminiHealth

Attachment theory is usually taught as a story about infants. On this week’s Neural Compass, Dr. Angus Macbeth explains why it matters just as much for adults, and how patterns of trauma and resilience pass from one generation to the next. Angus is a clinical psychologist and senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Live this Wednesday. #MentalHealth #AttachmentTheory #NeuralCompass #JiminiHealth

Most research on intergenerational mental health asks how trauma gets passed down. Dr. Angus Macbeth’s team asked the other question: what gets passed down that protects? Their review, published in Nature Psychology, covers the first thousand days of life. It looks at how parental mental health shapes a child’s, and at what buffers against it: social support, a positive sense of oneself as a caregiver, and safe communities. No single factor is large. They add up. Angus is a clinical psychologist and senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. The new episode of Neural Compass is live now. #MentalHealth #Resilience #NeuralCompass #neural-compass-jimini-health

What if practicing more doesn't make you learn any faster? This week on Neural Compass, we're joined by Prof. Vijay Mohan K Namboodiri, who studies how dopamine drives learning in the brain. For more than fifty years, the standard view has been that we learn by making predictions and then fixing them when they're wrong. Vijay's work offers a different explanation. He says we learn through "retrodictions," meaning we look back in time to figure out what caused something. If you get sick after trying a new restaurant, you don't predict it. You look back and connect the two. His model also predicts something hard to believe. Within a fixed amount of time, the number of repetitions doesn't affect how much you learn. Space your experiences 10 times further apart, and each one produces 10 times more learning. The two effects cancel out exactly. Podcast live right now. Link in the comments. #Neuroscience #Dopamine #Learning #NeuralCompass #JiminiHealth

Big Update! This week on Neural Compass, we're joined by Adeel Razi. He just published the largest single-site brain-imaging study ever done on psilocybin, five years in the making. 62 people took the drug while resting, meditating, listening to music, or watching a movie, and the same dose produced completely different brain reorganization depending on what they were doing, with stronger reorganization linked to better outcomes the next day. It's live right now. Link's in the comments, go press play. You absolutely don't want to miss this one. #Psychedelics #Neuroscience #MentalHealth #NeuralCompass #JiminiHealth

Think about how you feel when you're sick. You lose interest in things, you stay in bed, you stop eating, you sleep constantly, and you're exhausted. A few days later, it lifts. Naoise Mac Giollabhui, a clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School who directs research on inflammatory depression at Mass General, explains why those symptoms look so much like depression. The immune system and the brain are wired together, and immune activation tells the body to spend less energy and pull back from other people. Useful for a few days with an infection. A different situation when the activation is chronic. The full conversation with Mark Jacobstein is now live on Neural Compass. #MentalHealth #BehavioralHealth #Depression #NeuralCompass