CREATIVITY AND YOUR BRAIN
Simple--be in a good mood:
"Just want to have fun? Two pieces of recent research suggest that getting in a good mood helps you perform better at certain tasks and be more creative.  A new study in Psychological Science exposed participants to music clips and YouTube videos that were supposed to put people in specific mood states.  For instance, a video for a laughing baby was "positive," "Antiques Roadshow" TV show was "neutral," and a news report of a Chinese earthquake was "negative." After volunteers listened to music and watched clips characteristic of one of these three moods, they had to do a task that involved learning a rule to categorize a particular pattern.
Researchers at the University of Western Ontario found that the "happy" participants performed better than "sad" or "neutral" volunteers at this task.  So, the authors say, maybe watching an occasional funny video on YouTube at work may actually help your creativity by putting you in a good mood.  Along those lines, researchers at Northwestern University have found that humor was key to people's ability to solve puzzles. One of the study authors, neuroscientist Mark Beeman, told the New York Times he thinks "that the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections” to solve puzzles."

AND SPEAKING OF YOUR BRAIN
Why do adolescent young people do what they do?  Brain research is helping solve that puzzle, too:
"They say you never escape high school. And for better or worse, science is lending some credibility to that old saw. Thanks to sophisticated imaging technology and a raft of longitudinal studies, we’re learning that the teen years are a period of crucial brain development subject to a host of environmental and genetic factors. This emerging research sheds light not only on why teenagers act they way they do, but how the experiences of adolescence—from rejection to binge drinking—can affect who we become as adults, how we handle stress, and the way we bond with others.  One of the most important discoveries in this area of study, says Dr. Frances Jensen, a neuroscientist at Harvard, is that our brains are not finished maturing by adolescence, as was previously thought. Adolescent brains “are only about 80 percent of the way to maturity,” she said at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in November. It takes until the mid-20s, and possibly later, for a brain to become fully developed.  An excess of gray matter (the stuff that does the processing) at the beginning of adolescence makes us particularly brilliant at learning—the reason we’re so good at picking up new languages starting in early childhood—but also particularly sensitive to the influences of our environment, both emotional and physical. Our brains’ processing centers haven’t been fully linked yet, particularly the parts responsible for helping to check our impulses and considering the long-term repercussions of our actions. “It’s like a brain that’s all revved up not knowing where it needs to go,” says Jensen."

That's been one of the interesting things about doing this blog; I knew of course that Moebius Syndrome had something to do with your brain...and I knew it was hardly the only condition that had to do with your brain...but I did not realize how much research, and how much more knowledge we gain daily, concerning our brain and how it works.  Kind of amazing...

"Personality has the power to open many doors, but character must
keep them open." -Unknown