If you could, you would. You can, but pre­fer not to know it?

More than any other organ, your brain is up to you. You are what you think, not just what you eat. Here’s some food for thought:

Design your Mind

Set­ting cog­ni­tive and behav­ioral goals raises chal­leng­ing and wor­thy ques­tions: What do you want from your brain? Will you know it when you achieve it?

To attain the brain of our choos­ing, we must under­stand our selves and cur­rent abil­i­ties. Intro­spec­tion and curios­ity are help­ful if they trig­ger and sus­tain the effort to enrich the mind. How­ever, objec­tive infor­ma­tion which leads to informed assess­ment of brain func­tion is often lacking.

Mind your Brain

Hon­esty. Open­ness. Self-awareness.

Irrefutable virtues, but in prac­tice most peo­ple fall short. Few reg­u­larly appraise their brain skills; even so, the abil­ity to accu­rately judge one’s own men­tal per­for­mance is not guar­an­teed. I believe the first step to mind­ing the brain is shed­ding hang-ups while offer­ing and solic­it­ing frank feed­back from fam­ily and close con­fi­dants. In the clin­i­cal set­ting, rou­tine cog­ni­tive screen­ing and “men­tal check ups” are not cur­rently prac­ticed, in part due to time con­straints and lim­ited util­ity of tra­di­tional paper-and-pencil tests. From a pub­lic health per­spec­tive, the U.S. Pre­ven­ta­tive Task Force reviewed Read the rest of this entry »

The Wall Street Jour­nal had a very inter­est­ing arti­cle yes­ter­day, titled To Be Young and Anxiety-Free, focused on the value of cog­ni­tive behav­ioral ther­apy to help chil­dren with high lev­els of anx­i­ety learn how too cope bet­ter and pre­vent the snow­ball sce­nario, when that anx­i­ety grows and spi­rals out of con­trol result­ing in depres­sion and similar

- “…new research show­ing that treat­ing kids for anx­i­ety when they are young may help pre­vent the devel­op­ment of more seri­ous men­tal ill­nesses, includ­ing depres­sion and more debil­i­tat­ing anx­i­ety disorders.”

- “Of course, most kids have fears with­out hav­ing a full-blown anx­i­ety dis­or­der. And some anx­i­ety is healthy: It makes sense, for exam­ple, to be a lit­tle ner­vous before a big test. Doc­tors and psy­chol­o­gists do cau­tion that the increased focus on child­hood anx­i­ety could lead to an over­diag­no­sis of the prob­lem. What makes anx­i­ety a true ill­ness is when it inter­feres with nor­mal func­tion­ing or causes seri­ous emo­tional and phys­i­cal distress.”

- “But the use of anti­de­pres­sants in chil­dren has come under fire because Read the rest of this entry »