Nutrients play key roles in brain function. Several have shown efficacy in clinical trials treating cases of mood disorders, cognitive decline and of course benefiting the physical health of the brain. Nutrients are both the raw materials employed in creating new neural connections and important components in regulating the activity of genes involved in these processes. Specific nutrients involved in mitochondrial efficiency, the energy factories of brain and body cells, are particularly important for many aspects of brain function. Other nutrients are involved in the inner workings of neuronal membranes, responsible for ensuring that electrochemical signals, which make up our thoughts, transmit efficiently and reliably. Finally, antioxidants, important throughout the body, are especially important in the brain due to its high energy production rates and concurrent high capacity for free radical leakage. Keeping this in mind, it is readily apparent that nutrition provides the building blocks for our brain's structure and function, and therefore cannot be ignored.

Exercise is a clearly established component for promoting brain health as well. No longer can we think that the brain is completely separate from the brawn. Human studies have shown the value of exercise in controlling stress and maintaining positive mood states; in improving cognitive function, including performance on memory and executive tasks; and in improving the brain's two-way communication streams with the rest of the body. Some of these benefits are likely due to the positive effects of exercise on neurovascular health, which parallel cardiovascular health. Other benefits seem due to increased grey matter in 'front office' functions of the cortex; and neuronal birth, or neurogenesis, in the hippocampus, a brain region that controls aspects of memory and mood regulation. Whatever the mechanism, giving your body a workout will produce substantial benefits in terms of brain health. Remember, a body in motion tends to stay in motion, and your brain and body will be together your whole life.

Mental activity is an obvious, and critical, ingredient for optimizing and maintaining brain function. Studies have established relationships between the degree of life-time mental activity and late-life cognitive function. It's clear that those who engage in intellectually challenging endeavors on a regular basis reap the benefits of a clear mind. There is, however a need for each individual to balance sufficient variety with a proper degree of challenge. Without variety and challenge, tasks become too mundane and too easy, eventually growing stale and losing their capacity to adequately stimulate the brain. We must also realize that mental activity goes beyond 'cognitive' tasks. Mental activities also include practices like meditative focus, relaxation and stress reduction techniques, as well as social interaction. These active and dynamic processes challenge the mind as well. Mixing cognitive challenges with emotional regulation provides a more complete mental workout that will help you to use it to improve it.

An often neglected component contributing to brain health is optimal sleep. On average, we sleep approximately 1.5 hours per night less than we did 100 years ago. Modern technology makes it easier to get less sleep and our busy lives encourage us to do it. Sleep is far more than a time of rest, and is too often misclassified as a period of lost productivity. It is an active metabolic period for our brains. Sleep is a time when we consolidate memories of the previous day, a time when we re-synchronize the circadian rhythm of at least dozens, if not hundreds, of hormones controlling our metabolism. Sleep loss is associated with a high percentage of mood disorders and certainly reduces our cognitive efficiencies. We must give ourselves permission to sleep by realizing that it is counterproductive to steal from it.

In our new book BrainFit For Life: A User's Guide to Life-Long Brain Health and Fitness, we focus equally on the cognitive, emotional and physical health of the brain and all of the lifestyle factors that come into play to maintain them. Today's aging population is becoming increasingly focused on the maintenance of cognitive health and the value of 'brain training' programs. But we must realize that such training is not unlike that of an athlete, who must focus on their diet, sleep needs and psychological preparation in addition to their physical skill development. We explore specific aspects of nutrition, exercise, mental activity and sleep. We discuss how they regulate emotional, physical and intellectual functions of the brain. After all, they are not separable.

"To keep the body in good health is a duty...otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear." - Buddha, circa 500 B.C.

-- This article was co-written by Drs. Simon Evans and Paul Burghardt. Drs. Evans and who currently collaborate in the University of  Michigan’s Department of Psychiatry, and the Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute to study the effects of nutrition and exercise on brain function. They are co-authors of BrainFit For Life: A User's Guide to Life-Long Brain Health and Fitness.

To Blink or not to Blink?

To Think or not to Think?

We are pleased to present, as part of our ongoing Author Speaks Series, an article by Madeleine Van Hecke, author of Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things. In it, she offers the "on the other hand" to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink argument. 

To Think or to Blink?

- By Madeleine Van Hecke, PhD

Is thoughtful reflection necessarily better than hasty judgments?

Not according to Malcolm Gladwell who argued in his best-selling book, Blink, that the decisions people make in a blink are often not only just as accurate, but MORE accurate, than the conclusions they draw after painstaking analysis.

So, should we blink, or think?

When we make judgments based on a thin slice of time – a few minutes talking with someone in a speed dating situation, for example – are our judgments really as accurate as when we analyze endless reams of data?

Gladwell says sure – that’s why Blink is called “the power of thinking without thinking.” Gladwell tells some compelling stories to demonstrate that power, including his opening gambit about the Greek kouros sculpture that two experts accurately detected as a fake within a few moments perusal, after months of scientific testing had deemed it genuine.

But Gladwell’s own examples show that people are most likely to be correct in their “blink” judgments when they are like the two art experts – when their judgments rest on a mother lode of background experience or information. So a “blink” judgment might serve you well at those times – but the rest of the time, you need to slow down in order to avoid the blind spots that can trip up even the smartest people. In my book, Blind Spots, I suggest tactics to help one make better decisions because they help sidestep the pitfalls that our blind spots keep us from seeing.

While some "blink" decisions can be on target when they're based on our expertise, they don't always serve us well, for two reasons. First, because in highly-charged, emotional situations – such as when a police officer becomes suspicious of someone and fears danger – blink decisions can result in tragedy. Gladwell acknowledges this– he notes that some police departments have adopted one-officer squad cars. Why? Because an officer alone will act more slowly, often wait for back-up. This delays the time between becoming suspicious and taking action, and it apparently reduces the number of inaccurate blink-decisions that officers make.

In Blind Spots, I point out that failing to stop and think is a blind spot – we don’t think because we don’t recognize “this is a situation in which I really need to step back from what’s going on and figure out what to do.” As a result we shoot off an e-mail that we later regret, or exuberantly embrace a flawed marketing plan. Every time you have ever said “I realize now,” you’re recognizing an earlier time where you failed to stop and think.

The second reason that expert blink decisions can go astray is because sometimes our very expertise blinds us to new, more creative perspectives. Why, for example, did people design early train cars with no central aisles, and with brakes that had to be operated by a conductor seated outside, on top of the train car – a dangerous practice? Because these early cars were almost exact replicas of what the expert designers were most familiar with – the stagecoach. So our expertise can sometimes trap us.

Now, I think intuition is important, and one of the good things about Blink is that it’s kind of a corrective book, one that celebrates the value of intuitive thinking and pokes fun a bit at careful, analytic reasoning. But Blink oversimplifies the issue. Blind Spots reflects more deeply on the tension between analytic thought and intuition. It’s a mistake to enthrone logic as the sole and sure-fire way to Truth, but it’s also a mistake to blithely accept every whim as inspired. A better slogan might be “Don’t believe everything that you think.” The strategies in Blind Spots help you figure out what you should and shouldn’t believe.

Some of the stories that Gladwell tells are testimony to the mystery of our minds, and I absolutely agree that our minds often work in mysterious ways. But that mystery goes way beyond the nature of intuition. Take the evidence that children can be incredibly logical in their thinking. One three-year-old girl was being teased by her Aunt, who was nibbling at the child’s toes and threatening “I’m going to eat you up!” “No!” said the little girl, “I’m going to eat you up!” “Aha,” said the Aunt, “but I’m bigger than you, so I’ll eat you up first.” “Uh-uh” retorted this youngster: “because I’ll eat your mouth first.” The logic of this preschooler is quite breathtaking. How did she do that?

On the other hand, there’s also research that raises the opposite question: the “How could anyone be so dumb?” question. Some studies, for example, show that intelligent adults consistently make mistakes in reasoning. How do you explain that? To me, the apparent stupidity of adults – the enigma of why smart people do dumb things — is a puzzle to be solved.

Smart people do dumb things because our minds work FOR us – 80 or 90 percent of the time. But the rest of the time they work against us: they create blind spots that trip us up. Some of these blind spots are familiar to us, like “my-side bias” - not seeing another point of view. One smart fellow told me what he did to get a squirrel out of his basement. He opened a window, piled up some planks and boxes to create a road, and set down a trail of nuts, ending with a heap on the patio. Now that MIGHT have been a smart thing to do - but it could have backfired. Because that trail went both ways – possibly leading the troublesome squirrel out of the basement, but possibly leading other squirrels INTO the basement. Some smart plans fail because of my-side bias. Forgetting that there’s another point of view is one of the natural blind spots that work against us.

It takes some time, it takes some effort – it takes more than a blink – but paying attention to your Blind Spots can help you think more critically and more creatively.

-- Madeleine Van Hecke, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist, speaker, consultant, and author. She is the author of Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things (Prometheus Books, Inc., 2007).

If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy reading this related article:

Why Smart Brains Make Stupid Decisions. 

We are honored to bring you a guest post by Daniel Goleman, thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine, a UC-Berkeley-based quarterly magazine that highlights ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism. Enjoy!

- Alvaro

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Hot To Help: When can empathy move us to action?

By Daniel Goleman

We often emphasize the importance of keeping cool in a crisis. But sometimes coolness can give way to detachment and apathy.

We saw a perfect example of this in the response to Hurricane Katrina, whose devastation was amplified enormously by the lackadaisical response from the agencies charged with managing the emergency. As we all witnessed, leaders at the highest levels were weirdly detached, despite the abundant evidence on our TV screens that they needed to snap to action. The victims' pain was exacerbated by such indifference to their suffering. So as we prepare for the next Katrina-like disaster, what can the science of social intelligence—especially research into empathy—teach policy makers and first responders about the best way to handle themselves during such a crisis?

This brings me to psychologist Paul Ekman, an expert on our ability to read and respond to others' emotions. When I recently spoke with Ekman, he discussed three main ways we can empathize with others, understanding their emotions as our own. The differences between these forms of empathy highlight the challenges we face in responding to other people's pain. But they also make clear how the right approach can move us to compassionate action.

The first form is "cognitive empathy," simply knowing how the other person feels and what they might be thinking. Sometimes called perspective-taking, this kind of empathy can help in, say, a negotiation or in motivating people. A study at the University of Birmingham found, for example, that managers who are good at perspective-taking were able to move workers to give their best efforts.

But cognitive empathy can illustrate the "too cold to care" phenomenon: When people try to understand another person's point of view without internalizing his or her emotions, they can be so detached that they're not motivated to do anything to actually help that person.

In fact, those who fall within psychology's "Dark Triad"—narcissists, Machiavellians, and sociopaths—can actually put cognitive empathy to use in hurting people. As Ekman told me, a torturer needs this ability, if only to better calibrate his cruelty. Talented political operatives can read people's emotions to their own advantage, without necessarily caring about those people very much.

And so cognitive empathy alone is not enough. We also need what Ekman calls "emotional empathy"—when you physically feel what other people feel, as though their emotions were contagious. This emotional contagion depends in large part on cells in the brain called mirror neurons, which fire when we sense another's emotional state, creating an echo of that state inside our own minds. Emotional empathy attunes us to another person's inner emotional world, a plus for a wide range of professions, from sales to nursing—not to mention for any parent or lover.

But wait: Emotional empathy has a downside, too, especially for first responders. In a state of emotional empathy, people sometimes lack the ability to manage their own distressing emotions, which can lead to paralysis and psychological exhaustion. Medical professionals often inoculate themselves against this kind of burnout by developing a sense of detachment from their patients.

Cultivated detachment in rescue, medical, and social workers can actually help the victims of disaster. Ekman told me about his daughter, a social worker at a large city hospital. In her situation, he said, she can't afford to let emotional empathy overwhelm her. "My daughter's clients don't want her to cry when they're crying," he says.

The danger arises when detachment leads to indifference, rather than to well-calibrated caring. Today, we face this problem on a global level. "One of the problems of living in a television society is that every bit of suffering and misery that occurs anywhere in the world is shown to us," says Ekman—and generally, we can't do anything about it, at least not directly.

This can make emotional empathy seem futile and hinder the growth of the third kind of empathy, which Ekman calls "compassionate empathy." With this kind of empathy we not only understand a person's predicament and feel with them, but are spontaneously moved to help, if needed.

Compassionate empathy was the vital ingredient missing from the top-level response to Hurricane Katrina—and in responses to many other disasters around the world, including the slow-burning disaster of global warming. Ekman calls compassionate empathy a skill, the acquired knowledge "that we're all connected."

This can lead to outbursts of what he calls "constructive anger." In other words, reacting negatively to injustice or suffering can motivate us to work with others to make the world a better place. Just as empathy has its downsides, negative emotions like anger can have upsides. Staying cool in a crisis might bring some benefits. But sometimes we must let ourselves get hot in order to help.

-- Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., is the author of the bestsellers Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence. His website is www.danielgoleman.info. Goleman’s full conversation with Daniel Siegel can be heard as part of the audio series Wired to Connect: Dialogues on Social Intelligence, available through More than Sound Productions.

We bring you this post thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine, a UC-Berkeley-based quarterly magazine that highlights ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism.

- Alvaro

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In a recent interview on the Brain Science Podcast, Dr. John Medina, author of Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School shared some of the practical implications of recent neuroscience research.

We talked about the importance of exercise and sleep and we discussed why appreciating how our memory and attention systems really work could change how we run schools, businesses, and even our daily lives.

For example, while adequate sleep is generally acknowledged to be essential to optimal mental function, many people are chronically sleep deprived. Dr. Medina advises that the first thing an individual should do is determine their own sleep style. While people who naturally arise early and go to bed early ("larks") tend to perform well in the traditional education setting, those whose natural cycle is to rise late and stay up late (what Medina calls "late chronotypes" or "night owls") tend to accumulate a huge sleep deficit that impairs their performance. Dr. Medina argues that schools and businesses could run more efficiently if people's schedules were better matched to their natural rhythms. He advises people who are home schooling their children to determine their child's natural cycle since home schooling provides greater flexibility than the traditional school schedule.

Listen to John Medina's interview

Dr. Medina's Brain Rules goes into 12 principles that anyone can apply in their daily lives. You can hear the rest of Dr. Medina's interview on Episode 37 of the Brain Science Podcast and in iTunes™.

Ginger Campbell, MD graduated from the University of Alabama School of Medicine. She also has a Master's Degree in Biomedical Engineering and spent several years teaching at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Dr. Campbell has been practicing emergency medicine since 1992. She started the Brain Science Podcast in 2006. Her goal is to help general audiences understand how recent discoveries in neuroscience are unraveling the mysteries of how our brains make us who we are.

Try eating food with one chop stick. 

It is possible, for certain types of food. But probably not the best approach.

Let's now talk brain health.

Dr. Larry McCleary is a former acting Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Denver Children's Hospital, and author of the The Brain Trust Program (Perigee Trade, 2007). He agreed to help us answer an important, yet often neglected, question: Given That We Are Our Brains, How do We Nourish Them?

Alvaro: Dr. McCleary, Why did a former neurosurgeon such as yourself develop an interest in brain health public education?

Dr. McCleary: For two reasons ... I am a Boomer and am trying to maximize my own brain health. Also, there is much exciting research documenting how we can be proactive in this regard. This information needs to be disseminated and I would like to help in this process.

And what is the single most important brain-related idea or concept that you would like every person in the planet to fully understand?

The most important take home message about brain health is that we now know that no matter what your brain status or age, there is much you can do to significantly improve brain function and slow brain aging. Based on emerging information, what is especially nice is the fact that unlike many things in life our brain health is largely under own control.

What are the most important elements to nourish our brains as we age?

I approach this question much like an athlete prepares for competition. They utilize a holistic approach. This is also what a healthy brain requires. It should not be surprising that "what is good for the body is good for the brain." That is how our bodies and brains evolved.

Hence what I believe are valuable components of a well-rounded approach to brain health involve:

A) Appropriate nutrition.

The major fuel the brain consumes is glucose. The earliest sign of impending dementia and Alzheimer disease (AD) is a decrement in the ability of the brain to use glucose efficiently. Based on this observation, some neuroscientists are referring to AD as Type 3 diabetes because of the inability to appropriately use glucose in that disorder. This makes sense because people with diabetes have a four-fold increase in AD.

The brain is a fatty organ. The most important fats are those in the nerve cell membranes whose presence keeps them flexible. These are the long chain omega 3 fatty acid molecules found in fatty, cold-water fish and arachidonic acid (a long chain omega 6 fatty acid). These are both delicate fats and as such can oxidize easily (meaning they can become rancid).

Thus, we should include additional dietary components that provide free radical fighting activity to protect them against oxidation. Based on these observations, I recommend a diet containing fatty fish, veggies and salads, non-starchy fruits (like berries) - that are high in free radical fighting compounds - and nuts. Addition of specific nutritional supplements may be helpful for the elderly, those under chronic stress, in the context of medications that lower critical nutrient levels in the body, or when dietary quality varies.

B) Stimulating brain activity

To increase neuroplasticity (the continual ability of the brain to "rewire" itself) and neurogenesis (the formation of new nerve cells), brain stimulation is vital. All types count including school work, occupational endeavors, leisure activities and formal brain training. The key in any activity is to include novelty (to encourage thinking outside the box), challenge and variety.

C) Physical activity

Exercise delivers additional blood and oxygen to the brain. Yet, it does so much more. It actually causes alterations in the nerve cells. They produce more neurotrophins, which are compounds that increase the formation of new nerve cells and enhance their connectivity. They also make the neurons we have more resistant to the aging process. Cross train your brain by starting with a good aerobic program and mix in resistance (weight training) exercise and speed and agility components such as jumping rope, playing ping-pong, gymnastics and various balance drills.

D) Stress reduction

Chronic, unremitting stress kills neurons. This is especially detrimental to memory function. So include a component of stress reduction in your approach to optimal brain health and make sure to get plenty of sleep.

E) Be Aware of Side effects of medications

There are medications that lower the level of important brain nutrients in the body such as B vitamins and coenzyme Q10. Check with your doctor to screen for these. There are also many common medicines (many OTC) that have anti-cholinergic activities. These can impair the function of one of the most important memory neurotransmitters in the brain -acetylcholine.

Finally, what brain health-related information or practices would you suggest other doctors and health professionals pay more attention to, both for themselves and the patients they see?

They should counsel their patients on tips for brain health such as those listed above in much the same way they discuss cardiac risk factors and how to address them. I would like to see physicians encourage their patients to avoid high-fructose corn syrup because it has recently been shown to be associated with increased brain atrophy.

Dr. McCleary, many thanks for your great insights.

My pleasure!

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For more information

- The Brain Trust Program (Perigee Trade, 2007).

- Evolution and Brain Health, an article by Dr. McCleary.

Enjoy the weekend...always a good time to nourish our brains.

Why?

We just secured an interview with Ori Brafman, co-author of Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior (Doubleday Business, 2008), to discuss our Dark Side (well, he calls it "different hidden forces" and "psychological undercurrents").

While reading some reviews about his book, I particularly enjoyed finding, after the usual impressive long collection of endorsements, this "disclaimer":

*DISCLAIMER: If you decide to buy this book because of these endorsements, you just got swayed. One of the psychological forces you'll read about in Sway is our tendency to place a higher value on opinions from people in positions of prominence, power, or authority. (But you should still buy the book.)

Alvaro Fernandez (AF): Ori, what is SWAY? can you give us a couple quick examples?

Ori Brafman (OB): Sway is about why perfectly rational people make irrational choices. We interviewed business executives, airline pilots, doctors, and even a Supreme Court Justice to uncover the psychological forces that affect our decision-making. What was especially interesting was to find out that we all get swayed, and that these psychological forces are much more ubiquitous than we thought.

Take, for instance, the story of Jacob Van Zanten who was the head of safety for KLM. One foggy afternoon, Van Zanten took off without getting tower clearance, causing the biggest airline accident in history. Why would this man, who's the head of safety make such an irrational choice?

Or look at the story of Harvard Business School students who paid $204 for a twenty-dollar bill.

AF: Happy to have attended Stanford... Now, how did that happen?

OB: The professor set up an auction for a $20 bill. But there was a twist. The winner would get the $20 bill. But the second place bidder, would still have to honor his bid, but would get nothing. At first there are lots of bidders, but then as the bidding approaches $20 people start pulling out. Inevitably, though two people stay in. As the bidding continued to rise, the second-place person became determined to not be the sucker who pays good money for nothing in return. The amazing thing is that time after time the auction continues well past the $20 point. People are just so determined not to lose, that they keep on bidding up.

AF: Why do people get Swayed?

OB: Without realizing it, we get swept up by a host of different hidden forces. I think of it like being in a boat in the middle of the ocean. It may look like we're standing still, but underneath the surface, undercurrents move us without us realizing it. The same thing happens with psychological undercurrents. In Sway, we look at some of the major undercurrents and explore how they intersect triggering so many different irrational behaviors. The thing is that we're prone to psychological sways all of the time--whether we're conducting a job interview, going out on a first date, or deciding whether to sell a stock.

AF: Let's be practical for a minute... what can people do to Sway other people?

OB: We're constantly engaged in a hidden dance of sorts where we sway people around us and are swayed by others. One of the most unusual studies we encountered has to do with what we call the chameleon effect. In the study, a group of men and women--who had never met each other--were told to have a short phone conversation. Now, before the conversation, each man was shown a picture of the woman he'd be talking to. Unbeknownst to the men, the pictures were fake. And half the men were shown a picture of a beautiful woman, while the other half were shown a picture of a less attractive woman. The pictures had nothing to do with how the real women looked like, and the real women had no idea that there were any pictures shown. The kicker is that the women who the men thought were pretty ended up sounding beautiful on the phone. And the women who the men thought were less attractive ended up sounding less beautiful. We take on the roles others ascribe to us. Think about that with employees or even with your kids. If we think someone is smart, there's a good chance they'll live up to that role.

AF: And what can people do to prevent being Swayed?

OB: The biggest step is to recognize how often we get swayed. We have a tendency to think that our decisions are rational, when in fact, different sways may have informed the decision. Once we realize that we're prone to get swayed, the second step is figuring out specific strategies to counter the sway.
It ranges from taking a long-term perspective to using empirical models for job interviews.

AF: For example?

OB: We have a propensity to "diagnose" a job candidate from the first moment we meet him or her. We assign a diagnosis, and are unable to see things in a different light despite objective evidence to the contrary. It's for this reason that job interviews are terrible predictors of actual performance. A much more effective approach is to conduct very structured interviews that don't allow managers to get swayed. In these interviews, the questions are pre-scripted and focus on experience and ability rather than vague things like "what's your biggest strength?" We call these the Joe Friday interview (just the facts...) These interviews may seem less personal, but they're actually much more effective for actually selecting a good candidate.

AF: Ori, thank you very much for your time.

OB: My pleasure!

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For more information:

- Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior  (Doubleday Business, 2008).

- Other Brain and Mind Books.

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Can you share a recent Stupid Decision made by a Smart Brain? If it refers to yourself...you get 1,000 bonus points! I'll be happy to share mine as a comment below in a couple of days.  Books, brain, brain books, Dark Force, Decision making, Harvard, Huffpost Books, Irrational, Living News, Ori Brafman, Psychology, rational, Smart Brain, smart brains, Stanford, Sway]]> http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2008/06/20/why-smart-brains-make-stupid-decisions/feed/ http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2008/06/09/cognitive-and-emotional-development-through-play/ http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2008/06/09/cognitive-and-emotional-development-through-play/#comments Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:22:33 +0000 Greater Good Magazine Education Health & Wellness Author Speaks Seriesacademic performancebrain growthbrain researchcognitive developmentDavid Elkindearly childhoodemotional developmentflowgamesgoogleGreater Good Magazinehigher IQimportance of recessintellectual developmentLearningMihaly CsikszentmihalyiNo Child Left Behindplayplayful cultureplayground movementPreschool tutoringproblem solvingSmilanskyTechnological innovationtest anxietythe power of playTufts University http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2008/06/09/cognitive-and-emotional-development-through-play/ We sometimes neglect to mention a very basic yet powerful method of cognitive and emotional development, for children and adults alike: Play.

Dr. David Elkind, author of The Power of Play: Learning That Comes Naturally, discusses the need to build a more "playful culture" in this great article brought to you thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine.

- Alvaro

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Can We Play?

-- By Dr. David Elkind

Play is rapidly disappearing from our homes, our schools, and our neighborhoods. Over the last two decades alone, children have lost eight hours of free, unstructured, and spontaneous play a week. More than 30,000 schools in the United States have eliminated recess to make more time for academics. From 1997 to 2003, children's time spent outdoors fell 50 percent, according to a study by Sandra Hofferth at the University of Maryland. Hofferth has also found that the amount of time children spend in organized sports has doubled, and the number of minutes children devote each week to passive leisure, not including watching television, has increased from 30 minutes to more than three hours. It is no surprise, then, that childhood obesity is now considered an epidemic.

But the problem goes well beyond obesity. Decades of research has shown that play is crucial to physical, intellectual, and social-emotional development at all ages. This is especially true of the purest form of play: the unstructured, self-motivated, imaginative, independent kind, where children initiate their own games and even invent their own rules.

In infancy and early childhood, play is the activity through which children learn to recognize colors and shapes, tastes and sounds—the very building blocks of reality. Play also provides pathways to love and social connection. Elementary school children use play to learn mutual respect, friendship, cooperation, and competition. For adolescents, play is a means of exploring possible identities, as well as a way to blow off steam and stay fit. Even adults have the potential to unite play, love, and work, attaining the dynamic, joyful state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow."

With play on the decline, we risk losing these and many other benefits. For too long, we have treated play as a luxury that kids, as well as adults, could do without. But the time has come for us to recognize why play is worth defending: It is essential to leading a happy and healthy life.

Play and development

Years of research has confirmed the value of play. In early childhood, play helps children develop skills they can not get in any other way. Babbling, for example, is a self-initiated form of play through which infants create the sounds they need to learn the language of their parents. Likewise, children teach themselves to crawl, stand, and walk through repetitious practice play. At the preschool level, children engage in dramatic play and learn who is a leader, who is a follower, who is outgoing, who is shy. They also learn to negotiate their own conflicts.

A 2007 report from the American Academy of Pediatrics documents that play promotes not only behavioral development but brain growth as well. The University of North Carolina's Abecedarian Early Child Intervention program found that children who received an enriched, play-oriented parenting and early childhood program had significantly higher IQ's at age five than did a comparable group of children who were not in the program (105 vs. 85 points).

A large body of research evidence also supports the value and importance of particular types of play. For example, Israeli psychologist Sara Smilansky's classic studies of sociodramatic play, where two or more children participate in shared make believe, demonstrate the value of this play for academic, social, and emotional learning. "Sociodramatic play activates resources that stimulate social and intellectual growth in the child, which in turn affects the child's success in school," concludes Smilansky in a 1990 study that compared American and Israeli children. "For example, problem solving in most school subjects requires a great deal of make believe, visualizing how the Eskimos live, reading stories, imagining a story and writing it down, solving arithmetic problems, and determining what will come next."

Other research illustrates the importance of physical play for children's learning and development. Some of these studies have highlighted the importance of recess. Psychologist Anthony Pellegrini and his colleagues have found that elementary school children become increasingly inattentive in class when recess is delayed. Similarly, studies conducted in French and Canadian elementary schools over a period of four years found that regular physical activity had positive effects on academic performance. Spending one third of the school day in physical education, art, and music improved not only physical fitness, but attitudes toward learning and test scores. These findings echo those from one analysis of 200 studies on the effects of exercise on cognitive functioning, which also suggests that physical activity promotes learning.

In recent years, and most especially since the 2002 passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, we've seen educators, policy makers, and many parents embrace the idea that early academics leads to greater success in life. Yet several studies by Kathy Hirsch-Pasek and colleagues have compared the performance of children attending academic preschools with those attending play-oriented preschools. The results showed no advantage in reading and math achievement for children attending the academic preschools. But there was evidence that those children had higher levels of test anxiety, were less creative, and had more negative attitudes toward school than did the children attending the play preschools.

So if play is that important, why is it disappearing?

The perfect storm

The decline of children's free, self-initiated play is the result of a perfect storm of technological innovation, rapid social change, and economic globalization.

Technological innovations have led to the all-pervasiveness of television and computer screens in our society in general, and in our homes in particular. An unintended consequence of this invasion is that childhood has moved indoors. Children who might once have enjoyed a pick-up game of baseball in an empty lot now watch the game on TV, sitting on their couch.

Meanwhile, single and working parents now outnumber the once-predominant nuclear family, in which a stay-at-home mother could provide the kind of loose oversight that facilitates free play. Instead, busy working parents outsource at least some of their former responsibilities to coaches, tutors, trainers, martial arts teachers, and other professionals. As a result, middle-income children spend more of their free time in adult-led and -organized activities than any earlier generation. (Low-income youth sometimes have the opposite problem: Their parents may not have the means to put them in high-quality programs that provide alternatives to playing in unsafe neighborhoods.)

Finally, a global economy has increased parental fears about their children's prospects in an increasingly high-tech marketplace. Many middle-class parents have bought into the idea that education is a race, and that the earlier you start your child in academics, the better. Preschool tutoring in math and programs such as the Kumon System, which emphasizes daily drills in math and reading, are becoming increasingly popular. And all too many kindergartens, once dedicated to learning through play, have become full-day academic institutions that require testing and homework. In such a world, play has come to be seen as a waste of precious time. A 1999 survey found that nearly a third of kindergarten classes did not have a recess period.

As adults have increasingly thwarted self-initiated play and games, we have lost important markers of the stages in a child's development. In the absence of such markers, it is difficult to determine what is appropriate and not appropriate for children. We run the risk of pushing them into certain activities before they are ready, or stunting the development of important intellectual, social, or emotional skills.

For example, it is only after the age of six or seven that children will spontaneously participate in games with rules, because it is only at that age that they are fully able to understand and follow rules. Those kinds of developmental markers fall by the wayside when we slot very young kids into activities such as Little League. When Little League was founded in 1939, the adult organizers looked to children themselves in setting the starting age, which ended up being about age nine or older. But the success of Little League was not lost on parents eager to find supervised activities for young children. Before long, team soccer was promoted for younger children because it was an easier and less complex game for the six- to nine-year-old age group. The rapid growth of soccer leagues challenged the popularity of Little League. This led to the introduction of Tee Ball, a simplified version of baseball for children as young as four.

By pushing young children into team sports for which they are not developmentally ready, we rule out forms of play that once encouraged them to learn skills of independence and creativity. Instead of learning on their own in backyards, fields, and on sidewalks, children are only learning to do what adults tell them to do. Moreover, one study found that many children who start playing soccer at age four are burned out on that sport by the time they reach adolescence, just the age when they might truly enjoy and excel at it.

Bring back play

Play is motivated by pleasure. It is instinctive and part of the maturational process. We cannot prevent children from self-initiated play; they will engage in it whenever they can. The problem is that we have curtailed the time and opportunities for such play. Obviously we cannot turn the clock back and reverse the technological, social, and economic changes that have helped silence children's play. Television, computers, new family models, and globalization are here to stay.

What is important is balance. If a child spends an hour on the computer or watching TV, equal time should be given to playing with peers or engaging in individual activities like reading or crafts. It is important to involve the child in making these decisions and setting the parameters for how they spend their time. If we give children some ownership of the rules, they are usually more willing to follow them than when they are simply imposed from above. It is also important to appreciate individual differences. You will not be able to keep some children from playing sports, while others prefer more sedentary activities.

Another way we can help bring play back into children's lives is to have schools restore recess for at least half an hour. As research demonstrates, academics are unlikely to suffer from this change; if anything, they'll benefit. Schools also argue that they cannot afford recess because of high insurance costs and parents' greater appetite for litigation. But when I speak with insurance officers about this issue, they claim that argument is overblown. Either way, children could still be taken outside, or to the gym, for calisthenics to exercise their bodies.

We must also address the more general problem of test-driven curricula in today's schools. When teachers are forced to teach to the test, they become less innovative in their teaching methods, with less room for games and imagination. More creative teaching methods build upon children's interests and attitudes—their playful disposition—and this encourages them to enjoy their teachers, which in turn enhances their interest in the subject matter. Though computers are one of the forces limiting play, they can be creatively used in the service of playful learning. As more young teachers who are proficient in technology enter the schools, we will have the first true educational reform in decades, if not centuries.

But you don't have to be a teacher to help bring back play. Many neighborhoods badly need more playgrounds. This was also the case in the 1930s; in response, we saw the "playground movement," when local communities set up their own playgrounds. A new playground movement is long overdue, especially for our inner city neighborhoods, where safe play spaces are often in short supply. A playground should be required of any new large-scale housing development.

We could go further. In Scandinavian countries, there are play areas in even the best restaurants, as well as in airports and train stations. These countries appreciate the importance of play for healthy development, and we could well follow their example.

Finally children do as we do, not as we say. That gives us incentive to bring play back into our adult lives. We can shut off the TVs and take our children with us on outdoor adventures. We should get less exercise in the gym and more on hiking trails and basketball courts. We can also make work more playful: Businesses that do this are among the most successful. Seattle's Pike Fish Market is a case in point. Workers throw fish to one another, engage the customers in repartee, and appear to have a grand time. Some companies, such as Google, have made play an important part of their corporate culture. Study after study has shown that when workers enjoy what they do and are well-rewarded and recognized for their contributions, they like and respect their employers and produce higher quality work. For example, when the Rohm and Hass Chemical company in Kentucky reorganized its workplace into self-regulating and self-rewarding teams, one study found that worker grievances and turnover declined, while plant safety and productivity improved.

When we adults unite play, love, and work in our lives, we set an example that our children can follow. That just might be the best way to bring play back into the lives of our children—and build a more playful culture.

David Elkind, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus of child development at Tufts University and the author of the books The Hurried Child, Miseducation, and, most recently, The Power of Play: Learning That Comes Naturally. Copyright Greater Good. Greater Good Magazine, based at UC-Berkeley, is a quarterly magazine that highlights ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism.

	Larry McCleary, M.D, former acting Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Denver Children's Hospital, and author of The Brain Trust Program: A Scientifically Based Three-Part Plan to Improve Memory (Perigee Trade, 2007) presents a thoughtful post on Brain Evolution and Health.
	Joanne Jacobs, education blogger and author of Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea, and the School That Beat the Odds, writes an excellent article on why The First Step Is Failure.
	Daniel Goleman, author of many books including Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama, presents a superb article on The Power of Mindsight.
	Eric Jensen, founder of Learning Brain Expo, and author of Enriching the Brain: How to Maximize Every Learner's Potential, grants us a great interview on Learning and the Brain.
	Shannon Moffett, author of The Three Pound Enigma: The Human Brain and the Quest to Unlock its Mysteries, and expert quoted on PBS Special The Brain Fitness Program, summarizes important research on Sleep, Memory and the Brain.
	John Medina, Director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University, and author of Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, brings brain research to daily life in his Brain Rules: science and practice article.

The permanent home of this series is the page Author Speaks Series, under our Resources section (you can reach it through the top navigation bar).

If you have specific brain-related books and authors you are interested in, please let us know, and we will contact them. We are always looking for new perspectives.

If you are an author or an agent and would like to propose writing a 700-1,000 word article to introduce your book and work to our audience, please email us at information@sharpbrains.com, indicating Author Speaks Series in the subject line and providing a few details on the book and your article ideas.

Enjoy the weekend

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide To Stress, Stress Related Diseases, and Coping

We are honored to bring you a guest Article Series by Robert Sapolsky, thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine, a UC-Berkeley-based quarterly magazine that highlights ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism.

Enjoy this first installment, out of three. Very timely given the so-called "war on terror". Come back on Saturday April 12th for the second one, or subscribe to our RSS or newsletter to keep in the loop. 

- Alvaro

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Peace Among Primates

Anyone who says peace is not part of human nature knows too little about primates, including ourselves.

--By Robert M. Sapolsky

It used to be thought that humans were the only savagely violent primate. “We are the only species that kills its own,” narrators intoned portentously in nature films several decades ago. That view fell by the wayside in the 1960s as it became clear that some other primates kill their fellows aplenty. Males kill; females kill. Some use their toolmaking skills to fashion bigger and better cudgels. Other primates even engage in what can only be called warfare—organized, proactive group violence directed at other populations.

Yet as field studies of primates expanded, what became most striking was the variation in social practices across species. Yes, some primate species have lives filled with violence, frequent and varied. But life among others is filled with communitarianism, egalitarianism, and cooperative child rearing.Patterns emerged. In less aggressive species, such as gibbons or marmosets, groups tend to live in lush rain forests where food is plentiful and life is easy. Females and males tend to be the same size, and the males lack secondary sexual markers such as long, sharp canines or garish coloring. Couples mate for life, and males help substantially with child care. In violent species, such as baboons and rhesus monkeys, the opposite conditions prevail.

The most disquieting fact about the violent species was the apparent inevitability of their behavior. Certain species seemed simply to be the way they were, fixed products of the interplay of evolution and ecology, and that was that. And although human males might not be inflexibly polygamous or outfitted with bright red butts and six-inch canines designed for tooth-to-tooth combat, it was clear that our species had at least as much in common with the violent primates as with the gentle ones. “In their nature” thus became “in our nature.” This was the humans-as-killer-apes theory popularized by the writer Robert Ardrey, according to which humans have as much chance of becoming intrinsically peaceful as they have of growing prehensile tails.

That view always had little more scientific rigor than a Planet of the Apes movie, but it took a great deal of field research to figure out just what should supplant it. After decades’ more work, the picture has become quite interesting. Some primate species, it turns out, are indeed simply violent or peaceful, with their behavior driven by their social structures and ecological settings. More importantly, however, some primate species can make peace despite violent traits that seem built into their natures. The challenge now is to figure out under what conditions that can happen, and whether humans can manage the trick ourselves.

Old primates and new tricks

To an overwhelming extent, the age-old “nature versus nurture” debate is silly. The action of genes is completely intertwined with the environment in which they function; in a sense, it is pointless to even discuss what gene X does, and we should consider instead only what gene X does in environment Y. Nonetheless, if one had to predict the behavior of some organism on the basis of only one fact, one might still want to know whether the most useful fact would be about genetics or about the environment.

Two classic studies have shown that primates are somewhat independent from their “natures.” In the early 1970s, a highly respected primatologist named Hans Kummer was working in a region of Ethiopia containing two species of baboons with markedly different social systems. Savanna baboons live in large troops, with plenty of adult females and males. Hamadryas baboons, in contrast, have a more complex and quite different multilevel society. When confronted with a threatening male, the females of the two species react differently: A hamadryas baboon placates the male by approaching him, whereas a savanna baboon can only run away if she wants to avoid injury.

Kummer conducted a simple experiment, trapping an adult female savanna baboon and releasing her into a hamadryas troop and trapping an adult female hamadryas and releasing her into a savanna troop. The females who were dropped in among a different species initially carried out their species-typical behavior, a major faux pas in the new neighborhood. But gradually, they absorbed the new rules. How long did this learning take? About an hour. In other words, millennia of genetic differences separating the two species, a lifetime of experience with a crucial social rule for each female—and a miniscule amount of time to reverse course completely.

The second experiment was set up by Frans de Waal of Emory University and his student Denise Johanowicz in the early 1990s, working with two macaque monkey species. By any human standards, male rhesus macaques are unappealing animals. Their hierarchies are rigid, those at the top seize a disproportionate share of the spoils, they enforce this inequity with ferocious aggression, and they rarely reconcile after fights. In contrast, male stump tail macaques, which share almost all of their genes with their rhesus macaque cousins, display much less aggression, looser hierarchies, more egalitarianism, and more behaviors that promote group cohesion.

Working with captive primates, de Waal and Johanowicz created a mixed-sex social group of juvenile macaques, combining rhesus and stump tails together. Remarkably, instead of the rhesus macaques bullying the stump tails, over the course of a few months the rhesus males adopted the stump tails’ social style, eventually even matching the stump tails’ high rates of reconciliatory behavior. It so happens, moreover, that stump tails and rhesus macaques use different gestures when reconciling. The rhesus macaques in the study did not start using the stump tails’ reconciliatory gestures, but rather increased the incidence of their own species-typical gestures. In other words, they were not merely imitating the stump tails’ behavior; they were incorporating the concept of frequent reconciliation into their own social practices. Finally, when the newly warm-and-fuzzy rhesus macaques were returned to a larger, all-rhesus group, their new behavioral style persisted.

This is nothing short of extraordinary. But it brings up one further question: When those rhesus macaques were transferred back into the all-rhesus world, did they spread their insights and behaviors to the others? Alas, they did not—at least not within the relatively short time they were studied. For that, we need to move on to a final case.

(To be continued, in a second installment, on Saturday April 12th).

-- Robert M. Sapolsky, Ph.D., is the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biological Sciences and a professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University. He wrote the classic Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress Related Diseases and Coping. His most recent book is Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals. A longer version of this essay appeared in Foreign Affairs. We bring you this post thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine, a UC-Berkeley-based quarterly magazine that highlights ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism.

(Note: John will be in the Bay Area on April 8 and 9th, speaking at Google and San Jose Rotary).

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Brain Rules

-- By John Medina

Go ahead and multiply the number 8,388,628 x 2 in your head. Can you do it in a few seconds? There is a young man who can double that number 24 times in the space of a few seconds. He gets it right every time. There is a boy who can tell you the exact time of day at any moment, even in his sleep. There is a girl who can correctly determine the exact dimensions of an object 20 feet away. There is a child who at age 6 drew such lifelike and powerful pictures, she got her own show at a gallery on Madison Avenue. Yet none of these children could be taught to tie their shoes. Indeed, none of them have an IQ greater than 50.

The brain is an amazing thing.

Your brain may not be nearly so odd, but it is no less extraordinary. Easily the most sophisticated information-transfer system on Earth, your brain is fully capable of taking little black squiggles from a piece of bleached wood and deriving meaning from them. To accomplish this miracle, your brain sends jolts of electricity crackling through hundreds of miles of wires composed of brain cells so small that thousands of them could fit into the period at the end of this sentence. You accomplish all of this in less time than it takes you to blink. Indeed, you have just done it. What’s equally incredible, given our intimate association with it, is this: Most of us have no idea how our brain works.

This has strange consequences. We try to talk on our cell phones and drive at the same time, even though it is literally impossible for our brains to multitask when it comes to paying attention. We have created high-stress office environments, even though a stressed brain is significantly less productive. Our schools are designed so that most real learning has to occur at home. This would be funny, if it weren’t so harmful.

Blame it on the fact that brain scientists rarely have a conversation with teachers and business professionals, education majors and accountants, superintendents and CEOs. Unless you have the Journal of Neuroscience sitting on your coffee table, you’re out of the loop. My book is meant to get you into the loop.

12 brain rules

My goal is to introduce you to 12 things we know about how the brain works. I call these Brain Rules. For each rule, I present the science and then offer ideas for investigating how the rule might apply to our daily lives, especially at work and school. The brain is complex, and I am taking only slivers of information from each subject—non-comprehensive but accessible.

A sampling of the ideas you’ll encounter:

-For starters, we are not used to sitting at a desk for eight hours a day. From an evolutionary perspective, our brains developed while working out, walking as many as 12 miles a day. The brain still craves the experience, especially in sedentary populations like our own. That’s why exercise boosts brain power (Brain Rule #2) in such populations. Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in long-term memory, reasoning, attention, problem-solving tasks, and more. I am convinced that integrating exercise into our eight hours at work or school would only be normal.

- As you no doubt have noticed if you’ve ever sat through a typical PowerPoint presentation, people don’t pay attention to boring things (Brain Rule #4). You’ve got seconds to grab someone’s attention, and only 10 minutes to keep it. At 9 minutes and 59 seconds, something must be done quickly—something emotional and relevant. Also, the brain needs a break. That’s why I use stories in this book to make many of my points.

- Ever feel tired around 3 o’clock in the afternoon? That’s because your brain really wants to take a nap. You might be more productive if you did: In one study, a 26-minute nap improved NASA pilots’ performance by 34 percent. Even so, the brain isn’t resting while it sleeps. It is surprisingly active. And whether you get enough rest affects your mental agility the next day. Sleep well, think well (Brain Rule #7).

- We’ll meet a man who can read two pages at the same time, one with each eye, and remember everything in the pages forever. Most of us do more forgetting than remembering, of course, and that’s why we must repeat to remember (Brain Rule #5). When you understand the brain’s rules for memory, you’ll see why I want to destroy the notion of homework.

- We’ll find out why the terrible twos only look like active rebellion but are actually a child’s powerful urge to explore. Babies may not have a lot of knowledge about the world, but they know a whole lot about how to get it. We are all natural explorers (Brain Rule #12), and this never leaves us, despite the artificial environments we’ve built for ourselves.

Back to the jungle

What we know about the brain comes from biologists who study brain tissues, experimental psychologists who study behavior, and cognitive neuroscientists who study how the first relates to the second. Evolutionary biologists have gotten into the act as well. Though we know precious little about how the brain works, our evolutionary history tells us this: The brain appears to be designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment, and to do so in nearly constant motion. I call this the brain’s performance envelope.

If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to tear down both and start over.

In many ways, starting over is what the book is all about.

--John Medina, author of “Brain Rules,” is a developmental molecular biologist and research consultant. He is an affiliate professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He is also the director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University. His article on exercise and the brain was selected by the Harvard Business Review (Feb 2008) as one of its “Breakthrough Ideas for 2008.”