You're at home trying to make fresh tomato sauce, but can't seem to get the tomatoes out of their plastic container from the grocery store. The bottom latch is not opening, so you pull harder. Although you've never seen this type of tomato container before, you have opened many similar ones in the past. After a minute of trying, you stop to consider the situation - should you keep pushing and pulling? Should you ask a friend for help? Should you give up on fresh tomatoes and just open a can?

We make decisions like this all the time. How much effort should we expend on something? We have only so much time and energy in the day. Five minutes fumbling with the container is five minutes taken away from reading a book, talking to your family or sleeping. In any given situation, you must decide how hard to try.

Developmental cognitive scientists like me are interested in how we make decisions about effort. In particular, how do young children, who are constantly encountering new situations, decide how hard to try?

The longer the trip, the more healing occurs,' says the geologist Peter Winn, who has been leading expeditions down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon since the 1960s. 'Healing happens for people almost without exception.'

The most dramatic transformations that he's observed have been in disabled military veterans on 16-day kayaking trips organised by a group called Team River Runner. 'One army communications expert came home from Iraq so full of shrapnel, he'd lost his ability to do even simple math, and would only say "Fuck you."' By the end of the trip, he spoke eloquently and at length, in appreciation of both the Canyon and his fellow boaters. 'Later his wife wrote to thank the crew and the river for getting her husband back.'

Writing down the things that cause anxiety can help to alleviate stress and concerns, according to a new study carried out by the Michigan State University. Through this study, the first neural evidence of expressive writing has been shown.

People worry a lot on a daily basis, which leads to stress, anxiety and related disorders and diseases. Most of the concerns are based on feelings or future events that might never happen. Sadly, it appears to be a condition that many people can't avoid suffering. However, this new research shows that there are simple things people can do to stop worrying. It backs up the research developed by James Pennebaker in the 80's about the benefits of journaling to reduce pressure and improve our immune system.

"Worrying takes up cognitive resources; it's kind of like people who struggle with worry are constantly multitasking - they are doing one task and trying to monitor and suppress their worries at the same time. Our findings show that if you get these worries out of your head through expressive writing, those cognitive resources are freed up to work toward the task you're completing and you become more efficient" said lead author of the study, Hans Schroder, who is also an MSU doctoral student in psychology and a clinical intern at Harvard Medical School's McLean Hospital.

What does the field of psychoneuroimmunology study?

Over half a century ago, in 1966, when Prof. Ian Stevenson first published his seminal work Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (University of Virginia Press), it took the world by storm. It not only gave a tremendous boost to the religions that believe in reincarnation (and rebirth), but sought to provide a scientific foundation to the notion. After a scrupulous study of over 3,000 cases of "rebirth" Stevenson handpicked 20 cases of those to suggest, if not prove, the case of "reincarnation".

This fact was succinctly captured by Prof. Curt John Ducasse, parapsychologist and then Chairman of publications committee of the American Society for Physical Research, in the foreword he wrote to Stevenson's "Twenty cases ...". The closing line of his missive read as:

The twenty cases..., which Dr. Stevenson personally investigated, reports on, and discusses ..., are not claimed by him to settle that question; but they do put it before the reader sharply and, because of this, are fully as interesting and important as are the more numerous cases suggesting discarnate survival, to which physical research has given close and lengthy attention.

About 15% of men and 34% of women say they're not really interested in sex, according to a new study, statistics that few experts find surprising. In fact, low desire in one partner is probably the top reason couples seek out sex therapy.

When one of you has more interest in sex than the other, it's easy for the person with the higher sex drive to feel rejected, bruised and undesirable and for the partner who avoids sex to feel pressure, anxious and guilty.

Any number of factors can affect sexual desire, and most of them have little to do with your partner's attractiveness. In the study I mentioned, researchers found that for both men and women, physical and mental health had an impact on libido. But they may have different motivations for avoiding sex.

"For men, it's often the appearance of disinterest rather than actual loss of interest," sex therapist Deborah Fox said. "Men avoid sex frequently due to prior performance issues, such as erectile issues or rapid ejaculation. They may avoid it to escape the anxiety of these issues reoccurring." In women, hormonal factors and fatigue can contribute to low libido.

And sometimes, life just gets in the way. "In my practice, I see a lot of desire diminish due to interest in porn, boredom of the same sexual routine, the comfort of monogamy and relationship security, and the loss of couple time due to a focus on parenting time," sex therapist Amanda Pasciucco said.

The signs of depression are hidden in these type of people.

It is harder to spot depression in people who are outgoing and fun-loving, research finds.

Indeed, people who are extroverted may find it hard to spot the signs of depression in themselves.

People who are highly agreeable are also harder to diagnose with depression, the study found.

The boy named Jeetan first made the claim when his sister tried to tie a rakhi on his arm as he insisted his real sister is in Bholapur.

Reincarnation is among supernatural phenomenon which has captured the imagination of audiences in across the world. A large number of people are also known to believe in rebirth and such cases have often been reported from different corners of the country.

In a bizarre incident from a village in UP, a three-year-old child is claiming that the people he is living with aren't his real family and that his actual peers are in a village in Bholapur. The village he mentions is in Punjab and the boy's insistence that his father is a foreigner has left everyone baffled.

An over-active network of brain areas is central to how children inherit anxiety and depression from their parents.

The network consists of three regions in the brain which work together to control the fear-response.

Genes passed down from parents to children influence how these three regions function together, the new study finds.

Professor Ned Kalin, one of the study's authors, said:

"Over-activity of these three brain regions are inherited brain alterations that are directly linked to the later life risk to develop anxiety and depression.

This is a big step in understanding the neural underpinnings of inherited anxiety and begins to give us more selective targets for treatment."

The conversation about near-death experiences (NDE's) is typically centered around questions about the afterlife and what happens to consciousness should you follow the iconic tunnel of light. Skeptics, of course, look at the various scientific angles, debating whether or not the patient was truly dead, or the research was legitimate, and so on.

Less frequently discussed, however, is what happens to people after a near-death experience, and what changes occur in their psychological and physiological makeup. There are thousands of recorded examples of NDE's that offer testimony to the possibility of life after death, but what about life after near-death?

"Around eighty percent of the people who experienced near-death states claimed that their lives were forever changed by what happened to them. On closer examination, though, a pattern of surprising dimensions emerged. Experiencers were not returning with just a renewed zest for life and a more spiritual outlook. They were evidencing specific psychological and physiological differences on a scale never before faced by them." - P. M. H. Atwater, L.H.D.

Time perception is a construction of the brain. How fast we perceive time to be passing -- or "mind time" -- can be manipulated or distorted. Evaluations of time differ based on our state of being at the time of judgment. How you age and how long you live may depend on that perception.

People tend to see their will as more determinant of future events than of past events. When we contemplate the future we feel as though we have a choice and are likely to influence events but when we consider our own past we often feel like most of the things that have happened were out of our control.

When people see that their actions are tied to what actually happens around them then their perceptions of free will change, or at the very least activated.

If you're bored or suffering, every second counts, and time seems to expand or slow down. When you're ecstatic, moments glitter right through your fingers.

Mind time also depends on your projected future state of being. If you're counting down to a root canal, time speeds up as you wait. But if you're tallying days until the birth of your first child, time seems immeasurably slow.

What would happen to our sense of time if we knew we could to live to be 150? Or even 500?