After about age 50, most people begin to experience a decline in memory capability. Why is that? One obvious answer is that the small arteries of the brain begin to clog up, often as a result of a lifetime of eating the wrong things and a lack of exercise. If that lifetime has been stressful, many neurons may have been killed by stress hormones. Given the
most recent scientific literature, reviewed in my book Thank You, Brain, For All You Remember. What You Forgot Was My Fault, dead neurons can’t be replaced, except in the hippocampus, which is fortunate for memory because the hippocampus is essential for making certain kinds of memories permanent. Another cause is incipient Alzheimer’s disease; autopsies show that many people have the lesions of the disease but have never shown symptoms, presumably because a lifetime of exceptional mental activity has built up a “cognitive reserve.”
So is there anything you can do about it besides exercise like crazy, eat healthy foods that you don’t like all that much, pop your statin pills, and take up yoga?
Yes. In short: focus, focus, focus.
Changing thinking styles can help. Research shows that Continue Reading »
Cognitive training is showing a tremendous potential to expand working memory, a 
capacity once thought limited and untrainable.
If you have enough working memory to both be processing this information and developing your own thoughts, you may be thinking now, a) what exactly is Working Memory?, and b) why do we even care?. Well, Dr. Bill Klemm answers those questions, and more, below. Please enjoy one of the most insightful articles on the subject we have seen in a long while, which we are proud to bring to SharpBrains readers.
- Alvaro
How Well People Think Depends On Working Memory
- By Dr. Bill Klemm
Imagine dialing a phone number by having to look up each digit one at a time in the phone book. Normally, you look up the number and remember all seven digits long enough to get it dialed. Even with one digit at a time, you would have to remember each digit long enough to get it dialed. What if your brain could not even do that! We call this kind of remembering, “working memory,” because that is what the brain works with. Working memory is critical to everyday living.
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Here you are have the bi-monthly update with our 10 most Popular blog posts. (Also, remember that you can subscribe to receive our RSS feed, or to our newsletter, at the top of this page, if you want to receive this digest by email).
In this edition of our newsletter we bring a few articles and recent news pieces that shed light on what "Use It or Lose It" means, and why we can start going beyond that to say "Use It and Improve It."
The Neuron, The Brain, and Thinking Smarter
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Over the last year we have gladly seen an avalanche of news on adult neurogenesis (the creation of new neurons in adult brains), following recent research reports. Further, we have seen how the news that physical exercise can enhance neurogenesis is becoming common knowledge among many health systems we work with.
Now, the obvious question that doesn't always get asked is, "What good are new neurons if they don't survive?". And that's where learning, enrichment, mental exercise, are critical.
We are glad to introduce a new Expert Contributor, Dr. Bill Klemm, a professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University, who summarizes much research on how new neurons are born-and what they need to live long happy lives.
- Alvaro
New Neurons: Good News, Bad News
-- By Dr. Bill Klemm
In the last few years, researchers have discovered that new nerve cells (neurons) are born, presumably from residual stem cells that exist even in adults. That should be good news for all of us as we get older and fear mental decline. The bad news is that these new neurons die, unless our minds are active enough.
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Brandon Keim writes a nice post on The Future Science of Altruism at Wired Science Blog, based on an interview with Jordan Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
Brandon provides good context saying that "Scientists, said Grafman, are understanding how our brains are shaped by culture and environment, and a mechanism of these changes may involve fluctuation in our genes themselves, which we're only beginning to understand". (more on this in our post Richard Dawkins and Alfred Nobel: beyond nature and nurture).
And gives us some very nice quotes from Dr. Grafman, including
- "One of the ways we differentiate ourselves from other species is that we have a sense of future. We don’t have to have immediate gratification.... But how far can we go into the future? How much of our brain is aimed at doing that? [...]"
- "Other great apes have a frontal lobe, fairly well developed, but not nearly as well developed as our own. If you believe in Darwin and evolution, you argue that the area grew, and the neural architecture had to change in some way to accommodate the abilities associated with that behavior. There’s no doubt that didn’t occur overnight; probably a slow change, and it was one of the last areas of the brain to develop as well. It’s very recent evolutionary development that humans took full advantage of. What in the future? What in the brains can change?"
- "The issue becomes --- do we teach this? Train people to do this? Children tend to be selfish, and have to be taught to share."
The UC Berkeley magazine Greater Good tries to answer that question with a series of articles on Gratitude. I especially enjoyed A Lesson in Thanks, described as Continue Reading »
