Dr. John Medina, developmental molecular biologist, gives an informative and humorous talk at Google about brain science and his book “Brain Rules”.

In this talk he talks about brain rule number one which is that aerobic exercise boosts cognitive performance especially executive function. He says “if you have an active lifestyle you have a 50% reduction in the risk of Alzheimer”. He answers the question of how much exercise if required to get these benefits: Two to three times a week for 20 minutes per session. Aerobic exercise increases blood flow to the dentate gyrus of brain and elevates BDNF which is like Miracle Grow for brains.

Then he talks about stress on the brain. Stressed brains does not learn the same way and hurts learning. He says “stress damages cognition in virtually every way cognition can be measured.”

And he ends with the most important brain rule of all: curiosity.

Mark Bittman goes over the history of how we eat and explains what is wrong with the way we eat today. He advocates eating more plants and less animals — both for our own health as well as help prevent global warming. Oh, you didn’t know that raising cattle contribute to global warming? Mark Bittman says “livestock is the second highest contributing factor to atmosphere-altering gases. Nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gases is generated by livestock production — more than transportation.”

In this 2004 documentary “Super Size Me”, Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald’s for a whole month. Doctors tracked what happens to his health during this experiment. The film explores the obesity epidemic and how much fast food is contributing to this.

Brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor gave this talk at TED where she showed us a real brain and how it consists of two separate halves. The right half thinks in parallel and knows the concept of “we”. The left half thinks in serial and knows that concept of “I”. One day she had a stroke on the left hemisphere and she is able to describe to us today what happened on that day as her brain functions started to shut down. She described how she lost the normal brain chatter that are always in our head, how she gained a perspective as an outsider looking at herself, and how she experienced nirvana.

This is the full-length two-hour long documentary found on Google Video.

Michael Moore’s film “Sicko” compares (sometimes with ironic humor) at the US’s broken healthcare system with universal health care systems in other countries such as Canada, Britain, France, and even Cuba.
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Eva Vertes poses some interesting questions about cancer. Could it be that cancer is the body own immune system go awry and unable to complete the process?