Only 5% of People Wash Their Hands Properly, according to Robert Roy Britt for Medium/Elemental, 3 December 2019.  We are in cold and flu season … I thought you might like to know HOW TO WASH YOUR HANDS! 

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends you wash your hands much more frequently than you probably do: before prepping or eating food and after using the bathroom, blowing your nose, touching garbage, touching an animal, changing diapers, or caring for someone who is sick .

Here’s the CDC’s how-to:

1. 1. Use regular soap and running water.
   2. Lather up between fingers and on the back of your hands and especially under your nails. Soap helps lift germs from skin, and microbes congregate under fingernails.
   3. Scrub for at least 20 seconds (sing “Happy Birthday” twice). The friction is key to dislodging germs.
   4. Rinse well with running water.
   5. Use a clean towel to dry, or air dry

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Drumming makes your brain more efficient according to Tim Newman for MedicalNewsToday.com, 16 December 2019.  Over years of practice, drummers appear to modify the way that the two sides of their brain communicate. According to a recent study, the cabling that runs between the two hemispheres of a drummer’s brain is significantly different from non-musicians.

Playing the drums is a unique skill. Drummers can complete different rhythmical tasks with all four of their limbs, simultaneously. The coordination required is impossible for non-drummers.

As the authors of the latest study explain, “While most individuals can perform easy motor tasks with two hands at a similar level, only very few individuals can perform complex fine motor tasks with both hands equally well.”

The authors, from Bergmannsheil University Clinic and the biopsychology research unit at Ruhr-Universität, both in Bochum, Germany, published their paper in the journal Brain and Behavior.  The authors focused on white matter — the information superhighway of the brain.

When a right-handed person carries out a task with their right hand, the left-hand side of the brain, or the contralateral hemisphere, typically regulates it. When someone carries out a task with their left hand, both sides of the brain tend to share the load.

The corpus callosum — a thick tract of white matter that connects the two hemispheres — plays an essential role in this hemispheric asymmetry.

White matter contains tracts of fibers that connect distant regions of the brain. In the past, scientists considered white matter to be little more than useful cabling. Today, though, they see it as much more critical to the everyday functioning of the brain.

In particular, the authors of the current study focused on the corpus callosum. They focused here because they believe that a drummer’s “remarkable ability to uncouple the motor trajectories of [their] two hands is likely related to inhibitory functions of the corpus callosum.”

Read more:  Drumming makes your brain more efficient

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