How to Have a Healthy Brain

 Here's an interesting article about brain neuroplasticity and brain health. Guess what? Success in life all still all seems to boil down to exercise, good nutrition, and stress reduction — key to just about everything that we'd like to have, be, do, but have difficulty achieving!
Another example of "the more things change, the more things stay the same."

  This also ties in to why we all need to get rid of negative self-talk. NST causes stress. Using problem-solving thinking, cognitive restructuring, and detachment increases brain plasticity!


Dec 6, 2011

Top 10 Quotes on Lifelong Neuroplasticity and Neurogenesis (and a Call to eBook Readers)

By: Alvaro Fernandez

You may have  noticed that Amazon.com is shar­ing aggre­gated data on how ebook read­ers inter­act with the books they are read­ing. For exam­ple, the “Pop­u­lar High­lights” sec­tion (towards the bot­tom of our Kin­dle book page) ranks the Top 10 sen­tences that Kin­dle read­ers have high­lighted and shared while read­ing The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness: 18 Inter­views with Sci­en­tists, Prac­ti­cal Advice and Prod­uct Reviews, to Keep Your Brain Sharp (April 2009; 182 pages; ranked #1 in Kin­dle Store’s Pre­ven­tive Med­i­cine section).
This infor­ma­tion is invalu­able to authors and pub­lish­ers - as you can imag­ine, we’ll make sure to not only main­tain but to elab­o­rate on these top­ics as we pre­pare future edi­tions of the book.
So, what are so far the Top Ten Quotes on Life­long Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and Neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, based on read­ers’ reac­tion to The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness via Kin­dle eBook plat­form? Here you are the Top Ten:

1. “Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity refers to the life­long capac­ity of the brain to change and rewire itself in response to the stim­u­la­tion of learn­ing and expe­ri­ence. Neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis is the abil­ity to cre­ate new neu­rons and con­nec­tions between neu­rons through­out a life­time.” (High­lighted and shared by 24 Kin­dle readers)
2. “…best defenses against chronic stress are phys­i­cal exer­cise, relax­ation, self-empowerment, and cul­ti­vat­ing social networks.”
3. “Learn­ing is thought to be “neuro-protective.” Through neu­ro­plas­tic­ity, learn­ing increases con­nec­tions between neu­rons, increases cel­lu­lar metab­o­lism, and increases the pro­duc­tion of nerve growth fac­tor, a sub­stance pro­duced by the body to help main­tain and repair neurons.”
4. “There is not one sin­gle “atten­tion”, but three sep­a­rate func­tions of atten­tion: alert­ing, ori­ent­ing, and exec­u­tive attention.”
5. “The fear of fail­ing, the fear of look­ing not smart, is a key obsta­cle to learn­ing that I see too often, espe­cially with peo­ple who want to pro­tect per­ceived rep­u­ta­tions to such an extent that they do not let them­selves try new learn­ing cycles.”
6. “Emo­tion is the sys­tem that tells us how impor­tant some­thing is. Atten­tion focuses us on the impor­tant and away from the unim­por­tant things. Cog­ni­tion tells us what to do about it. Cog­ni­tive skills are what­ever it takes to do those things.”
7. “As lit­tle as three hours a week of brisk walk­ing has been shown to halt, and even reverse, the brain atro­phy (shrink­age) that starts in a person’s for­ties, espe­cially in the regions respon­si­ble for mem­ory and higher cog­ni­tion. Exer­cise increases the brain’s vol­ume of gray mat­ter (actual neu­rons) and white mat­ter (con­nec­tions between neurons).”
8. “Evi­dence of neu­ro­plas­tic­ity has been observed mostly in the brains of indi­vid­u­als who became experts in a par­tic­u­lar skill. Why? Because changes asso­ci­ated with learn­ing occur mas­sively when we become expert in a spe­cific domain. The areas of the brain that sup­port the skills at which one has become an expert change over time.”
9. “Cur­rent rec­om­men­da­tions sug­gest that a brain-healthy life style should include at least bal­anced nutri­tion, stress man­age­ment, phys­i­cal exer­cise, and brain exercise.”
10. “it is also impor­tant to main­tain emo­tional con­nec­tions. Not only with our­selves, to have self-confidence and self-esteem, but also with our fam­ily our friends.” Sleep and over­all health con­di­tions are other fac­tors that also mat­ter. Here we focus on the four main pil­lars of brain health: Bal­anced nutri­tion Stress man­age­ment, Phys­i­cal exer­cise, Men­tal stimulation.”

We have not yet fig­ured out whether we’ll be able to track this same data via other eBook plat­forms such as Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Apple’s iPad. In any case, fas­ci­nat­ing times! If you hap­pen to have a Kin­dle (or read Kin­dle books via other devices), and can invest $4.99 in a pretty solid eBook…please get your own copy and make sure to high­light your favorite sen­tences so we can include them in our analysis!