Mindfully Healing

Why people with the most severe personality disorder find it difficult to have romantic relationships and friendships. People with borderline personality disorder have deficits in brain regions related to empathy, new research finds. The finding helps explain why people with borderline personality disorder have unstable moods. They also often have trouble maintaining relationships with others. Dr Brian Haas, the study’s lead authors, said: “Our results showed that people with BPD traits had reduced activity in brain regions that support empathy. This reduced activation may suggest that people with more BPD

Why some memories last a lifetime and others are quickly forgotten. Memories that last a lifetime need to be linked to lots of other memories, plus they need to be a bit weird. Professor Per Sederberg, an expert on memory, thinks the idea of peculiarity is vital to understanding memory: “You have to build a memory on the scaffolding of what you already know, but then you have to violate the expectations somewhat. It has to be a little bit weird.” This ‘scaffolding’ means connections to other memories. For example,

People are mistaken about the best way to understand other people’s minds. The best way to know other people’s minds is to put yourself in their shoes, new research suggests. This is not what people expect, though. Instead, people assume that reading facial expressions and body language is a better way of understanding the emotional states of others. Study authors, Drs Haotian Zhou and Nicholas Epley said: “People expected that they could infer another’s emotions by watching him or her, when in fact they were more accurate when they were