Play Time – The Healthy Mind Platter (3/8)


Daily Life, Neuroscience, Theoretics


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Play time – The joy of experimenting with life Play, which may seem like a frivolous, unimportant behavior with no apparent purpose, has earned new respect as biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists and others see that play is indeed serious business and is perhaps equally important to other basic drives of sleep, rest, and food. Neuroscience research reveals that play-joy is a basic emotional system and essential in child development and adult creativity and learning. It has been suggested that play is an important behavioral tendency that does not require learning, is an “experience-expectant” process that has adaptive neurodevelopmental effects which promote later adaptive behaviors and which help program higher brain regions involved in emotional behaviors.

Sleep Time – The Healthy Mind Platter (2/8)


Daily Life, Neuroscience, Theoretics


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Sleep time – Refreshing mind and body, and consolidating memory. Sleep is a highly complex and vital process which is essential for the biological balance of the mammalian organism (Benington, 2000), and thought to be critical for homeostatic restoration, thermoregulation, tissue repair, immunity, memory processing, and emotion regulation. Accordingly, sleep deprivation can more lethal than food deprivation.

An introduction to The Healthy Mind Platter (1/8)


Daily Life, Neuroscience, Theoretics


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The Dutch and the US government have the food pyramid – the diagram that’s been with us for decades that is supposed to remind people how to eat well. The model is called Choose my plate , is a big improvement. However, there’s a different epidemic happening out there that’s getting less attention, perhaps because it is less obvious than the epidemic of obesity we’re experiencing. We’re entering an era of an epidemic of overwhelm.

Congress in Berlin 2019


Congres & Symposium, Humour, Way of Life


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On the 28th of Februari and the 1st of March 2019 I was invited to give a presentation about Humour as a Nursing Intervention at the 28th International Conference on Neurology and Therapeutics 2019. On this congress I found myself the odd duckling because there where all doctors (except for 2 others, a physiotherapist and a researcher).

Are Girls with Autism Hiding in Plain Sight?


Autism, Daily Life, Neuroscience


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Autism primarily affects boys, right? Officially, boys exceed girls with autism by 4 to 1 (and 10 to 1 in “high-functioning” autism).1 In fact, almost everything we know about autism comes from studying boys. But now some scientists are making discoveries that are challenging common assumptions about autism, girls and gender.

Humor and Those Aha Moments


Humour, Laughter, Neuroscience, Theoretics


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Hearing just the first few words, your brain springs into action. The path of neuronal activity is a complex one that enlists various brain regions: the frontal lobe, to process the information; the supplementary motor area, to tap learned experience to direct motor activities such as the movements associated with laughter; and the nucleus accumbens, to assess the pleasure of the story and the reward that the “aha!” brings.