The Nest Creative Therapy Center

09/23/2025

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09/13/2025

This is UP!

Many kids and teens use ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence models like Claude or Google Gemini for everything from dealing with math homework to coping with a mental health crisis, often with little to no guidance from adults. Education and child development experts say parents must take the lead in helping children understand this new technology.

"Having conversations now about what is ethical, responsible usage of AI is important, and you need to be a part of that if you are a parent," says Marc Watkins, a lecturer at the University of Mississippi who researches AI and its impact on education. Read the story here: https://n.pr/47CMxrv

08/24/2025

03/28/2025

Hamppy Hamster 💗 During pregnancy, a woman's brain shrinks in size.
This is why some pregnant women may experience small, sometimes subtle deficits in tasks, like recalling items from a list they have studied, or remembering to do certain things in the future.

After delivering the baby, it would take up to six months for the mother's brain to regain its original size. The cells in the brain reduce in size without reducing in number. In other words, neuron density remains the same, which is why the brain capacity returns to normal after childbirth.

A study published in Nature Neuroscience revealed that pregnant women experience a decrease in gray matter in specific brain regions responsible for social cognition and forming attachments. However, this loss of gray matter actually enhances a mother's feelings of attachment to her baby and improves her ability to understand their needs and emotions.

Using MRI scans, researchers examined the brains of pregnant women before and after giving birth. They discovered that the reduction in gray matter in specific brain regions actually improves the brain's efficiency in understanding nonverbal cues from newborns.

This change enables mothers to quickly identify potential dangers and enhances their emotional connection with their babies. The first study was published in the American Journal of Neuroradiology, and it’s entitled, “Change in brain size during and after pregnancy: study in healthy women and women with preeclampsia”. The second study was published in Nature Neuroscience and it’s entitled, “Pregnancy leads to long-lasting changes in human brain structure”

Credits: Hashem Al-Ghaili

03/05/2025

Come check out our free, drop-in groups to support your mental health!

Tonight is Mindfulness Skills and Education! And the others are listed below

02/09/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18E2xxWpPM/?mibextid=WC7FNe

Rooted in Play 💗

01/06/2025

For this portrait, Alice Neel didn’t ask her son, Hartley, to put on a happy face. She painted him as he was: exhausted and vulnerable.

It’s clear that Alice Neel’s 26-year-old son, Hartley, was preoccupied with his thoughts as he sat before his mother, a pioneering painter who redefined 20th-century American portraiture.

But Neel was never interested in depicting people’s most flattering moments. Hartley (1966) lays bare the harsh reality of her son’s circumstances as he trudged through medical school while the Vietnam War raged on.

Neel didn’t tell her son to smile, or to put on a dressier outfit, or to correct his slouched posture in the armchair. For her, asserting Hartley’s dignity meant capturing his true state of mind.

No matter whom Neel painted—her family, famous friends like Andy Warhol, blue-collar laborers, or her own aging body in the nude—she rendered her subjects with the same unrelenting honesty, in her signature emotive, blue-tinged brushwork.

Despite her distinctive approach, Neel went relatively unrecognized for most of her artistic journey, as emerging movements like abstract expressionism were more in vogue than portraiture. The art world finally began paying attention to her work in her 60s, during the rise of second-wave feminism and a renewed interest in realist representation.

But no matter how her career ebbed and flowed, she would always return to Hartley, whom she painted “many hundreds” of times.

Out of her love for her child and her commitment to her artistic vision, Neel painted Hartley as she truly saw him: imperfect.

In an age of edited photos and curated feeds, what might we learn from Neel’s raw, unvarnished representations of her son? And during a time of year when there may be pressure to perform cheeriness, what might it mean to allow ourselves and one another to simply feel what we feel, regardless of whether it looks picture-perfect?

11/07/2024

“Just Take Them and Leave Me Alone”
By Iranian artist, Raoof Haghighi

08/28/2024

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