Brain Bites is all about broadening your reach with easy-to-digest psych knowledge! Join me for quick, interesting medication and brain science tidbits! Elevate your therapy practice with insight and data from your friendly online psychiatrist!
are headbands back? probably not how you'd expect...
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I’m short. Or maybe not really, but compared to my family and friends, I’m a short 5’4”-ish. I don’t HAVE to wear petites but they sure fit better than “regular”. Or I can buy the SHORT version. That’s nice too. (Eye roll. Can't it be a cuter designation? Short is so obvious and boring!) It’s something I’ll probably never really get over (a little punny, maybe? over? no? ok.) but I do have workable solutions! Other than consistently buying pants that don’t fit because they’re too dang long:
Thank goodness for the cropped thing going on right now! But the real solution? Step stools!
It’s not exactly an elegant solution but it’s practical. And yes, I’m short, but I can work with that even if I don’t like it. Which strangely brings me to today’s topic: Passive infrared hemoencephalography! (Gosh it takes a long, careful time to tap that out. And my Mac still thinks I’m spelling it wrong!) Let’s just call it pIR HEG like the cool kids do. Before I tell you anything about it I just want to say I stumbled across this in a recent CME I took and had NEVER heard of this before EVER! Not in med school or residency or any other clinical setting. But it sounds potentially amazing!! Which means that it’s probably not as good as I’m making it out to be because how is that even possible?
What?! I’m linking you to a great article I just read by Cathrine Tyrrell Baker, PhD all about it! The data is amazing!! Have you heard of this before? Do you know anyone who does it or has tried it? I don’t! So you know how I’m going to solve my short-on-knowledge problem? I’m going to learn more by trying it on myself! With guidance of course. I’ve linked up with the psychiatrist who put out the CME I watched and she put me in touch with the developer (who created this in the 90’s!) and I’ll be buying all the gadgets while getting training on what the heck I’m doing. Woo hoo! I’m getting so excited about this! Here are my potential benefits:
And if you're curious about what the actual session is like, this is a quote directly from the article: "They [the client] choose a movie that “resonates” with them, a movie that they find satisfying to watch... Most often clients would choose a DVD that would be used from session to session...
When the sensors on the forehead detect a decrease in thermal output in the PFC [prefrontal cortex], the movie freezes and a bar graph appears on the screen...
The client then uses the information in the bar graph to voluntarily exercise the PFC, learning to return heat to this part of the brain, thereby prompting the movie to play again...
Clients obtain approximately 10 min of active brain exercise over a total of approximately 30 min.”
Ok, if you know anything about this or have resources PLEASE SHARE!!! Reply to this email and tell me what you know or where to look so I can get a well-rounded view of this techy stuff. Here are more links:
And expect to hear more, good OR bad, as I learn throughout this process. A little like a step stool for my brain? Almost. Maybe pIR HEG can even help me feel better about my height! Or I can just buy more things to climb on (TJMaxx usually has them for $12.99). Cheers to healthy brains, Dr. B Jessica Beachkofsky, MD Your friendly, online psychiatrist! P.S. That “short” stuff came from a writing prompt I did this week with Meagan Megginson who’s got a fabulous newsletter, Deeply Rested, and hosts weekly writing times. I highly recommend both! P.P.S. What do you have going on that feels exciting right now? Is it a dream summer vacation, a lighter summer schedule, or an interesting training you’ve been working through? I’d love to hear about that too. |
Welcome to Brain Bites with Dr. B!
Brain Bites is all about broadening your reach with easy-to-digest psych knowledge! Join me for quick, interesting medication and brain science tidbits! Elevate your therapy practice with insight and data from your friendly online psychiatrist!
Circle circle dot dot now i got my cooties shot My kids think it’s hilarious that we used to get “cooties shots”. Yeah, yeah, I’m old and used to play with dirt and sticks. Didn't we all? I didn’t have a fancy phone or tablet like many kids have access to now, and maybe you didn't either. I mean, kids also don’t have to deal with Encyclopedia Britanica or the Dewey decimal system! (thanks, Google) But they're missing out on the smell of books. And they don’t have to color everything brown and...
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I'm not a huge fan of math in general. Which is probably kind of a dumb thing to say. Like, "I'm not a fan of underwear." Which may be true for some (ew? or yeah!) but undies are pretty ubiquitous and make sense in lots of situations! But the kind of math I'm talking about today isn't the computational kind. It's neurofeedback!! I have recently purchased a sensor and app from HeartMath where I can practice working on my HRV or heart rate variability. Sounds super fun, right? not this kind of...