NO ROAD, NO trail can pen­e­trate this for­est. The long and del­i­cate branches of its trees lie every­where, chok­ing space with their exu­ber­ant growth. No sun­beam can fly a path tor­tu­ous enough to nav­i­gate the nar­row spaces between these entan­gled branches. All the trees of this dark for­est grew from 100 bil­lion seeds planted together. And, all in one day, every tree is des­tined to die.

This for­est is majes­tic, but also comic and even tragic. It is all of these things. Indeed, some­times I think it is every­thing. Every novel and every sym­phony, every cruel mur­der and every act of mercy, every love affair and every quar­rel, every joke and every sor­row — all these things come from the for­est. Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s note: below you have part 5 of the 6-part The Neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy of Stress series. If you are join­ing the series now, you can read the pre­vi­ous part Here.)

Stayin’ Alive

The Human Brain Likes to Be in Balance

For­tu­nately, the brain has some built — in safety sys­tems. Too much cor­ti­sol in the blood sig­nals the brain and adrenal glands to decrease cor­ti­sol pro­duc­tion. And under nor­mal con­di­tions, when the stress is over­come or brought under con­trol (by fight­ing, flee­ing, or turn­ing into an immo­bile statue, or by mas­ter­ing the threat), the hypo­thal­a­mus starts send­ing out the orders to stand down. Stop pro­duc­ing cor­ti­sol!  Event over!  Under con­tin­u­ous stress, how­ever, this feed­back sys­tem breaks down. The hypo­thal­a­mus keeps read­ing the stress as a threat, furtively send­ing mes­sages to the pitu­itary gland, which screams out to the adrenal glands to keep pump­ing out cor­ti­sol, which at this point begins to be neu­ro­toxic — poi­son to the brain. Read the rest of this entry »

Eric Jensen alerted me to a research study pub­lished in the Feb­ru­ary 4th Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science — Trans­gen­er­a­tional Res­cue of a Genetic Defect in Long-Term Poten­ti­a­tion and Mem­ory For­ma­tion by Juve­nile Enrich­ment. We both had the same ini­tial WOW! feel­ing that we had expe­ri­enced when we first read about the dis­cov­ery of mir­ror neu­rons a decade+ ago.

The study’s find­ings seemed to sug­gest that acquired char­ac­ter­is­tics can be genet­i­cally trans­mit­ted, a Lamar­ck­i­nan belief that had long been dis­carded by biol­o­gists. This seemed improb­a­ble, so we decided to check out what the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity thought. It’s the kind of research that edu­ca­tors cer­tainly need to under­stand because the poten­tial edu­ca­tional impli­ca­tions are pro­found, no mat­ter how this par­tic­u­lar study sorts out.

I’ve thus appended the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion below: (1) the abstract and ref­er­ence of the orig­i­nal sttudy, (2) a link to a non-technical report in the cur­rent issue of New Sci­en­tist, (3) a link to a non– tech­ni­cal expla­na­tion of the research in Med­ical News Today, and (4) a link to a recent extended non-technical New Sci­en­tist arti­cle on the issue of non-genetic inher­i­tance. Eric will post his com­men­tary on the research in the March edi­tion of his Brighter Brain Bul­letin newsletter.

THE STUDY:

To put it sim­ply: The researchers stud­ied long-term poten­ti­a­tion (LTP), in which longer and more robust synap­tic acti­va­tion occurs. LTP is the basic mech­a­nism for learn­ing and mem­ory formation.

Juve­nile mice placed into an enriched envi­ron­ment (EE) devel­oped enhanced LTP capa­bil­i­ties that they later trans­mit­ted to their own off­spring dur­ing embryo­ge­n­e­sis (rather than through later mater­nal instruc­tion), and these effects per­sisted even when the off­spring weren’t in an EE. The study con­cluded that a stim­u­lat­ing juve­nile envi­ron­ment can thus influ­ence the com­po­si­tion of sig­nal­ing net­works that influ­ence synap­tic plas­tic­ity and mem­ory for­ma­tion in the enriched mouse, and also in its future offspring.

The prob­lem with this research appears to be over whether the trans­mit­ted effects occurred via genetic changes or through some­thing else in the mother’s uter­ine envi­ron­ment. A female’s eggs develop early in life to be dis­trib­uted later, so it’s improb­a­ble that a female’s juve­nile expe­ri­ences would alter the DNA in her eggs. A more prob­a­ble expla­na­tion may be that any changes in the mother’s brain that occur via an EE are rep­re­sented as cur­rently ill– under­stood sig­nal­ing mol­e­cules that pass through the pla­cen­tal bar­rier into the embry­onic brain.

THE SIGNIFICANCE:

For edu­ca­tors, this research sim­ply adds to our own strong belief that long-term ben­e­fits accrue from a stim­u­lat­ing early envi­ron­ment that encour­ages curios­ity and explo­ration. The research builds on Read the rest of this entry »

July is shap­ing up to be a fas­ci­nat­ing month, full of cog­ni­tive health research reports and appli­ca­tions. Here you have a roundup, cov­er­ing food for the brain, cog­ni­tive assess­ments, men­tal train­ing and DNA, and more.

1) Brain foods: the effects of nutri­ents on brain func­tion (Nature Neuroscience)

An anony­mous reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog writes a superb com­ment, repro­duced here:

“One thing Wat­son and oth­ers for­get is that the brain is highly mal­leable based on envi­ron­ment. Although he is the father of DNA he knows very lit­tle about neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis. Pre­vi­ously it was thought that the human brain was ‘hard­wired’ after a cer­tain age. This is not true. Not only is not true, but the human mind is capa­ble of adap­ta­tion but actual neu­ron growth even late in life. Ten years ago this was thought impossible.

Neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis and neu­ro­plas­tic­ity proves that a nur­tur­ing social and fam­ily set­ting shifts IQ, per­spec­tive, and emo­tional IQ. The so-called bell curve isn’t genetic. Oppressed Tibetans and Chi­nese eth­nic minori­ties –whose test scores soar in the United States and Canada– are 20–30 points lower in their home­land. That 20–30 points deficit is in the same range of a lot of groups that are attacked or threat­ened (Mus­lims in France, Chris­tians in Nige­ria, Blacks in Amer­ica). Con­versely when oppressed groups are removed from their envi­ron­ment their IQ, emo­tional health returns to a nor­mal rate, thus prov­ing that is NOT genetic.

It is plas­tic, shift­ing and based upon the environment.

That is why peo­ple Read the rest of this entry »

We hope you are enjoy­ing the grow­ing cov­er­age of Brain Fit­ness as much as we are. Below you have the Brain Fit­ness Newslet­ter we sent a few days ago-you can sub­scribe to this monthly email update in the box on the right hand side.

In this post, we will briefly cover:

I. Press: see what CBS and Time Mag­a­zine are talk­ing about. Sharp­Brains was intro­duced in the Birm­ing­ham News, Chicago Tri­bune and in a quick note car­ried by the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion news service.

II. Events: we are out­reach part­ners for the Learn­ing & the Brain con­fer­ence, which will gather neu­ro­sci­en­tists and edu­ca­tors, and for the Dana Foundation’s Brain Aware­ness Week.

III. Pro­gram Reviews: The Wall Street Jour­nal reviewed six dif­fer­ent pro­grams for brain exer­cise and aging, and the one we offer is one of the two win­ners. A college-level coun­sel­ing cen­ter starts offer­ing our stress man­age­ment one. And we inter­view a Notre Dame sci­en­tist who has con­ducted a repli­ca­tion study for the work­ing mem­ory train­ing pro­gram for kids with ADD/ ADHD.

IV. New Offer­ings: we have started to offer two infor­ma­tion pack­ages that can be very use­ful for peo­ple who want to bet­ter under­stand this field before they com­mit to any par­tic­u­lar pro­gram: learn more about our Brain Fit­ness 101 guide and Exer­cise Your Brain DVD.

V. Web­site and Blog Sum­mary: we revamped our home page and have had a very busy month writ­ing many good arti­cles. We also hosted two “Blog Car­ni­vals”- don’t you want to know what that means?
Read the rest of this entry »

Good inter­view with Posit Science’s Dr. Michael Merzenich. (Thanks, Steve!)

Includes the quote “Peo­ple can be active learn­ers by learn­ing in new forms and in new domains. It’s not just being active and get­ting up every day. The brain is a learn­ing machine, and it needs to be engaged in new learn­ing of dif­fer­ent dimen­sions. The best kinds of exer­cise are those that chal­lenge. For exam­ple, to mas­ter a musi­cal instru­ment at an older age is a won­der­ful thing. Or, seri­ously under­tak­ing the mas­tery of a sec­ond lan­guage is a won­der­ful thing to do. One of the prob­lems with such exer­cises is that it’s very hard to main­tain the skills and abil­i­ties nec­es­sary to main­tain a men­tal fit­ness program.”

You can read our pre­vi­ous Brain Coach Answers post on why cross­words and sudoku aren’t suf­fi­cient brain exer­cise.