Senia writes a great arti­cle on How You Tell the Story of Your Life in Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­ogy News Daily. As part of the story, she men­tions a very fun study on the power of the Placebo effect.

From Senia’s post:

“In the Feb­ru­ary, 2007 issue of Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, Langer and col­league Alia Crum reported that they took 84 hotel work­ers and told one group that “the work they do (clean­ing hotel rooms) is good exer­cise and sat­is­fies the Sur­geon General’s rec­om­men­da­tions for an active lifestyle. Exam­ples of how their work was exer­cise were pro­vided. Langer and Crum told the con­trol group noth­ing. Four weeks later, Langer and Crum returned to find some mea­sure­ments of both groups: the con­trol group hadn’t changed phys­i­cally, but the test group had decreased all of the fol­low­ing: weight, blood pres­sure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index.

Langer and Crum describe this study as sup­port­ing the the­ory that exer­cise affects health at least partly due to the placebo effect. Fur­ther­more, we can ask, what are the sto­ries that these hotel work­ers are telling them­selves? Why do the hotel work­ers sud­denly believe that they actively affect their exer­cise regiment?”

Impli­ca­tion: the placebo effect is real, and it can help our health.

A few fun ques­tions to consider:

- How do we pre­vent other peo­ple from sell­ing us stuff that only works based on the placebo effect?

- Once we decide to do some­thing, shouldn’t we try to “placebo” our­selves in order to get the most of it? this is another man­i­fes­ta­tion of the impor­tance of emo­tional self-regulation.

Enjoy the long weekend

My wife and I were for­tu­nate to con­duct recently a mind train­ing exper­i­ment, in the form of a breath­ing & med­i­ta­tion retreat, with some neu­ro­sci­en­tists and Adam Engle, Co-Founder and Chair­man of the Mind & Life Insti­tute (nice name, isn’t it?)

The Mind and Life Dia­logues “started in 1987 as an exper­i­ment to deter­mine whether a sci­en­tific exchange could occur between mod­ern sci­ence and Bud­dhism. MLI has now spon­sored 14 dia­logues (between the Dalai Lama and neu­ro­sci­en­tists) over the last 20 years. In that time MLI has become a rec­og­nized world leader in the emerg­ing sci­en­tific inves­ti­ga­tion of the effects of con­tem­pla­tive prac­tices on the brain, behav­ior, and the trans­la­tion of this data into effec­tive tools to ben­e­fit all peo­ple everywhere.”

A few notes from our con­ver­sa­tion with Adam

• - He helped launch the Mind & Life Insti­tute to build a science-based field of inter­dis­ci­pli­nary study to inves­ti­gate the appli­ca­tions of the “data­base of prac­tices” that Bud­dhism and some Chris­t­ian tra­di­tions have accu­mu­lated over milennia
• - From early on it became clear that they needed to engage West­ern neu­ro­sci­en­tists in order to be cred­i­ble and become a real East-West bridge with poten­tial to reach main­stream soci­ety. You can see below a par­tial list of par­tic­i­pants in their most recent meet­ing, 2 weeks ago
• - They are very happy that Sharon Begley’s book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain has become a non-fiction Best­seller, since it is based on one of the Mind & Life Dia­logues (more on Books on neu­ro­plas­tic­ity)
• - He is glad to see the inroads that Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduc­tion (MBSR) is mak­ing in the med­ical world thanks to solid research. He believes the Cor­po­rate Train­ing and Lead­er­ship mar­ket is also going to become very inter­ested in this tech­nique for stress man­age­ment. The main bot­tle­neck for growth? the exist­ing num­ber of qual­i­fied instruc­tors does not meet the increas­ing demand.

The Insti­tute spon­sors research in a num­ber of ways, and they just announced that the 3rd annual Sci­en­tists Retreat will take place Read the rest of this entry »

Great Brain Fit­ness Car­ni­val Num­ber 3 hosted by Neu­rophiloso­pher, with a vari­ety of posts on stress man­age­ment, hap­pi­ness, healthy eat­ing, pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy, emo­tional intel­li­gence, edu­ca­tion and much more. The next Brain Fit­ness blog car­ni­val will be hosted by Jane Chin at Naked Med­i­cine. Sub­mit your arti­cles here.

Other blog car­ni­vals just pub­lished: Read the rest of this entry »

Wel­come to the Feb­ru­ary 19, 2007 edi­tion of brain fitness.

Today we want to high­light an excel­lent Inter­view with Aaron Beck on the His­tory of Cog­ni­tive Ther­apy sub­mit­ted by the Beck Insti­tute. Dr. Beck was 83 when he gave this inter­view. To the ques­tion “Do you have a view about age­ing?”, he responds “I can only speak for myself. I know that prac­ti­cally all my col­leagues from med­ical school days who are still around have retired. That is not some­thing that I think about. It is no more on my hori­zon now than it was when we first met a quar­ter of a cen­tury ago. I keep look­ing ahead.” He also says “I have always liked to unify dif­fer­ent fields. Given my back­ground in neu­rol­ogy I do not see a con­flict between neu­rol­ogy and psy­chol­ogy. But if you look at the train­ing of con­tem­po­rary psy­chi­a­trists, for exam­ple, the two domains are totally dis­tinct. If psy­chi­a­try is to sur­vive as a dis­ci­pline, a merg­ing of the con­cepts of neu­rol­ogy and psy­chol­ogy will need to occur.” Read the rest of this entry »

…a few ques­tions: how did you find us, what we are doing well, what we can do better?

We have just found out that more than 600 people are receiv­ing our feeds, but we only know-and just a bit– the 50–60 who leave com­ments and link to us. We enjoy hav­ing so many read­ers not just in the US but in Europe, the Mid­dle East, Asia, Australia…(thanks Google Analytics!).

Would you mind writ­ing a com­ment to allow us to learn about you and your inter­ests, and also include your feed­back for us? If you have a blog, please write the URL so we can pay a visit.

Enjoy the week­end, and thanks a lot for your time and attention!

Car­o­line and Alvaro

Wel­come to the inau­gural edi­tion of the Brain Fit­ness Blog Car­ni­val. The tim­ing couldn’t be bet­ter  you have prob­a­bly seen the fea­tured CBS News/TIME Series on Brain Neuroplasticity.

Thanks to the over 40 peo­ple who sub­mit­ted posts. We have had to select the posts we enjoyed the most to help facil­i­tate an engag­ing and informed conversation.

Learn­ing is phys­i­cal. Our expe­ri­ence lit­er­ally shapes our brains. And vice versa. The media seems to be focus­ing mostly on brain fit­ness for seniors, but its impli­ca­tions go beyond that, as you will see in this post by Car­o­line: What is Brain Fit­ness?, and the arti­cles in this carnival.

Science-based under­stand­ing is evolv­ing from “Use it or Lose It” to “Use It and Improve It.”  As Fast Company’s Alan Deutschman provoca­tively puts it in his last book, Change or Die. We couldn’t agree more with his sum­mary rec­om­men­da­tion: “Relate. Repeat. Reframe.” Alan presents a blog arti­cle announc­ing his book (here is his orig­i­nal arti­cle). Read the rest of this entry »

Happy 2007 to everyone!

We have just for­mu­lated our New Year Res­o­lu­tion: make 2007 the year when brain plas­tic­ity and Brain Fit­ness became main­stream concepts.

How do we start? well, let’s announce the launch of the Car­ni­val of Brain Fit­ness (a Blog Car­ni­val is basi­cally the vehi­cle that blogs use to share posts around spe­cific topics).

Goal: to facil­i­tate a dia­logue about this emerg­ing field across mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives, from sci­en­tists and health pro­fes­sion­als, to edu­ca­tion and train­ing ones, to basi­cally every­one who has con­ducted an exper­i­ment on his on her brain and mind, and has news to report.

Con­text: The sci­en­tific foun­da­tions lie in neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, neu­ro­plas­tic­ity, cog­ni­tive train­ing and stress man­age­ment. Med­ical and health appli­ca­tions range from stroke and TBI reha­bil­i­ta­tion to ADD/ADHD and early Alzheimer’s to Mind­ful­ness Based Stress Reduc­tion and cog­ni­tive ther­apy. Edu­ca­tional and train­ing appli­ca­tions go from help­ing kids improve read­ing abil­i­ties to help­ing man­age stress and anx­i­ety — includ­ing work with the “men­tal game” in sports and high-demand activ­i­ties pr pro­fes­sions. Each of us may also have expe­ri­ences to report, where we saw first hand, no mat­ter our age, our innate abil­ity to refine and trans­form our­selves (and our brains).

Mechan­ics: If you’d like to con­tribute, Read the rest of this entry »

We’re full of res­o­lu­tions for the upcom­ing new year. But, if you haven’t found one yet and need a lit­tle inspi­ra­tion, here are some ideas to stim­u­late your com­mit­ment to a healthy brain and body this year …

Read the rest of this entry »

Just came back from a hol­i­day party where I met some avid golfers who thought the con­cept of man­ag­ing emo­tions through breath­ing, visu­al­iza­tion and tech­nol­ogy sounded like a bit far out.

First I tried to para­phrase the quote “Effec­tive man­age­ment of the emo­tions in your golf game will not only lower your scores, but is guar­an­teed to increase your enjoy­ment of the game”, by Lynn Mar­riott and Pia Nils­son, Voted Top 50 Teach­ers 2003–2004, Golf Digest.

Then, I promised to find some rel­e­vant arti­cle on Brain Fit­ness for Golfers.

Here you have a Golf Digest arti­cle– Read the rest of this entry »

Since the begin­ning of the Sharp­Brains blog, we have enjoyed fre­quent, insight­ful and nice com­ments by “Eleanor”. One day we decided to track her back and see what work she was involved with, and we enjoyed learn­ing about what she does in the UK. There­fore, we asked her to write a guest entry here to intro­duce her­self, her orga­ni­za­tion and phi­los­o­phy. Eleanor, all yours!

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Sharp­Brains Inc is bril­liant. Thanks for invit­ing me to con­tribute. I work for Mind­Fields Col­lege, based in the UK, which teaches human givens psy­chol­ogy to men­tal health pro­fes­sion­als, teach­ers, social work­ers, etc.

The human givens approach has been described as “the miss­ing heart of pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy” and is named after its core organ­is­ing idea, that there are innate needs (or ‘givens’) phys­i­cal and emo­tional, which must be met for good men­tal health. These needs, which are genet­i­cally pro­grammed into us, include secu­rity, receiv­ing and giv­ing atten­tion, auton­omy and con­trol, emo­tional con­nec­tion to oth­ers, feel­ing part of a wider com­mu­nity, friend­ship, inti­macy, pri­vacy, sta­tus, sense of com­pe­tence and achieve­ment and to be stretched (from which comes our sense that life is mean­ing­ful). We also have innate resources (e.g. imag­i­na­tion, long-term mem­ory, the observ­ing self and a con­scious ratio­nal mind) required to ful­fil these needs, which are also givens.

After launch­ing our Mind­Fields Col­lege blog, I stum­bled across the Sharp­Brains blog, and was fas­ci­nated to see that, by encour­ag­ing higher pub­lic aware­ness of “Brain Fit­ness” they are addi­tion­ally pro­vid­ing valu­able and prac­ti­cal ways to help peo­ple get their emo­tional needs met too.

For exam­ple: Read the rest of this entry »