Hypnosis… not just a party trick

After hearing about Emily’s presentation about dreams and other forms of reality I was reminded of the time I was placed under hypnosis. The night after graduation my school hosted a party at our local recreation center. There were games, indoor rock climbing, and even a hypnotist. I’ll admit I’ve always been a skeptic when…

Neurocinematics: Your Brain on Movies

Lately I’ve been watching a lot of movies and TV shows, either by myself, with my family or with my friends (through Facetime or Netflix Party). This made me wonder how movies affect our brains. I would consider cinema the most advanced art form: it is visual as well as auditory, it takes years and…

Why do we like music?

Humans love music. We listen to it in the car, while we are working out, or when we are in need of a mood booster. But have you ever considered why? Music is simply just a bunch of instruments playing simultaneously in the same key to the same beat, sometimes with someone saying strings of…

Art Therapy, Traumatic Brain Injuries & Depression

One day during my junior year of high school, on our walk down to the soccer field, my best friend told me that a fellow teammate had just been diagnosed with a concussion. What was originally supposed to be a mild head injury, eventually turned into over nine months of recovery and the loss of…

How Art Therapy is Helping Cancer Patients

When I was three years old, my little sister, who was 11 months old, was diagnosed with a Stage III Wilms’ Tumor. Wilms’ Tumors are kidney cancer and, luckily, have a high remission rate when caught early enough. My sister, Grace, was in treatment for just over a year. She turned one and two in…