I’m a retired brain surgeon and I wanna tell you why you feel like life is passing by. I just need one minute to explain this to you so hang in there. Repetitive daily routines stop the brain from recording clear detailed memories. When every day looks the same, your brain does not track time the same as a clock does. It tracks change. If nothing new happens then days, months, and years start to blur together. This is know as Time compression. When life lacks variety, your brain compresses past days together, making it feel like time is sped up. To stop feeling like life is passing you by, add new experiences to your life. Break routine habits, like changing your daily home routine, taking a different route to work, or trying a new hobby. Schedule small trips or plan new adventures so your days do not blend together. Practice mindfulness by staying fully focused on what you are doing right now and not trying to race off to the next task. Keep a journal and write down happy memories or memorable parts of the day before you go to sleep. Take deep, calm breaths when you feel anxious or rushed to return your focus to the moment. You can and you will retrain your brain to not feel like life is passing you by by following these few simple measures.

You can cut calories and sugar by putting less sweetener in your coffee especially when you are buying a specialty coffee like from Starbucks or Panera. Just ask for half the pumps of sweetener and you’re off to a healthier start.

As a retired brain surgeon, this is one of the most striking fitness studies I know. In 122,007 adults, the gap between slightly below and slightly above average fitness was linked to about the same added risk of death as smoking. It’s an association, not proof of cause. Healthier people are also simply more able to exercise. But fitness tracks with survival as closely as almost anything we measure, and that’s enough for me to act on.

Sometimes you just have to have a little fun!! On Lake Erie at Put-in-Bay, OH.

I'm a retired brain surgeon, here’s what happens in your brain when you see someone close to you unexpectedly, or after a long period of time. The first thing that happens is that light reflecting off the person hits your eyes and quickly travels to the occipital lobe in the back of your brain where facial features, shape, and movement are being processed. Next, a specialized region in the temporal lobe called the Fusiform Face area identifies the face and matches it to stored visual images that you have of the person. This visual information then routes to the amygdala which is the brain’s emotional hub. The amygdala then evaluates if this person is safe, familiar or significant. Simultaneously, the hippocampus, which is the brain’s memory center quickly tries to pull up a profile regarding who this person is, how you know them and where you last left off. Neuroscience reveals that your brain actually builds a detailed internal model for people you care about. Seeing them forces your brain to immediately reactivate that stored information thus bridging the gap of missing time. As soon as recognition clicks, your brain releases a flurry of hormones and neurotransmitters, including dopamine, adrenaline, oxytocin, and endorphins. These substances create a hit of pleasure, surprise, “butterflies in your stomach” feeling, a sense of safety and reattachment as well as feelings of comfort and content to name a few. So you can see that everything we experience in life has an elaborate orchestrated sequence of events that occurs automatically in our brain to make what we encounter real for us.

"Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." - Howard Thurman

Here’s what happens in your brain when you see someone close to you unexpectedly or after a long period of time. The first thing that happens is that light reflecting off the person hits your eyes and quickly travels to the occipital lobe in the back of your brain where facial

Honored to be speaking at the the 5th Annual Trauma Symposium. I’ll be speaking about the weight of the work, the experiences that stay with us, and how we continue to move forward with purpose as healthcare professionals and first responders. To learn more about the event or

As a retired brain surgeon, here’s the most useful thing I know about dopamine: your expectations are a dial you control. Dopamine tracks the gap between what you got and what you predicted. Walking in expecting less genuinely produces more. That is not resignation and it is not positive thinking. It is arithmetic. It also explains why the things you enjoy can quietly stop registering. A fully predicted reward produces no signal. So the coffee you have every morning at the same time in the same chair has stopped registering. Change something. Skip a day. Move it. Variety is not indulgence. It is what keeps the signal alive.

As a brain surgeon, I can tell you almost everything you’ve heard about dopamine is wrong. It is not the pleasure chemical. Dopamine is about prediction, not pleasure. It fires hardest when something turns out better than you expected. Dopamine goes up when things are better than predicted, does nothing when things go exactly as predicted, and goes down when things are worse than predicted. That is not a pleasure signal. That is an error signal. Your brain is constantly making predictions, and dopamine reports the gap. It’s why the second cookie is worse than the first. Nothing about the cookie changed. Your prediction did. It’s why the raise stopped feeling like a raise. You adjusted. The new number became the expectation, and expectations generate no signal.

I’m training for a half marathon and at the same time, trying to stay fit for life. #running #halfmarathontraining #healthylife

What a day in my life as a neurosurgeon on trauma call looked like. When you are on call, you have to be able to perform emergency surgery at any time. The surgery went well and was a success.

Trivia: Neurosurgeon vs. Forensic Pathologist, husband vs. wife