One of my favorite health reports this week, reminding me why the USA is still the land of innovation and a place for entrepreneurs, ideas and diversity. This is greatly missed by me in France.
The 13-year-old CEO who invented a cure for hiccups
Mallory Kievman is CEO and founder of a company that might just cure one of the world’s oldest and most annoying maladies, the hiccups. The 13-year-old is preparing to launch her product, the Hiccupop, a hiccup-stopping lollipop of her own invention.
After testing about 100 folk remedies, Kievman picked three of her favorites — sugar, apple cider vinegar, and lollipops — and combined them. I’m still “tweaking the taste,” she tells The New York Times, but the combination of ingredients “triggers a set of nerves in your throat and mouth that are responsible for the hiccup reflex arc… It basically over-stimulates those nerves and cancels out the message to hiccup.”
She has a patent pending, financial backers, and a team of business consultants (in training). Here’s her story
Reflect on your present blessings, on which every man has many, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. —Charles Dickens (M. Dickens, 1897, p. 45)
In coherence, the heart rate is not necessarily lowered although there is a change in the rhythm pattern of the heart. In relaxation, there is a lowering of heart rate.
Coherence is an active state of positive engagement, characterized by extraordinary physical activity and mental acuity. Relaxation is a low energy state.
Relaxation can lead to sleep; coherence produces a state of relaxed alertness, opening the heart and brain to intuition, creativity and improved performance.
Studies have shown that the heart is an electromagnetic field radiating 12 to 15 feet beyond the body. Moreover this field curves back towards the heart in the shape of a torus suggesting that the frequencies of the heart are accessible at any point within that field.
This means that coherence can and does extend from the body nervous system outward into our personal and social space. The way we feel inside can indeed change the reality of the world outside us.
A coherent heart rhythm pattern is produced when the two branches of the body nervous system are synchronized in a smooth wave-like regularity. This arrangement becomes evident when we are experiencing emotional stability and positive feelings.
The more we pause to appreciate and show caring and compassion, the more order and coherence we experience internally. When our hearts are in an “internal coherence state,” studies suggest that we enjoy the capacity to be peaceful and calm yet retain the ability to respond appropriately to stressful circumstances.
Researchers have found that when we think about someone or something we really appreciate and experience the feeling that goes with the thought, the parasympathetic – calming-branch of the autonomic nervous system – is triggered. This pattern when repeated bestows a protective effect on the heart. The electromagnetic heart patterns of volunteers tested become more coherent and ordered when they activate feelings of appreciation.
Ref: Mcraty, R. “Heart Rhythm Coherence - An Emerging Area of Biofeedback.” Biofeedback 2002; 30(1): 23-25.
People who kept gratitude journals on a weekly basis exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week compared to those who recorded hassles or neutral life events.
This is a prevailing sentiment in both classical and popular writings on happiness is that an effective approach for maximizing one’s contentment is to be consciously grateful for one’s blessings.
Ref; Robert A. Emmons. University of California, Davis. Michael E. McCullough. University of Miami. The effect of a grateful outlook on psychological and physical wellbeing in daily life
(Source: greatergood.berkeley.edu)
Scientists are making the first attempts to understand spiritual experience — and what happens in the brains and bodies of people who believe they connect with the divine.
The field is called “neurotheology,” and although it is new, it’s drawing prominent researchers in the U.S. and Canada. Scientists have found that the brains of people who spend untold hours in prayer and meditation are different.
Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist, has been scanning the brains of religious people for more than a decade. He has found that people who meditate, from Franciscan nuns to Tibetan Buddhists, go dark in the parietal lobe — the area of the brain that is related to sensory information and helps us form our sense of self.
