Finally.

“The House took steps yes­ter­day to improve coun­sel­ing and care for the tens of thou­sands of mil­i­tary per­son­nel return­ing from Iraq and Afghanistan with brain injuries and post-traumatic stress dis­or­der.” keep read­ing the Wash­ing­ton Post’s arti­cle House Passes Four Bills Aimed at Aid­ing Vet­er­ans.

Our pre­vi­ous thoughts on TBI (Trau­matic Brain Injury), Iraq and neu­ropsy­chol­ogy.

This week we have enjoyed 3 great blog carnivals

• Encephalon (neu­ro­science and psychology)
• Grand Rounds (med­i­cine and health)
• Tan­gled Bank (gen­eral science)

And, of course, there are more on a vari­ety of topics:

Med­i­cine and web 2.0, Change of Shift, Edu­ca­tion, Read the rest of this entry »

I have just read the best blog post I have read in a loooong while, so let me share it here now. Brett Steen­barger is a Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chi­a­try & Behav­ioral Sci­ences and a Trad­ing Psy­chol­ogy expert who I had the plea­sure to inter­view a while back. He is a mas­ter at trad­ing, learn­ing, teach­ing and coaching.

And has writ­ten this superb post: When Traders Lose Con­fi­dence — Part Three: Struc­tur­ing Your Expe­ri­ence. We talk in this blog a lot about neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and cog­ni­tive and emo­tional train­ing, but what Brett out­lines is, in sum­mary, a very healthy atti­tude to life, life­long brain plas­tic­ity, brain health, and suc­cess. Not bad!

See below a few of his quotes-but please read the full arti­cle here:

• What we call the “self”–how we expe­ri­ence ourselves–is the result of all that we inter­nal­ize from peo­ple and events.
• Because we are always hav­ing new experiences–and can inter­nal­ize these–we are always, to some degree, remak­ing who we are.
• Every activ­ity we engage in pro­vides us with feed­back about our­selves: our abil­i­ties, how we’re per­ceived by oth­ers, our char­ac­ter. In select­ing what we do, who we do it with, and how we do it, we can struc­ture our expe­ri­ence to cre­ate mir­rors of suc­cess and mastery.
• Expe­ri­ence is our psy­cho­log­i­cal food; it’s vital that we feed our­selves well. But what does it mean to struc­ture our expe­ri­ence and feed our­selves well psychologically?
• The rea­son I’m effec­tive as a psy­chol­o­gist, I believe, is not because I’m all that more edu­cated than oth­ers or uti­lize such bet­ter tech­niques. Rather, I have an uncanny abil­ity to see the best in peo­ple; to push aside the prob­lems of the moment and see through to qual­i­ties of great­ness that are present within most of us, how­ever fleet­ingly. It’s because I see the best in peo­ple that I can be a good mirror–and help oth­ers see in them­selves what they oth­er­wise can­not appre­ci­ate on their own Con­fi­dence comes from the right kind of mirroring–and we can choose our mirrors.

Please enjoy When Traders Lose Con­fi­dence — Part Three: Struc­tur­ing Your Expe­ri­ence.

Dr. Michael Merzenich has writ­ten a great post titled “cog­ni­tive reserve is a good thing to work on!. Rec­om­mended read­ing if you are inter­ested in another sci­en­tific per­spec­tive for cog­ni­tive training.

I agree we should know more (as usual), espe­cially for pol­icy deci­sions, but there is enough research, from Mar­ian Dia­mond et al (see beau­ti­ful essays below) work on enriched envi­ron­ments to cog­ni­tive reserve and train­ing, that is shout­ing at all of us: Exer­cise Your Brain! Enjoy Learn­ing! Sta­tis­tics such as that the aver­age American-including kids– watch 5 hours of TV daily… don’t mean “we need more research” but “how can we change this”?.

See a cou­ple of quotes from my recent inter­view with Yaakov Stern on the Cog­ni­tive Reserve.

• “well…I was pretty sur­prised when, years ago, a reporter from Sev­en­teen mag­a­zine requested an inter­view. I was really curi­ous to learn why Read the rest of this entry »

Shel­ley launched a good dis­cus­sion on The Neu­ro­science of ADHD in her blog, dis­cussing the sit­u­a­tion and pro­vid­ing a tech­ni­cal overview of drug-based inter­ven­tions. Some­thing I hadn’t heard is that “For exam­ple, babies born pre­ma­turely face a sig­nif­i­cantly greater risk of devel­op­ing ADHD than full-term babies (socioe­co­nomic sta­tus was con­trolled for).”

Which helps me bet­ter under­stand the need to think about pre-schoolers, as dis­cussed in the arti­cle Diag­nos­ing ADD/ ADHD in Preschool­ers, at ADDi­tude Mag­a­zine. I quote:

• “The Preschool ADHD Treat­ment Study, or PATS, con­ducted by the National Insti­tute of Men­tal Health (NIMH), is the first long-term study designed to eval­u­ate the effec­tive­ness of treat­ing preschool­ers with ADHD with behav­ioral ther­apy, and then, in some cases, methylphenidate. In the first stage, the chil­dren (303 preschool­ers with severe ADHD, between the ages of three and five) and their par­ents par­tic­i­pated in a 10-week behav­ioral ther­apy course. For one third of the chil­dren, ADHD symp­toms improved so dra­mat­i­cally with behav­ior ther­apy alone that they did not progress to the ADHD med­ica­tion phase of the study.”

As Shelley’s post and the arti­cle explain, drugs do help when used appro­pri­ately. Now, they are not the only answer. I am happy to see that behav­ioral ther­apy can be as use­ful when appro­pri­ate. Which is not a sur­prise, given the grow­ing lit­er­a­ture on dif­fer­ent meth­ods of cog­ni­tive train­ing, includ­ing ther­apy and work­ing mem­ory train­ing like the one dis­cussed with Notre Dame’s Bradley Gib­son and in our post Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science and ADD/ADHD Today.

Given the stock mar­ket per­for­mance these days, Brett Steen­barger offers timely tips and resources for traders on man­ag­ing stress and self-confidence: Updated Psy­chol­ogy of Trad­ing Resources, includ­ing a list of rel­e­vant blogs such as Afraid to Trade blog, Trader Psy­chol­ogy blog, the Head Coach blog, his Stock Mar­ket Psy­chol­ogy blog and Smart Trader blog.

He also offers very good advice to build self-confidence, which can be use­ful to us all, no mat­ter our pro­fes­sion: When Traders Lose Con­fi­dence — Part Two: Chang­ing Your Self-Talk .

• “The key to chang­ing the self-talk is to become aware of when you’re doing it. Most often, the neg­a­tive talk is auto­matic. Jour­nals are effec­tive because they force us to reflect on our think­ing and inter­rupt those auto­matic pat­terns. Sim­i­larly, I’ve had great results work­ing with traders who talk their thoughts out loud into a tape recorder and then play them back. It’s an excel­lent way to become aware of your think­ing, stand apart from it, and break the flow.”
• “Yet another strat­egy is to go through guided visu­al­iza­tions of chal­leng­ing mar­ket sce­nar­ios while you’re calm and focused (before trad­ing starts) and then men­tally rehearse the self-talk you’d like to engage in dur­ing those sit­u­a­tions. This helps to build new, pos­i­tive pat­terns of self-talk.
• “The key to all these strate­gies is rep­e­ti­tion: you’re train­ing your­self to process infor­ma­tion in new ways, and such train­ing requires practice.”

You may enjoy our inter­view with Brett N. Steen­barger on Enhanc­ing Trader Per­for­mance. And learn more on other tech­niques at Best prac­tice for top trad­ing per­for­mance: biofeed­back and solu­tions for Traders.

Very good arti­cle in Mar­ket­Watch titled Beat­ing for­get­ful­ness and boost­ing the brain. Prob­a­bly the best we have seen so far pro­vid­ing an over­all indus­try per­spec­tive on a nascent field. I rec­om­mend read­ing the whole arti­cle, but here you have some teasers:

• “As boomers age, the drive to cor­rect such dis­com­fort has impli­ca­tions for health and well­ness, employ­ment and cor­po­rate train­ing — even sports. It’s giv­ing rise to a bur­geon­ing busi­ness of brain-boosting prod­ucts and ser­vices, as well as explo­ration into “cog­ni­tive enhanc­ing” pre­scrip­tion drugs.”
• “The mar­ket for brain-fitness soft­ware tar­get­ing U.S. adults is esti­mated to be $80 mil­lion to $100 mil­lion this year, up from $60 mil­lion last year and $2 mil­lion in 2005, accord­ing to Sharp­Brains, a San Francisco-based por­tal that helps indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies nav­i­gate brain-training infor­ma­tion, prod­ucts and services.”
• “It’s also easy to con­fuse age-related mem­ory prob­lems with the effects of undi­ag­nosed depres­sion or anx­i­ety, which are reversible, said Dr. Gene Cohen, direc­tor of the Cen­ter on Aging, Health & Human­i­ties at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity Med­ical Center”
• “The busi­ness of brain train­ing started tak­ing off after Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Yaakov Stern is the Divi­sion Leader of the Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Divi­sion of the Sergievsky Cen­ter, and Pro­fes­sor of Clin­i­cal Neu­ropsy­chol­ogy, at the Col­lege of Physi­cians and Sur­geons of Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, New York.

He is one of the lead­ing pro­po­nents of the Cog­ni­tive reserve the­ory, which aims to explain why some indi­vid­u­als with full Alzheimer’s pathol­ogy (accu­mu­la­tion of plaques and tan­gles in their brains) can keep nor­mal lives until they die, while oth­ers –with the same amount of plaques and tan­gles– dis­play the severe symp­toms we asso­ciate with Alzheimer’s Dis­ease. He has pub­lished dozens of peer-reviewed sci­en­tific papers on the subject.

The con­cept of a Cog­ni­tive Reserve has been around since 1989, when a post mortem analy­sis of 137 peo­ple with Alzheimer’s Dis­ease showed that some patients exhib­ited fewer clin­i­cal symp­toms than their actual pathol­ogy sug­gested. These patients also showed higher brain weights and greater num­ber of neu­rons when com­pared to age-matched con­trols. The inves­ti­ga­tors hypoth­e­sized that the patients had a larger “reserve” of neu­rons and abil­i­ties that enable them to off­set the losses caused by Alzheimer’s. Since then, the con­cept of Cog­ni­tive Reserve has been defined as the abil­ity of an indi­vid­ual to tol­er­ate pro­gres­sive brain pathol­ogy with­out demon­strat­ing clin­i­cal cog­ni­tive symp­toms. (You can check at the end of this inter­view a great clip on this).

———————————

Key take-aways

- Life­time expe­ri­ences, like edu­ca­tion, engag­ing occu­pa­tion, and leisure activ­i­ties, have been shown to have a major influ­ence on how we age, specif­i­cally on whether we will develop Alzheimer’s symp­toms or not.

- This is so because stim­u­lat­ing activ­i­ties, ide­ally com­bin­ing phys­i­cal exer­cise, learn­ing and social inter­ac­tion, help us build a Cog­ni­tive Reserve to pro­tect us.

- The ear­lier we start build­ing our Reserve, the bet­ter; but it is never too late to start. And, the more activ­i­ties, the bet­ter: the effect is cumulative.

———————————

The Cog­ni­tive Reserve

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez (AF): Dear Dr. Stern, it is a plea­sure to have you here. Let me first ask you this: the impli­ca­tions of your research are pretty astound­ing, pre­sent­ing major impli­ca­tions across sec­tors and age groups. What has been the most unex­pected reac­tion so far?

YS: well…I was pretty sur­prised when Read the rest of this entry »

The ABA (Amer­i­can Bar Asso­ci­a­tion) Jour­nal has a good arti­cle titled Law Hacks: 101 tips, tricks and tools to make you a more pro­duc­tive, less stressed-out lawyer, com­bin­ing tips on email usage, soft­ware, and some brain tips from us:

• 67 “The Web site Sharp­Brains sug­gests self-improvement exer­cises. Try this one: Take five-minute visu­alization breaks with deep and reg­u­lar breath­ing, pic­tur­ing beau­ti­ful land­scapes or pleas­ant or suc­cess­ful mem­o­ries, espe­cially after fin­ish­ing a tough task.”
• 68 “Improve your men­tal acu­ity by sub­tract­ing num­bers, i.e., 7 from 200 (200, 193, 186, 179 …) or prac­tic­ing an expo­nen­tial series (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 …). The point is not to become a math genius or be smarter than a fifth-grader, but just to keep your mind sharp.”
• 69 “It takes a sys­tem to be pro­duc­tive, but it’s also use­ful to try some­thing dif­fer­ent every day to stay sharp. For exam­ple, try com­mut­ing dif­fer­ently or talk­ing to new people.”

Some more tips?

• Here is our full post on Brain Exer­cise FAQs.
• And the notes from a Stress Man­age­ment Work­shop we run at Accen­ture recently.
• You may also be inter­ested in this arti­cle on Ten Impor­tant Truths About Aging: How we age is at least par­tially under our con­trol, pub­lished by The Com­plete Lawyer, where you can learn why stress man­age­ment is impor­tant, and more tips.
• And a Best prac­tice for peak per­for­mance: emwave biofeedback

Very fun inter­view with Jack and Elaine LaLanne by Dave Bun­nell: read it at Meet Fit­ness Leg­ends Jack and Elaine LaLanne | ELDR.com. See some quotes:

• In 1936, Jack opened America’s first health club in Oak­land, Cal­i­for­nia, called the “Jack LaLanne Phys­i­cal Cul­ture Studio.”
• Through tele­vi­sion shows, pub­lic appear­ances, and books—and by sell­ing health-related products—they have been the most vocal and effec­tive evan­ge­lists for pre­ven­tive health the world has ever known.
• “Elaine works out,” Jack replies, “but I work out eight days a week. I spend an hour and a half in the gym, and then a half hour in the pool, and I change my rou­tine every 30 days completely.”
• “You’ve got to go at it hard and work on dif­fer­ent mus­cles,” he con­tin­ues. “You know how you stay young, don’t you? You work your butt off. Any­thing you do in life that’s worth­while, there’s a price to pay.”

Jack recently cel­e­brated his 92nd birthday!

We all have to be very thank­ful for their life mis­sion: a recent arti­cle from the Soci­ety for Neu­ro­science quotes:

“Every­body knows that exer­cise is good for your heart, but in recent years we’ve gath­ered com­pelling evi­dence that exer­cise is also good for your brain,” says Fred Gage, PhD, of the Salk Insti­tute for Bio­log­i­cal Stud­ies. “We now know that exer­cise helps gen­er­ate new brain cells, even in the aging brain.”

You can check other tips in Read the rest of this entry »