Better Living Through Interaction

A long time ago, malabar asked me, with more than a little bit of incredulity, 'Do you really believe that you can make people more interesting just by talking to them?' 'Well, basically,' I replied. About a year later she came back to me and said that based on her experiences over the intervening year with the individual about whom we'd been speaking, she was now prepared to cede the point, though it still made her twitchy. Now, fast forward to today, when kamileon forwarded me this positively amazing science snack, ganked from being_angyl (who happens to be a perfectly delightful person who I simply don't know particularly well). Short form: Primate neurons regenerate. (That's you and me, bub, for our home audience, and flies in the face of what we thought we knew about neuroanatomy just ten short years ago). Furthermore, anti-depressants don't work the way most of us think they do. Finally, and here's the really interesting bit, putting people into a higher data density, lower stress environment almost certainly actually improves the functioning of their brain, and reduces depression, btw.

So all of you who've been self-medicating by making your lives less stressful, more varied, and more interesting? Keep up the good work. Stress sucks the life out of the brain, and variety puts it back in.

On an unrelated note, we may be very close to a treatment for Parkinson's Disease. And you should read the article.