This time last year I wrote a blog about the brain benefits of regular exercise. I mentioned the idea that taking your exercise off-piste, i.e. avoiding any hard pavement or tarmac surfaces, is not just easier on the body (joints, ligaments, bones etc), but actually better for your brain. I’m going to expand on this theme here.

If you’re jogging round the park and stick to the paths, you’re going to cross paths with many people also out exercising. Sticking to the grass, ideally by going right round the perimeter of your biggest nearby park, is likely to mean not having to come into close contact with other people who might be breathing Covid-19, flu or the common cold into the air you’re breathing. So there’s one good reason to exercise off the beaten track right there. You’ll be doing your civic duty in terms of reducing the spread of various diseases.

By now you’re probably aware of the huge brain benefits of taking regular moderate to intense levels of cardiovascular exercise – in other words giving your heart / blood vessels plenty of work to do and getting out of breath to stretch those lung tissues. The better your heart functions, the more effectively it pumps blood to the brain. The better your lungs function, the more oxygen is added and waste gases removed as that blood passes through the brain.

Exercise every other day and both these systems adapt to the high levels of activity so that, little-by-little, day-by-day, week-by-week, they slowly-but-surely become stronger and better coordinated when working together. That’s a reason to keep as active as possible because that way you’ll live longer and enjoy a better functioning brain. Exercise day. Rest day. Exercise day. Rest day. This kind of rhythm keeps brains happy. Not to mention the mood boosting impact of the adrenaline and endocannabinoids that are released into your bloodstream to help you keep going.

Put exercise together with being outside and off-piste, THEN you have something even better: vestibular and cognitive training; to improve your kinaesthetic and information-handling intelligences, respectively. This is why I do a 6-10km run around Richmond Park at least once a month and have done for many years. It’s partly just the joy of being outdoors in all seasons. Usually I really feel the cold deep in my bones. I’m always the one wrapped up in more layers than anyone else; from autumn to spring. But when you’re out running you generate so much heat you always feel nice and toasty as you pick your way up hills, through woods, along the water’s edge and, in particular, after the killer climb towards the end.

The fresh air clears out your lung holes, the exercise-triggered hormones make you feel high as a kite and the up-and-down bouncing motion even compacts all the food in your gut (helping whatever is in there to sit more comfortably; in my experience anyway). It’s almost as if our bodies were designed to do precisely that. Through millennia of careful natural selection, evolution expertly crafted our bodies and internal organs to have the capacity to run down much larger and stronger prehistorical animals. These animals were usually faster than us in a sprint, but jogging after them for hours and hours as a groups was thought to enable our ancestors to keep up until they ran out of puff making it easy to stick them with a spear. Jogging might seem a bit dull, but our bodies are very well adapted to it.

When I say “vestibular training” – this isn’t a term you’ll find elsewhere. I use it to describe the type of workout that pushes the brain systems devoted to balance and coordination of body movements particularly hard. To picture what the vestibular system does it can be helpful to imagine yourself being thrown around on a roller-coaster. When your head (and body) fly though space on track weaving through space in three dimensions, a pair of special sensory structures inside the inner ear detect acceleration in the forwards <-> backwards and upwards <-> downwards directions. The sensory device that picks up acceleration in the upwards <-> downwards direction is called the saccule and for the forward <-> backward direction we have the utricle; both of which are a bit like a seed rattling around in a hair-lined pea pod inside your inner ear. They’re constantly broadcasting to the rest of the brain whether you are stationary or accelerating in one direction or another.

The saccule and utricle get much more of a workout when running across open plains, meadows, hills, woods or even just muddy tracks. When there’s no path to follow, leaping across puddles and picking your way across a wooded inclines causes a lot of up and down movements as you dart around trying to make sure each footfall strikes a firm surface. When running on flat smooth surfaces, on the other hand, the information these sensory systems send to the rest of the brain is very basic, simple and straight-forward – too predictable to offer much of a challenge for the brain to integrate with the other sensory information. In other words, what I’m proposing is that our vestibular system thrives on being adventurous.

Another part of the vestibular sensory system are the semi-circular canals (superior, posterior and lateral canals; see below). These three semi-circular fluid filled tubes are responsible for monitoring rotations of the head (and, by attachment) the body. These are the three types of rotation, each of them dealing with in terms of common head gestures: Nodding to say “yes” – that’s “pitch” rotation. Shaking your head to say “no” – that’s “yaw” rotation. (If you’re Greek, please reverse that ;-)) If you try to touch your ear to each shoulder in alternating fashion – that’s “roll” rotation. These semi-circular canals are also in the inner ear and broadcast any changes in the signal they detect to the rest of the brain too.

What does the brain do with all the info on acceleration and rotation (from saccule, utricle and semi-circular canals) as you pick your way around a puddle on the slippery canal tow path? One important role for it is as feedback on how well the brain is steering your movements. If you don’t find firm footing, and slip, the saccule / utricle will detect the unexpected changes in acceleration, and if your body has twisted in the slip this will be detected by the semi-circular canals, so the cerebellum (at the back of the head) has the information it needs to instruct various leg muscles to contract in the right order to catch our fall, in the blink of an eye. This is exceedingly good brain training. And you don’t get the same bang for your buck if you’re just doing laps of the local athletics track.

This approach is not without its jeopardy. Rolled or sprained ankles can happen if you lose concentration and take you’re eye off the uneven terrain. But take it slow and easy on the more treacherous stretches and you can get away with it; even in middle age. And then there are the added challenges posed by man’s best friend.

In any London park (and I’m sure it’s the same all over the UK) every time you step from tarmac to grass you run the risk of stepping in dog shit. Unpleasant yes, but every cloud has a silver lining. I’ve found it’s possible to harness the power of disgust to push yourself harder in terms of increasing focus and concentration. Recall how disgusting it is to realise you’ve stepped on a turd by getting a whiff of that foul stench and feelings of repulsion that come with the knowledge that you’re now bringing it with you, can be used as an incentive to become a full-on dog poo ninja.

It may sound ridiculous, but constantly keeping a keen eye on precisely where you put each foot fall is really taxing on a variety of sensorimotor and cognitive abilities. In other words, not only do you get really good at dodging the doo doo, but you end up with abilities that are helpful in everyday life even when you’re not exercising. The kind of far transfer I’m talking about stems from the fact that doo doo dodging requires a high level of vigilance, stretching the brain pathways of attentional control to their limit, placing greater time pressure on the brain to think quickly the faster you go. You have to be ready to change direction and veer off from your chosen foothold at the drop of a hat. The concept of poo dodging might not be pleasant, but I’m convinced it speeds up your reaction times, improves your running gait and ultimately leads to a more nimble running style.

Running on the flat encourages a very uniform gait. It becomes a matter of developing muscle density, stride cadence and boring things like that. Running on all terrains requires you to develop the brain capacities of a mountain goat: sure-footed even on uneven slopes scattered with slippery scree. The brain has to work out how to deal with all sorts of unexpected obstacles that you often don’t notice until you are right on top of them: branches to hop over, tree trunks to swerve around, streams to fjord, fern-filled valleys to scramble up and down. A richer, undulating terrain provides a greater challenge for the various brain regions receiving the vestibular sensory information to sink its proverbial teeth into.

And then there’s the evidence – outlined in a previous blog – indicating that being outside in mother nature doing any kind of recreational activity for 2-5 hours per week has a demonstrable impact on happiness and well-being. What are you waiting for? Slip on that thermal underwear, a tracksuit and a pair of old trainers you don’t mind running through puddles in and get out there!

In addition to these monthly brain blogs I also tweet the occasional bit of excellent brain science that I stumble on via Twitter (@drjacklewis).

On the basis of an analysis of nearly 20,000 people’s feedback, a recent paper concluded that just two hours of outdoor recreation per week is sufficient to yield a significant improvement in health or well-being, compared to people who get no recreation time in green spaces at all. In fact, the more time people spent engaged in outdoor recreational activities, the more happy or healthy they reported to be; an effect that peaks somewhere between 200-300 mins of weekly exposure to mother nature.

Many previous papers have reached similar conclusions. A meta-analysis of 21 studies suggested that a person’s chances of developing a mood disorder were increased by 28% if they lived in urban as opposed to rural areas, where nature is more easily accessed. There are of course other possible explanations for urban dwellers being more likely to encounter mental health issues than rural ones. Perhaps humans are just more vulnerable to such disorders in a densely as opposed to sparsely populate environment? Or is it really something to do with the presence of trees in the environment?

This possibility has been addressed by studies using high-resolution satellite imagery to plot tree density against various measures of well being in a huge sprawling urban area in Toronto, Canada. One such study (by Kardan et al, 2015) concluded that people who lived in an area with a higher density of trees in their neighbourhood had a significantly higher perceived health level and a lower incidence of cardio-vascular conditions.

This complements the earlier study mentioned above that compared the mental health outcomes of people who moved from more green to less green urban areas and vice versa. Alcock and colleagues analysed 5 consecutive years worth of data from 1,084 British households, finding that those who moved from less green to more green urban areas enjoyed fewer mental health complications over the following three years.

In a previous blog I described the classic study of patients who were recovering from a straightforward hernia operation in adjacent rooms, one that had a view of a brick wall and one that had a view of a small patch of grass with a tree growing in it. The patients who ended up in the room with the view of the tree recovered faster (as evidenced by the number of days they stayed in hospital post-surgery) and even required lower doses of analgesic medication to help them cope with the pain. Other studies have gone on to suggest that just being able to look out the window to catch sight of a slice of mother nature reduces aggression and criminal activity.

So what is is about plants and trees that seems to have such a profound impact on how we feel? Hartig et al (2016) suggest that viewing a natural scene helps us to put things in perspective, to create a healthy psychological distance between the day-to-day grind by actively engaging our attention in features of the natural landscape. This can help us to repeatedly gain the positive and reinforcing experience of feeling our mood lift and stress subside, both of which naturally occur when we turn our back on the hectic urban world and engage with the more relaxed pace typical of open green spaces. Beyond these important factors, trees also improve air quality and aesthetic appearance of an environment.

Across many studies, having access to green spaces has been shown to promote mental health, reduce accidental death and even mitigate against the negative impact of economic struggles on various health measure. It also reduces blood pressure and stress by promoting physical activity and reducing sedentary leisure time.

Even before I read all about this body of research attesting to the physical and mental health benefits of spending leisure time in natural settings, my behaviour over the last few years suggests that I knew this innately. Since I moved into my flat a few years back I’ve spent countless hours watching our neighbourhood sparrows, blackbirds, blue tits, goldfinches, crows and wood pigeons flitting around the communal gardens (see above) that I can see from my balcony. When I taking breaks from researching and writing books and blogs while surveying this green scene, I can feel the stress drain out of my body. Then when I get back to work, I feel significantly better able to crack on after the ten to fifteen minutes spent watching the natural world do its thing; an observation supported by research indicating that attention and memory resources get a boost from even a brief exposure to nature.

Beyond engaging with mother nature as a spectator, one of my favourite recreational past-times is to go running around Richmond Park with my mate Nathan. We’ve been doing it once a month for the past eight years. We talk almost non-stop during these 10km runs, mostly about nonsense just to reduce our perceived exertion (i.e. to distract ourselves from the bodily discomforts of keeping up a brisk jog for a solid hour), but we also regularly find ourselves commenting on how life just seems much better, easier, less daunting when you get outside, running cross-country through woods, fields of fern and grassy plains studded with herds of deer. It seems that the academic research data supports these views and backs the idea that communities benefit hugely from improved access to green spaces.

In addition to these monthly brain blogs, I regularly tweet about the latest neuroscience research to hit the lay press and review a virtual reality game or experience every week on my YouTube channel Brain Man VR.

As my new book The Science Of Sin essentially argues that increasing a person’s sense of social connection improves their health (compared to social isolation), it occurred to me that we should start to label tech companies according to whether their overall impact on the depth of people’s sense of being socially embedded in a supportive community is improved or harmed by regular engagement. I’ve invented some hashtags in the vain hope that people might start playing the game of thinking about the impact of the technologies they use on their own sense of social connectedness and use #socialXplus to denote an opinion that it is a force for increasing the sense of being meaningfully connected with others (e.g. Twitter #socialXplus) and #socialXminus to tag those social media companies that despite seeming to promote social connections actually have the opposite effect (e.g. Facebook #socialXminus). That said, I won’t be holding my breath waiting for it to go viral! Anyway, let’s consider the cases of Hotels, Hostels and AirBnB.

Hotels DO NOT foster a sense of community

In a hotel you are, by definition, crammed in with all the other guests, many of whom you wouldn’t want to get stuck talking to for very long, if you could possibly avoid it. For these reasons, and others, the average guest is likely to hurry by in any given corridor, do their best to avert their gaze while stuck in a lift with you and carry on with their business with as little actual direct communication as possible. Sure, there’s the occasional exchange of pleasantries, but rarely do these result in what might be described as a meaningful social interaction.

Hostels DO foster a sense of community

Backpacker hostels across Africa, Asia and South America are a completely different offering. With everyone brought together by relative poverty compared to other visitors to the country who can actually afford to stay for an extended period in a hotel, the banter tends to be lively and all-inclusive. (That their relative poverty is positively lavish by the standards of most local people’s annual income is another matter for another day.) The point is: the usual sharp invisible borders wordlessly drawn between people from different levels of socioeconomic status in the developed world become blurred when you’re all bunk-bedded up in a 16-man & -woman dorm at the mercy of other people’s common decency regarding night-time emanations of light, sound and odour, breaking down many of the usual social barriers as a direct result.

I’ve done a lot of traveling in my time, doing my best to stray from Lonely Planet recommendations wherever possible, in an effort to maximise my interactions with locals and the more intrepid adventurers. When I’ve been lucky enough to be put up in nice hotels by my bigger clients I try to wear the comfort of the facilities and the obsequiousness of the staff lightly. Don’t get used to it, I tell myself, focusing instead on directing my attention to how my fellow guests interact with those they encounter.

I very much subscribe to the idea that you can glean much more about what a person’s really like from observing their interactions with others, rather than relying just on how they comport themselves with you. I’ve noticed that those who take the time to be polite and friendly to all, even those employed to serve them, are not as common as they once were.

Comparing the incidence of positive social connection experiences in backpackers’ hostels to a wide variety of hotels, from one star holes right up to the full five star luxuriance, the backpacker hostels win hands down in the pro-social stakes. So I would say that, in my humble opinion, if I had to choose which of the two is a force building a sense of social connectedness (#socialXplus) and which ultimately reduces a person’s sense of social connectedness (#socialXminus), the categories would have to be:

BackpackerHostels #socialXplus
Hotels #socialXminus

Then along came AirBnB, dutifully disrupting (as all good tech firms are wont to do) the whole traditional approach to finding a place to lay your weary head. And it is much more #socialXplus than any of its recent predecessors. Not only does the traveler get to meet a local who is incentivised by the ratings system to be helpful and friendly and do their best to provide the basics, but you become physically embedded in the local community. You see things that a relatively isolated hotel or hostel dweller would never see. As you’ll more often than not just be given the keys and told to leave your keys on the side on your way out, you usually have no choice but to ask local people for help and advice. Which is a good thing, by the way. Let me give you an example…

I’m in Copenhagen as I type, staying in an AirBnB, tapping this into my laptop with the rare September sun streaming through the window and a swirling wind violently whipping the leaves of the plants on the balcony in time with the drum ‘n’ bass beats streaming from my laptop (Goldie, Strictly Jungle, 1995 – in case you’re curious). Earlier today, I had to ask three people where the nearest cash machine was until I finally tracked it down. And I also ended up asking a woman in the supermarket whether the carton I had in my hand was milk (because late last night, starving hungry, I ended up having a very sickly bowl of cereal because I’d accidentally bought a carton that looked very much like milk, but was in fact full cream!). My point is, as much as I wasn’t relishing the prospect of having to rely on the kindness of others to get what I needed doing done, it was ultimately great to have had some interactions with local people. I felt buoyed each time and it made me feel more at home as a stranger in a foreign country.

These are minor moments of #socialXplus but ones that are worth mentioning all the same. The main boost this trip is giving for my sense of social connectedness (#socialX) is that I’m here to give a lecture as an excuse to spend time with two neuroscience buddies from my PhD days who are based here in Denmark. AirBnB quite literally made the trip financially viable, whereas if I’d had to stay in hotels I’d have flown in and out with one overnight stay, as the hotels in Copenhagen are outrageously expensive!

There are also important #socialXplus opportunities on the other side of the equation. My host this time is staying at her boyfriend’s place so her interaction with me has been minimal. But the last time I stayed the night in an AirBnB it was on the outskirts of Bristol and the circumstances of my host were very different. We were in her spare room and it quickly became apparent that she often forged friendships with guests that she “clicked” with. She was a bouncy, vivacious, 45-year-old, full of West Country hospitality, enthusiasm and charm. She immediately invited us to have a cup of tea and join her on the sofa to watch the tennis (Wimbledon was on). Later that night my girlfriend came back to our AirBnB at midnight (while I continued on at the party hosted by another bunch of old university friends) and they ended up having an hour-long chat over a glass of wine. In the morning we tiptoed down to the kitchen / lounge to find the patio doors had been pulled back to reveal a beautifully-kept, wide, lush garden complete with pond, rock garden and seating area. She was up a ladder trimming the hedge in glorious sunshine, but immediately beckoned us to sit down and have some lemonade. She made us feel very welcome and all parties benefited from the social intimacy that the arrangement evoked.

It is for these reasons that I offer AirBnB as a technology company that is a clear and unequivocal source of #socialXplus … helping humans to form social connections, helping them feel embedded in a community. And by bolstering their sense of being socially connected, albeit briefly, it should reduce their feelings of social isolation which might otherwise have increased their chances of getting cancer, cardiovascular disease, psychosis and depression according to a series of peer-reviewed scientific articles that have been accumulating in the literature since 1988.

In addition to these monthly blogs, I tweet interesting brain articles (@drjacklewis), do a regular science podcast with the divine Lliana Bird (Geek Chic’s Weird Science) and am on the verge of launching a brand new YouTube channel where I take people in Virtual Reality adventures….

The tradition of exercising freedom of speech down at Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park dates from 1196 when Tyburn Gallows were first erected nearby. Those condemned to hang from the neck until dead would be given the opportunity to speak to the gathered crowd before they met their maker. In 1872 this tradition was officially sanctioned by an act of parliament and of the hundreds of sites where speakers could get up on a soapbox and speak their minds freely, only Speakers’ Corner now remains.

A couple of months ago I followed in the footsteps of Karl Marx and George Orwell by trying to start a revolution down at Speakers’ Corner. I talked about what I discovered when digging around in the neuroscience literature to find research that might illuminate the root causes of the stereotypical excesses of human behaviour branded as The Seven Deadly Sins (#SciOfSin). I used this evidence to motivate a different way of thinking about what these seven sub-types of anti-social behaviour does to our social circles, our health and our wellbeing.

Ever since I’ve been loading up a 5-6 min excerpt each week of my hour-long speech. It’s a bit rambling as I hadn’t planned exactly what I was going to say and there are quite a few interruptions from a trio of hecklers, but my hope is that this all makes it feel more authentic and akin to what Speakers’ Corner is all about …

Part One – Roll up, Roll up

Part Two – The Seven Deadly Sins (Queen of Pride Rules Over Them All)

Part Three – Brain Areas implicated in Wrath and Envy

Part Four – Greed (The Root Of All Evil?)

Part Five – Lust

Part Six – The Trouble With Internet Porn

Part Se7ev – Gluttony I

Part Eight – Gluttony II

Part Nine – Watch This Space

Part Ten – Watch This Space

I love Channel 4’s Gogglebox. In case you’ve never had the pleasure – it’s a TV series where everyday British people’s living rooms are fitted out with TV cameras to capture the spontaneous conversation that arises as they sit together watching the week’s big shows on their own television. Watching people watching television may not sound like a particularly interesting way to pass the time but I personally find it absolutely fascinating. In fact, I’ve tried on several occasions to convince my friends to be filmed watching Gogglebox with me so that we can launch a YouTube channel where friends and families all over the country can post their own videos of their own running commentary as they watch people on television who themselves are watching television. That way, viewers of this meta-Gogglebox channel can amuse themselves by watching people on the telly who are watching people on the telly who are watching telly.

Am I the only one to find this prospect tantalising?

Apparently so. Nobody’s ever taken me up on the offer…!

Gogglebox has a strange way of making me feel connected to my fellow Brits up and down the length of the nation. Why? I think it’s because for such a wide diversity of households, featuring such a variety of people who seem, at first glance, to be completely different yet deep down clearly share a very similar set of values. It’s surprisingly satisfying to find that you share certain strong opinions, make similar observations and perhaps most tellingly read between the lines in a similar way to people of a completely different age, regional dialect, sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and/or sexuality. For example, I find myself agreeing with most of the observations made by the father and two sons in Nottingham, yet the slang that the Brixton girls use are the words most familiar to my ear. So, bizarrely, I find myself identify most closely with three guys of south Asian origin and two girls of Afro-Caribbean origin.

It reminds me that being British ain’t so bad after all and that feeling proud of my nation (rather than a little bit apologetic, as our default setting seems to be under normal circumstances) is not such a terrible thing. Jeremy Paxman’s brilliant book: “The English” started this process in me many years ago and now Gogglebox has picked up where he left off but applying this newfound pride to the whole of Britain rather than just England. I like my weekly reminder that the average, everyday, normal British person can be both amusing and insightful. I enjoy contemplating that, despite our varying outward appearances, accents and slang, scratch the surface and we’re actually much more similar than we are different deep down, on the grand scheme of things. It  genuinely warms the cockles of my soul…

Anyway, I digress. The main reason I wanted to blog about Gogglebox this month was not just to sing its praises in terms of it’s capacity for promoting a much needed sense of national togetherness, but rather to point out a simple tweak to a common habit that takes place in living rooms all over the UK. This could genuinely help each and every one of us to take some simple steps to avoid developing Type II diabetes. So you could view this as my small offering in the battle against the rising global obesity epidemic.

Greater Manchester’s contribution to Gogglebox – the Malones – are a family unit comprising a husband and wife accompanied by two teenage sons and several huge dogs that are clearly an intrinsic and dearly loved part of the family. One ever-present feature in their segments of the show is a huge box of sweets or plate of cakes and biscuits placed slap bang in front of them on the footrest siting between them and the television. Every single time I see this I think to myself: bad idea. It may seem perfectly harmless, hospitable even, but in a world defined by the overabundance of sweet, fatty, delicious foods it’s already hard enough to reduce calorie intake to a reasonable level without having temptation permanently within your field of view! With a couple of simple tweaks a scenario that actively promotes the mindless nibbling that inevitably leads to weight gain can be converted into one that helps us to limit intake of foods that are naughty but nice.

The first thing you should do if you’re keen to reduce the amount of food you eat late at night, whilst unwinding in front of the telly after a tiring day, is to never eat straight out of the packet. When our mind’s are distracted by a TV show or film we simply don’t notice how much food we are eating and so we eat lots without really appreciating it. Whilst the Malones nearly get this bit right, they take the approach of emptying the entire tray of Mr Kipling’s pies onto a large plate for everyone to help themselves to. I would argue that a better strategy would be to put just one or two out on a small plate. That way if they want more then they have to put in effort to go and get it from the kitchen. Several studies have shown that the smaller the plate, bowl, serving spoon etc used to hold the food, the less of it ends up being consumed. Better still, cut these small cakes in half or quarters and empty them directly onto the plate to further encourage a lesser calorie intake by reducing portion size.

The second brain hack is to move the plate or bowl out of your field of vision, rather than having it sat directly in front of you. Out of sight, out of mind. The more frequently your eyes catch sight of the snack food, the more temptation you have do resist. If you move it out of view you’ll have less temptation to fight.

Thanks to the Malones, I have started applying these simple brain hacks in my own life. I’ve always been partial to Cadbury’s chocolate fingers. But I’d often go through a whole packet in a night without really remembering munching through them. Having been reminded by the Malones of my tactical error, I now load up a shot glass with half a dozen fingers and put the box back in the freezer (yes, in the freezer). I then place them outside my line of vision directly to the right of my head where I can only see it if I turn my head 90 degrees.

The result of using this simple brace of brain hacks on a daily basis is that,  when I switch off the box to hit the hay at the end of an evening of being a “sofa sloth”, I’ll typically find that that there are still a couple of uneaten chocolate fingers left in the shot glass. That’s something that simply never happened when I ate straight out of the box. By dishing out a small portion I set the maximum dose to a modest number of calories. And by positioning them out of sight, I ended up completely forgetting that they were even there, reducing the amount of fast-release carbs yet further!!

Instead of eating a couple of dozen chocolate biscuits in one sitting, this simple tweak to my daily habit means that I’m now only munching my way through four, five or six of them. The best bit of all? It requires no mental discipline from me whatsoever to resist the temptation.

I’m even starting to see a comeback of something whose days I thought were long gone – my six-pack is mysteriously beginning to re-emerge (well, to be honest it’s only really visible when I’m stretched out in the bath or on the beach, but it’s a step in the right direction!!

In addition to these monthly brain blogs you can follow me on Twitter for a daily dose of breakthroughs in brain science. My new book – Mice Who Sing For Sex is now available to pre-order. It’s a compilation of the strange and wonderful science stories to emerge in the press over the past two years in the Geek Chic’s Weird Science podcast presented by Lliana Bird and I. And finally my brand new series “Secrets of the Brain” will soon be available to stream from the Insight TV website.