The Weekly Dose - Episode 26

The Weekly Dose...

... the latest from Dr Karan

  Here is your weekly dose...  

Hi all!Here is your weekly dose of the Sunday Six! A few things I found interesting this week. If you enjoy this please feel free to forward this to friends. families and enemies alike!**You'll find more in depth analysis of some of these subjects on my social platforms in the links just below, including Dr Karan Investigates! for deep dives into interesting topics on my YouTube channel.**

Make & Break Habits...

As the new year approaches you might have that piece of electric meat in your skull set on getting rid of a bad habit or starting a new one.When it comes to creating habits, people often make the mistake of focusing primarily on intensity and neglect consistency. Instead why not try starting your new habit now or even a random week in January when expectations are low and not at the start of the year. You haven't have any additional pressure to create major life changes and you can focus on small actions and consistency.Additionally it's worth hacking your neurology to build your habits. The prefrontal cortex is the "executive brain" and is heavily involved in motivation. The "autopilot" centre of the brain is the basal ganglia and is the part of the brain the executive brain delegates tasks to. This autopilot brain contains stores of pre-programmed sequences that produce efficient actions...i.e habits.You can see that well formed habits don't rely on motivation or planning but are simply glorified reflexes. The stronger the habit the more easily it is handled by the autopilot brain. Simply repeating your desired habits, even small components of it helps to reinforce those neural pathways and help to etch that sequences of moves into the autopilot so you rely less on motivation and the "executive" brain.If you have a bad habit encoded and you want to break it and delete it from this autopilot ty this. To prevent the autopilot mode from acting automatically insert tactical speed blocks to stop or slow down the autopilot. These road blocks will make you slow down and pay attention to your actions and helps to change your automatic response. E.g. You are bored and automatically reach for your phone to scroll social media. Your "speed block" will be to log out of all social media apps or having your phone turned off.

  Failing is growth... 

Don't worry this isn't some new age Tony Robbins style jargon.I used to think failure and success were opposites but they are in fact two points on a spectrum and failure is often a requirement to success. You can see an example of this on a cellular level inside you.As you go through life, your brain is constantly being fed numerous data points from your sensory organs which help it to adapt, change and organise itself to be more efficient and ultimately help you survive - this is neuroplasticity. The idea that your brain is "plastic" and malleable is not a new one.Undergoing uncomfortable experiences, rejection and even challenging situations places stress on your brain similar to the stress your muscles need to grow. This psychological stress engages a specific type of plasticity known as experience dependent plasticity in which your neurons develop new synpases or connections to become more efficient and prepare you better for upcoming scenarios. Your brain is literally learning from its mistakes on a microscopic level.So get comfortable being uncomfortable, you need it on a neurological level. 

What I'm Watching...

On August 22, 1962, Heinz Stücke left Hövelhoff in Germany with just his bicycle and a tent. He was 20 years old.He set out to see everything in the world. In 1996 he had already traveled every country in the world travelling around like a nomad. This part biopic/part documentary explores the nomadic lifestyle of this walking treasure trove full of stories. If you wanted any inspiration to travel more or do something impossible in the next year - give this a watch. Watching this man's exceptional life that takes you through not only his history but the history of the world, different historic eras and countries puts my boring life in perspective. I want to do something amazing in 2023. Something life changing. I don't know what is is but this was exactly what I needed to reignite my passion for adventure! 

  The feeling of impending doom... 

You might have experienced this. The easiest way to explain this is using Harry Potter terminology. It is a feeling as though life is being sucked out of you by a dementor. All joy is being sucked from your life and you have the imminent feeling of peril, as though you're about to die.I've come across this feeling described by patients a few times across my career. Patients who have experienced a heart attack, a collapsed lung and finding it difficult to breathe (pneumothorax) and commonly the heart rate lowering drug, adenosine.No-one is quite sure why this happens and indeed what purpose this serves from an evolutionary perspective. Perhaps an internal alarm signal from your body to alert you that there is some degree of system malfunction which requires urgent attention - like the warning lights on your car that you have no idea what they mean.Even things like anxiety and sleep paralysis can provoke this chilling symptom...and a nutmeg overdose. So easy on the seasoning this christmas.

Usain Bolt and unusual names...

Are some people born into their roles? Would Usain Bolt have been a successful sprinter had his name been Usain Lazyass?The theory of nominative determinisn is one that suggests that someone's name has a power over determining their future.It’s part of what researchers call “implicit egotism”, the idea that we’re attracted to things that remind us of ourselves, whether it’s marrying a person who shares your birthday, or moving to a place with a name phonetically similar to your own. Examples:Sara Blizzard - a presenter for the BBC weather forecasts on East Midlands Today and North West Tonight.Ann Webb - helped found the British Tarantula Society and is also the writer of the book "the proper care of tarantulas"R. W. Cockshut – Circumcision advocate. Very little is known about this Victorian doctor. In fact, some websites and literature refer him as C. W. Cockshut and others as R. W. Cockshut. He is relevant due to a quote from the British Medical Journal, 1935, where he calls for all male children to be circumcised to reduce masturbation. Here, he acknowledges the keratinization of the glans, consequence of circumcision, and further loss of sensation as ideals for a civilized culture.D Weedon and JW Splatt - Urologists; one of the best-known examples of nominative determinism in medicine that was published in the British Journal of Urology.In fact I used to work for a surgeon who went by the name Dr Death, but it was De'Ath not Death and contrary to the spelling of his name he was quite a good surgeon!

The Silent Ghost...

The Rolls-Royce Ghost was so eerily quiet, the engineers had to make it louder..The designers of this luxury car wanted this new car to be such a relaxing and quiet space they made the interior eerily quiet inside. In fact so much so that occupants and testers found this silence disorientating because the sound didn't match with the car's movements.Humans rely on both visual and other sensory cues to be in sync so we can orient ourselves in time and space. This is why some people get motion sickness due to imbalance between sight and the movement of the balancing fluid in our ear canals.Anyway, sound engineers had eliminated even the slightest of noises like the windshield wipers and air vents. This unnatural silence accentuated someone; breathing or clothes rustling against their body.Engineers eventually went back and added in some "harmonizing" sounds that provided a soft whisper! 

As always, please give me feedback on Twitter. Which of this weeks Sunday six is your favourite? Is there something you want more, or less of? I'm open to any suggestions so please let me know! Just send a  tweet to @drkaranrajan and use the hashtag #theweeklydose at the end so I can find it!

Have a wonderful week, all.

Much love,

Karan