A study reveals that deaths due to suicide increase significantly during the full moon week!

"We wanted to analyze the hypothesis that suicides increase around the full moon and determine whether high-risk patients should be followed more closely during those times," said Dr. Aleksandar Niculescu.

Niculescu and his team looked at data from the Marion County Coroner's Office in Indiana on suicides that occurred from 2012-2016. They found that deaths by suicide increased significantly during the week of the full moon, with people over the age of 55 showing the largest increase. They also looked at the time of day and months in which suicides occurred, and found that they most often occur between 3 and 4 pm, and September is the peak time for suicides.

The team recently published their findings in Discover Mental Health.

"From a clinical perspective and a public health perspective, we found some important messages to consider in this study: high-risk patients should be closely followed during the week of the full moon, during the late afternoons and possibly in September," Niculescu explained.

Niculescu and his team have previously developed blood biomarker tests for other mental health conditions (anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder) and for pain.

Using blood samples that the pathologist had previously taken from some people, the team was able to work out which vital signs were present.

"We tested a list of blood biomarkers for suicidality that we had identified in previous studies," Niculescu said. "It appears that the suicidality biomarkers that are predictive of suicide during the full moon, peak hour of the day, and peak month of the year compared to outside those periods are genes that regulate the body's internal clock." It's called the circadian clock. Using biomarkers, we also found that people with alcohol use disorder or depression may be at increased risk during these time periods."

Niculescu indicated that the increased light from the full moon could be what leads to an increase in suicides during that period.

Ambient light plays a major role in the body's circadian rhythm, the natural 24-hour cycle our bodies follow to regulate when we sleep and when we're awake. Moonlight can affect people at a time when it should be darker.

"The effect of ambient light and body clocks in suicide needs to be closely studied, along with how people sleep and are exposed to light. Changes in light can affect people at risk, in combination with other risk factors," Niculescu added.

For the two peak periods for suicide, Niculescu explained, the peak in suicides from 3 to 4 p.m. could be related to stressors throughout the day as well as the onset of low light, which causes decreased expression of circadian genes and cortisol. In September, many people experience the end of their summer vacations, which can cause stress, in addition to the effects of seasonal affective disorder, as daylight decreases during that time of year.

"Our work shows that the full moon, fall season, and late afternoon are time windows in which suicide risk is increased, particularly in individuals with depression or alcohol use disorders," Niculescu said. In the future, Niculescu hopes to study whether exposure to screens at night contributes to an increase in suicide in individuals, especially young adults. Source: Medical Express

Why are some people always late?

We all know someone who never seems to be on time, whether it's a lunch date or a business meeting. But is there a good explanation for why some people are always late?

The habit of being late is likely caused by a number of factors, including perception of time, time management and personality, experts say.

"It's possible that there is a mechanism in the brain that causes some people to be late to meetings because they shorten the time it will take them to get there," said Hugo Spiers, professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and co-author of the 2017 study in the journal Hippocampus.

Spiers said the hippocampus is a region of the brain that handles aspects of time, such as remembering when to do something and how long it takes. Research published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience suggests that neurons in the hippocampus that act as "time cells" contribute to our perception and memory of events, but it's not clear why some people don't always estimate time.

One factor may be how well we know space. For the 2017 study, Spiers asked 20 students who had recently moved to London to map a college area and estimate travel times to different destinations. While students' area estimates expand if they know the area well, their travel time scale shrinks with familiarity.

"If you get really familiar with the space, you start to minimize the hassle it's going to take," Spiers said.

In some cases, people who are late may not take the time to complete tasks unrelated to commuting, such as getting ready in the morning. Research published in the journal Memory & Cognition indicates that we make time estimates based on how long we think tasks took in the past, but our memories and perceptions are not always accurate.

“If we have a lot of experience performing a task, we are likely to underestimate the time it will take,” said Emily Waldum, assistant professor at Campbell University in North Carolina and lead author of a 2016 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. In the study, Waldom found that environmental factors, such as music, can distort your sense of time.

Specifically, Waldum showed that when doing a task of general knowledge questions, some subjects incorrectly estimated the length of the task based on the number of songs they heard while it was playing in the background. Younger adults tended to inflate their time estimates if they heard four short songs compared to two longer songs, something that didn't seem to affect older people's perception of time.

Overcrowding may be another environmental factor. And in a 2022 study in the Journal of Virtual Reality, researchers asked participants to estimate the length of simulated metro rides that were more or less crowded. They found that crowded commutes were felt to take 10% longer than less crowded commutes, which was associated with an unpleasant experience.

Personality also plays a role in the delay. Waldam said some personality traits, such as decreased awareness, can make some people forget tasks they've planned in advance. "Another factor that may affect a person's timing is how prone they are to multitasking," she added.

And research published in the journal Advances in Cognitive Psychology showed that people who juggle many tasks at once are less likely to remember and complete other scheduled tasks on time.

"The best laid plans can fail simply because we don't have enough attention resources to carry them out successfully," Waldam said.

And sometimes latecomers don't see themselves that way, says Grace Bassey, author of Late! The Timebender's Guide to Why We're Late and How We Can Change. This is because people who fall behind schedule tell themselves and others that they can be punctual. "We can be on time when it matters, when there are negative consequences for being late, like missing a flight," Passi said.

But in the absence of a deadline, these people often lose track of time. And a 2019 review published in the journal Medical Science Monitor found that individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may have difficulty processing and appreciating the passage of time.

Some people struggle to be on time because they intentionally delay tasks. "Tardiness can be a symptom of procrastination," said Fuchsia Serwa, a professor of psychology at Durham University in England. Procrastination is usually rooted in a difficult emotional connection to a task.

The difference between procrastination and delay, Pacey said, is that the latter affects our relationships with others.

A self-proclaimed "timekeeper," Pacey suggested setting alarms and reminders on your phone. One of her tried and tested tactics is setting deadlines before the event. "My favorite trick is to offer someone a ride," she said. "That means you arrange to meet them at a reasonable time. Source: Live Science

An optical illusion that can reveal if you have schizophrenia

Schizophrenia, or schizophrenia, is a disorder that affects the way people act, think and perceive reality. It is often difficult to diagnose and treat.

And there is no single test for schizophrenia, which means that many people can go a long time without a diagnosis, and this means the difficulty of treatment, as the earlier schizophrenia is treated, the better.

Schizophrenia is a severe and long-term health condition that makes sufferers unable to distinguish their thoughts from reality, but a recent joint study between specialist scientists from Germany and the United Kingdom, published in the journal NeuroImage, found that patients with schizophrenia are not deceived by an optical illusion.

The scientists said the way patients viewed the "hollow mask" video could help diagnose mental condition.

And the video is of a white face mask spinning in the air. To healthy viewers, the back of the mask will appear convex, like the front of the mask, when it should appear concave.

The illusion is said to be so powerful that even when viewers become aware of the illusion, they continue to be unable to distinguish the concave face.

The German scientists explained that this is because the illusion evokes the way the brain processes the visual world.

The scientists explained that our brains know from experience that faces are convex, so our brains process the image in a way that makes sense to us and conforms to this expectation. And this expectation is so powerful that it is able to outpace what we actually see.

It is known that people with schizophrenia are immune to some illusions of vision. The latest study confirms that patients with schizophrenia are not deceived by the "hollow mask" illusion, and that this may relate to a difference in the way in which two parts of their brains communicate with each other, in a "bottom-up" process to collect visual incoming information from the eye, and a "top-down" process. down" to interpret this information.

Delusions occur when the brain interprets incoming sensory information based on its context and a person's previous experience. This is called top-down processing. Sometimes, this process can mean that people's perception of something is very different from reality.

The new study suggests that patients with schizophrenia rely less on top-down processing during cognition.

The results of the brain imaging analysis suggested that in healthy volunteers, connectivity between two parts of the brain, the parietal cortex involved in top-down control, particularly spatial attention, and the lateral occipital cortex involved in bottom-up processing of visual information, increased when faces were presented. hollows.

In patients with schizophrenia, this change in communication did not occur. These findings suggest that patients with schizophrenia have difficulty coordinating responses between different brain regions, also known as 'dysconnection', and that this may contribute to their immunity to visual illusions.

The research group is now investigating communication dysfunctions in schizophrenia, which they hope will advance our understanding of the disorder.

It is noteworthy that schizophrenics are not the only ones who see the concave face, as drunk or high people can also overcome the illusion. Source: The Sun

Holland names a new type of tulip in honor of Biden's wife

The Associated Press reported that a type of tulip in the Netherlands was named after Jill Biden, wife of current US President Joe Biden.

According to the agency, the Dutch ambassador to the United States, Andre Haspels, presented a bouquet of orange tulips of the type "Jill Biden" to the wife of the US president during an official ceremony, which took place on Wednesday at the ambassador's residence in Washington.

During the event, the First Lady of the United States wished that the flowers named after her would become a symbol of the longstanding friendship between the two countries.

Throughout its history, the Netherlands named different types of tulips in honor of the American first ladies seven times, as it was honored for the first time by Frances Cleveland, wife of Grover Cleveland, who assumed the American presidency for two terms with a break between them and obtained double numbering in the list of presidents as the 22nd and 24th president ( in the two periods between 1885-1889 and 1893-1897).

Before the Biden generation, Laura Bush, wife of the 43rd US President George W. Bush (2001-2009), was the last First Lady of the United States to have a type of tulip in the Netherlands named after her in 2004. Source: "Associated Press"