Good Health for Brains by Alvaro Fernandez

Here are 5 habits to increase your brain's good functioning. The tips come from Alvaro Fernandez, founder of Sharpbrains.com. Good stuff. I only copied the first five because they're the best, but you can see the others if you're interested at sharpbrains.com
  I'm working on this stuff with intensity and delighted to forget about crossword puzzles.

The Ten Habits of Highly Effective Brains

By: Alvaro Fernandez

Let’s review some good lifestyle options we can fol­low to main­tain, and improve, our vibrant brains.
.
.

1. Learn what is the “It” in “Use It or Lose It”. A basic under­stand­ing will serve you well to appre­ci­ate your brain’s beauty as a liv­ing and constantly-developing dense for­est with bil­lions of neu­rons and synapses.
2. Take care of your nutri­tion. Did you know that the brain only weighs 2% of body mass but con­sumes over 20% of the oxy­gen and nutri­ents we intake? As a gen­eral rule, you don’t need expen­sive ultra-sophisticated nutri­tional sup­ple­ments, just make sure you don’t stuff your­self with the “bad stuff”.
3. Remem­ber that the brain is part of the body. Things that exer­cise your body can also help sharpen your brain: phys­i­cal exer­cise enhances neurogenesis.
4. Prac­tice pos­i­tive, future-oriented thoughts until they become your default mind­set and you look for­ward to every new day in a con­struc­tive way. Stress and anx­i­ety, no mat­ter whether induced by exter­nal events or by your own thoughts, actu­ally kills neu­rons and pre­vent the cre­ation of new ones. You can think of chronic stress as the oppo­site of exer­cise: it pre­vents the cre­ation of new neurons.
5. Thrive on Learn­ing and Men­tal Chal­lenges. The point of hav­ing a brain is pre­cisely to learn and to adapt to chal­leng­ing new envi­ron­ments. Once new neu­rons appear in your brain, where they stay in your brain and how long they sur­vive depends on how you use them. “Use It or Lose It” does not mean “do cross­word puz­zle num­ber 1,234,567″. It means, “chal­lenge your brain often with fun­da­men­tally new activities”.

I'm still reeling from much information and many mental gyrations as a result of sharpbrains.com virtual Summit. Here are a couple of new surprising facts:

• Multitasking isn't good for your brain. The word toxic was used which seems like overkill to me, but . . .

 The impression I got was that brains are wired to work quickly and efficiently. When you're working on several different projects and types of thinking at one time, (watching TV, talking on the phone, knitting OR taking notes on a lecture, planning an upcoming meeting, and thinking about your new blog logo), your neural pathways have to make detours, take longer to arrive at planned destinations, and your attention, my guess without fMRI.

 I am finding that I am doing much better with one mental project at a time, although there are definitely seemingly mindless tasks that I can do simultaneously. e.g. watching a boring TV program and a reading a boring newspaper article. Of course I don't remember much of either, but it doesn't matter other than for me to wonder why I'm bothering with boring stuff.

 I'd like to hear what other women' experience is with more single focus, less multifocus. My experience is that men are generally more single focused than we are — and it can sometimes be annoying, particularly when I'm multifocusing.

N-Back Games to Increase Intelligence Still Iffy

Do you know what the N-Back game is? I didn't either but now I do because it and its cousins are the mainstay of brain training, aimed at improving memory and attention for all ages. I tried one brain training game, about a 9 months ago, although I don't remember the brand name (ironic). Actually I bought it as a gift for my husband with the idea that we could use it together. The information about the brain training was on sharpbrains.com

 I returned the game fairly quickly because neither of us had the patience or boredom tolerance to practice 20 minutes a day, a problem that I later learned was also a concern of manufacturers and researchers. Players have to summon their own motivation and willingness to delay gratification, which is tough for adults, but even harder for kids as you can imagine.

The basis for this type of brain function enhancement is based on research that showed that improvement in n-back training could result in improvement in fluid intelligence: "the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and get to the bottom of things." Sounds like problem-solving thinking to me. The NYTimes Magazine, 4/22/2012 article by Dan Hurley noted, "To find that training could result in an increase in fluid intelligence would be cognitive psychology's equivalent of discovering particles traveling faster than light." The early mission of the training aimed to increase kids' intelligence. The later added goal was to build working memory and  attention for adults, young and old.

Problems arose. Researchers couldn't come up with the same excellent results that the pioneering research found. And again, the problem of how to build and maintain a habit that doesn't have immediate rewards, involves strategic allocation of attention on the training game for 20 minutes every day,  and requires patience, focus, and determination still hasn't been solved.

Nonetheless, I think the N-Back games training is something for adults, particularly parents, to keep on their radar. In the next year or two,  developments may bring this intelligence enhancing tool to an effective level, an adjunct to everyday life for kids and adults.

Zip-zapping Brains Can Increase Saving $$ Behavior?! So Far, Just in the Lab

Neuroscience is covering the behavioral waterfront like algae in warming seas. Now it's about rebooting hard-wired spending habits. Noticeable differences in the brain anatomy and action was noted for savers and spenders. Which are you? Or are you in the mid? Sharon Begley's article in Newsweek calls the summary research findings, the "moneybrain."

Much of the concepts about problem-solving thinking, will power, strategic allocation of attention, and delay of gratification all are part of the interactive process that determines what and how we spend and save.  Begley notes that, "Identifying the regions of the brain that control impulses, is a first step in learning how to strengthen them and, ultimately to enjoy saving."

 Yes, I'm sure that's true, but then what? Makes sense that we're more likely to spend impulsively than to save impulsively, but maybe there are addictive savers as well as spenders. Tight-wads? Frugalites? Obsessive-compulsive people focused on money? Just plain sane, folks with common sense and olf-fashion values? Debt-haters?

Regardless, I don't want someone zip-zapping around my brain to figure out exactly how to get me to save or spend more, whether it's "noninvasive" or not! Just in case you're more adventuresome in this realm than I, the technique is called TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation. The procedure has been conducted only in labs so far, but . . .

Besides hard-wiring for one or another end of the s-s spectrum, ages and stages as well as the realities of life must have some effect. E.g. saving has increased and spending has decreased during the recession for obvious reasons. Reminds me of the habit stuff I was just posting about: cues trigger a routine/habit which is rewarded, whether sooner or later. Also as Begley points out in her article, one-click shopping, Twittering,  instagrams all encourage instant gratification.

Good news for women and money comes from the Journal of American Science (2011) and World Bank research.

 • College women demonstrate better financial management and spending management than men. They focus on cash flow. Men do a better job of planning for the future with savings and investments.
 • Women, as has been true for decades, are still more cautious and risk aversive. They manage the day-to-day well. Generally, they don't do a great job planning for the future.

Rebuttal to "The Brain on Fiction" article

I had posted an article about neuroscience and fiction previously. http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5630711609871539058#editor/target=post;postID=730063957582045987Here's a rebuttal of that original article; a broad criticism. The author of The Pseudoscience of Neuroscience in the Media, says that her problem is "the flippant use of neuroscience as it is bandied about in our popular consciousness by the media." She coins the phrase "neuro-pop crowd" and adds, "While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this neuro-pop mania is particularly dangerous, it’s misleading." 

Although I hadn't given it a thought when I read the original article, this rebuttal made sense. Neuroscience, well translated into practical information and how-tos is most relevant for clinical diagnosis and treatment and/or learning about thinking, emotions, behavior, and their interactions — not for the arts and humanities. It was fun to see both articles by good writers, smart women, making good points, but in strong disagreement.

 

 

The Pseudoscience of Neuroscience in the Media

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Katheryn Rivas

The New York Times and many other respected, well-known newspapers seem to have an unending love affair with the fMRI machine and what it can supposedly tell us about who we are. In the past two weeks alone, we were blessed with the following gems—“The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction” and “The Brain on Love,” both of which try to explain complex human phenomena, like the pleasure of reading or the feeling of being in love, using brain scans. Now don’t get me wrong. Neuroscience is indeed a fascinating field that has and will help tremendously in discovering how the brain works and the reasons which cause it to malfunction. The brain has historically been a mystery to scientists, so to knock neuroscience as a legitimate field is not at all what I’m trying to do.
Most of these “Your Brain on X” or “The Neuroscience of X” articles use the same exact formula—they talk about a study using brain scans, and then they triumphantly conclude that a subjective experience is “real” because parts of the brain light up on the scan. For example, an article will suggest that because the region of your brain that processes pleasure lights up with activity when you eat something fattening, it means that –wait for it—fatty foods really are pleasurable!

Another common thread among the neuro-pop crowd is the mixing of often irreconcilable disciplines to come to some sort of higher truth about both disciplines. Almost no humanistic field of study has escaped the scourge of someone or another trying to explain the field in terms of firing neurons. There’s neuroeconomics, neuro-literary criticism, even neuro-aesthetics. While conciliense—the attempt to unify different bodies of knowledge—can yield interesting results, it’s only possible if the two different fields ask similar questions. Neuroscience and literary criticism do not have the same aims. Raymond Tallis most engagingly criticized this in his article “A Suicidal Tendency in the Humanitiies”:

A mode of literary studies that addresses the most complex and rich of human discourses, not with an attention that aims to reflect or at least respect that complexity and richness, but with a simplifying discourse whose elements are blobs of the brain (and usually the same blobs), wheeled out time after time is the kind of contempt that, along with the mobilization of other disciplines half-digested, in this case bad biology rather than bad philosophy and worse linguistics that we saw in Theory. If literary criticism is to serve any worthwhile function, it won’t be concerned with putative mechanisms of grotesquely reduced and traduced neuralised reader responses or Darwinised authorial motives but with helping readers to make sense of, and put into larger context, a work that repays careful attention.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this neuro-pop mania is particularly dangerous, it’s misleading. It incorrectly reduces both the human self and the field of neuroscience to something simple and easily digested in a 500 word newspaper article. In a world saturated in skin-deep media, this is not what the public needs.

What do you think about neuroscience in the media?