How Exer­cise Ben­e­fits the Brain (NewYork Times):

“To learn more about how exer­cise affects the brain, sci­en­tists in Ire­land recently asked a group of seden­tary male col­lege stu­dents to take part in a mem­ory test fol­lowed by stren­u­ous exercise.

First, the young men watched a rapid-fire lineup of pho­tos with the faces and names of strangers. After a break, they tried to recall the names they had just seen as the pho­tos again zipped across a com­puter screen. Read the rest of this entry »

Vet­er­ans learn to use yoga and med­i­ta­tion exer­cises to recon­nect with their emo­tions (Wis­con­sin State Journal):

“Rich Low of Madi­son served as an infantry offi­cer in the Army in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, lead­ing some 280 com­bat mis­sions. When he came back from the ser­vice, he didn’t think his expe­ri­ence affected him in any major way. He had night­mares, and he star­tled eas­ily, but he chalked that up to just some­thing vet­er­ans live with. Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: every other Fri­day, start­ing today, we’ll pub­lish a brain teaser to exer­cise our brains a bit. Here you have one sub­mit­ted by new con­trib­u­tor Maria Lando. Enjoy!).
Archimedes made a plen­i­tude of sig­nif­i­cant sci­en­tific dis­cov­er­ies through­out his life. He designed machines capa­ble of lift­ing attack­ing ships out of the water as well as mir­ror arrays capa­ble of focus­ing sun rays and set­ting enemy ships on fire. He explained why and how bod­ies float in the water, help­ing the king ver­ify that his crown is indeed made out of pure gold. He was fas­ci­nated with infin­ity and found the way of approx­i­mat­ing the num­ber Pi as well as count­ing the num­ber of grains of sand that will fit inside the uni­verse. He died telling a Roman sol­dier that he is too busy to meet a gen­eral as he was con­tem­plat­ing yet another math­e­mat­i­cal dia­gram.  His tomb was dec­o­rated with his favorite dis­cov­ery .… What do you think it is?

Read the rest of this entry »

Let us high­light a cou­ple of insight­ful and brief arti­cles in the New York Times and a very pow­er­ful analy­sis in The New York Review of Books; they pro­vide use­ful clues about Brain Cal­is­then­ics, Bilin­gual Brains, and Debunk­ing Myths on Men­tal Ill­ness. Read the rest of this entry »

Laugh­ing feels good. Laugh­ing is indeed good in most cases. A good belly laugh amounts to an aer­o­bic exer­cise as your blood pres­sure and heart rate increase, your breath­ing changes and your diaphragm con­tracts. Laugh­ing has also been shown to boost the immune sys­tem and reduce stress.

Laugh­ing is thus good for your brain! Here are two fun ways to take a fur­ther look at laugh­ter and the brain :

• Lis­ten to these laughs and decide whether it is a human or a com­puter laughing.
• Try this to find out how much you are stressed. You may be surprised…

Enjoy!

An arti­cle in the Wall Street Jour­nal today, Build­ing a More Resilient Brain, reviews the work of Dr. Bia­lystok and her col­leagues on the ben­e­fits that bilin­gual­ism brings to the brain. Another great exam­ple of neuroplasticity.

… over time, reg­u­larly speak­ing more than one lan­guage appears to strengthen skills that boost the brain’s so-called cog­ni­tive reserve, a capac­ity to work even when stressed or dam­aged. This build-up of cog­ni­tive reserve appears to help bilin­gual peo­ple as they age.

… the process of speak­ing two or more lan­guages appears to enable peo­ple to develop skills to bet­ter cope with the early symp­toms of memory-robbing dis­eases, includ­ing Alzheimer’s. […] the advan­tages of bilin­gual­ism are thought to be related to a brain func­tion known as inhibitory or cog­ni­tive con­trol: the abil­ity to stop pay­ing atten­tion to one thing and focus on some­thing else

Com­ments: What if I only speak one lan­guage? Would it be ben­e­fi­cial to start learn­ing one now? Would I need to speak it every­day? Would it help me built reserve? Unfor­tu­nately sci­ence does not have evidence-based answers to these ques­tions yet… But learn­ing a new lan­guage fol­lows the recipe for a good men­tal exer­cise as out­lined in The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness: Vari­ety, Chal­lenge and Novelty.

• Vari­ety: to stim­u­late mul­ti­ple func­tions of the brain.
• Chal­lenge:  to avoid routine.
• Nov­elty:  to stim­u­late parts of the brain such as the pre­frontal cor­tex that are mostly exer­cised when we learn to mas­ter new cog­ni­tive challenges.

As such, learn­ing a new lan­guage is a great men­tal exer­cise. How­ever it can­not be the magic answer to every­thing. As you know, brain main­te­nance requires a multi-faceted approach com­pris­ing at least a vari­ety of brain stim­u­la­tion, bal­anced nutri­tion, stress man­age­ment, social­iza­tion and phys­i­cal exercise.

Related post: Men­tal stim­u­la­tion: build­ing a Brain/ Cog­ni­tive Reserve with nov­elty, vari­ety and challenge

How often do you lis­ten to the office gos­sip while fill­ing in forms? Or read a doc­u­ment while talk­ing on the phone with a client? Or think about your prob­lems at work while help­ing your child with his homework?

We are con­stantly assaulted by lots of infor­ma­tion and often required to per­form sev­eral tasks at once. It is not easy to stay focused. How­ever being able to stay focused is cru­cial to achieve suc­cess. Indeed, if you are lis­ten­ing to the office gos­sip while fill­ing in forms, you will prob­a­bly make mis­takes. If you try to read a doc­u­ment while talk­ing on the phone with a client, you will prob­a­bly sound dis­tant and unin­ter­ested to your client and may not get the con­tract you expected to get. If you think about your prob­lems at work while help­ing your child with his home­work, you will prob­a­bly miss oppor­tu­ni­ties to teach her something.

As you may notice all the sit­u­a­tions above involve doing more than one thing at a time. Multi-tasking is enemy num­ber one when it comes to accu­rate and speedy performance.

Human atten­tion is lim­ited. Think about your atten­tional focus as the beam of a light. If the light is on an object it can­not be on other objects at the same time with the same inten­sity. Only dim light will be avail­able to light up the objects in the periph­ery. The same hap­pens in your atten­tional sys­tem. Divid­ing atten­tion results in less atten­tional power devoted to all the dif­fer­ent tasks that you are try­ing to do at the same time. The more tasks, the less atten­tion can be devoted to each. The result is more errors and waste of time. Although we all have the feel­ing that mul­ti­task­ing saves us time, it is often not the case.

Try the exer­cise below to test your atten­tional focus. Three words have been com­bined to make this grid of let­ters. How many times does each of these words appear…? Can you com­pare your per­for­mance while search­ing for just one word vs. two of them at the same time?

How many times is the word SUN shown?
How many times is the word BUS shown?
How many times is the word NONE shown?

Solu­tions: Read the rest of this entry »

Bilin­gual­ism Asso­ci­ated With Brain Reor­ga­ni­za­tion Involv­ing Bet­ter Effi­ciency in Exec­u­tive Func­tions, Research Finds (Sci­ence News)

“Find­ings are very impor­tant because they show an unknown aspect of bilin­gual­ism, which goes beyond lin­guis­tic advan­tages, and they also show bilin­guals are more effec­tive in respond­ing to cer­tain stim­uli,” explains researcher Cesar Avila, who ensures the research shows that bilin­gual­ism does not only have effects on the brain at a lin­guis­tic level, but that it also works dif­fer­ently, empha­siz­ing the impor­tance of intro­duc­ing lan­guages at an early age because it gen­er­ates cog­ni­tive benefits.

Jour­nal Ref­er­ence: G. Garbin, A. San­juan, C. Forn, J.C. Bus­ta­mante, A. Rodriguez-Pujadas, V. Bel­loch, M. Her­nan­dez, A. Costa, C. Ávila. Bridg­ing lan­guage and atten­tion: Brain basis of the impact of bilin­gual­ism on cog­ni­tive con­trol. Neu­roIm­age, 2010; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.05.078

This study sup­ports another one we com­mented on a few years ago on how Bilin­gual brains stay sharp longer:

“In short: learn­ing and speak­ing a for­eign lan­guage pro­vides con­stant brain exer­cise to the frontal lobes, the area of the brain right behind your fore­head that focuses our atten­tion, helps us ignore dis­trac­tions, and make decisions.”

What a bet­ter open­ing for our Jan­u­ary Sharp­Brains Sum­mit than to have Mar­ian C. Dia­mond, one of the pio­neers of neu­ro­plas­tic­ity research since the 1960s, intro­duce us to the human brain, its anatomy and func­tion, and impli­ca­tions from neu­ro­plas­tic­ity for brain health and per­for­mance at any age.

Mar­ian C. Dia­mond, Ph.D., is Pro­fes­sor of Neu­ro­science and Anatomy at UC-Berkeley  and one of the world’s fore­most researchers on neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and enrich­ment since the 1960s . She is author of more than 100 sci­en­tific arti­cles and three books, includ­ing Enrich­ing Hered­ity (Free Press/Simon and Schus­ter, 1988) and The Magic Trees of the Mind (Plume, 1999). In par­tic­u­lar, she is inter­ested in study­ing the effects of the exter­nal envi­ron­ment, aging, and immune responses on the cere­bral neocortex.

You can read a num­ber of her pub­lic edu­ca­tion essays online:

• The Brain … Use It or Lose It: a core com­po­nent of brain exer­cise is chal­lenge. Pas­sive obser­va­tion is not enough.
• Why Einstein’s Brain?:  Dr. Dia­mond describes how she came to be inter­ested in study­ing the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties in Einstein’s brain back in the early 1980s.
• Suc­cess­ful Aging of the Healthy Brain: beau­ti­ful essay on how to keep our brains and minds active and fit through­out our lifetime.
• Response of the Brain to Enrich­ment: although the brain pos­sesses a rel­a­tively con­stant struc­ture, the ever-changing cere­bral cor­tex is pow­er­fully shaped by expe­ri­ences before birth, dur­ing youth and, in fact, through­out life.
• The Sig­nif­i­cance of Enrich­ment: here, the brain phys­i­o­log­i­cal changes are explored in more detail.
• My Search for Love and Wis­dom in the Brain: The frontal lobe is undoubt­edly the most impor­tant area to cul­mi­nate the neural processes lead­ing to what we call wis­dom and the most refined sense of love.

To learn more about the agenda of the Sharp­Brains Sum­mit and the incred­i­ble ros­ter of speak­ers who have agreed to par­tic­i­pate in this impor­tant event, click on Sharp­Brains Sum­mit.

You may be read­ing all about brain fit­ness and brain train­ing. It seems every week brings a new bar­rage of arti­cles and stud­ies which often con­tra­dict what you read the month before: Does Gingko Biloba help delay Alzheimer’s Dis­ease? Can phys­i­cal exer­cise help you stay sharp as you age? Which computer-based “brain fit­ness pro­grams”, if any, are worth your money?

All this cov­er­age reflects very excit­ing sci­en­tific find­ings but also poses a key dilemma: How to become an informed life­long learner and con­sumer when there are few and con­tra­dic­tory author­i­ta­tive guidelines?

The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness (to be pub­lished in May 2009; $24.95) aims to fill that void. This guide is the result of over a year of exten­sive research includ­ing more than a hun­dred inter­views with sci­en­tists, pro­fes­sion­als and con­sumers, and a deep lit­er­a­ture review. Below you have some of the main find­ings from our effort. The guide not only cov­ers these aspects in more depth and offers prac­ti­cal guid­ance, but also includes 18 inter­views with promi­nent sci­en­tists to help you under­stand the research better.

Can we intro­duce you to your Brain?

The Guide will start at the obvi­ous start­ing point: The Human Brain. In order to make informed deci­sions about brain health, one needs to first under­stand the basic orga­ni­za­tion of the human brain and how it tends to change as we get older.

* The brain is com­posed of a num­ber of regions serv­ing dis­tinct func­tions. For­get IQ: our life and pro­duc­tiv­ity depend on a vari­ety of brain func­tions, not just one.

* There is noth­ing inher­ently fixed in the tra­jec­tory of how brain func­tions evolve as we age. Your lifestyle, actions, and even thoughts, do matter.

The 4 Pil­lars of Brain Maintenance

Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity is the life­long capac­ity of the brain to change and rewire itself in response to the stim­u­la­tion of learn­ing and expe­ri­ence. The lat­est sci­en­tific research shows that spe­cific lifestyles and actions can, no mat­ter our age, improve the health and level of func­tion­ing of our brains.

What fac­tors seem to have the most influ­ence? Read the rest of this entry »