We call breakups “painful” for good reason: When you experience an unwanted breakup, thinking of  your ex-love-interest activates the same parts of your brain that process physical pain.

Researchers measured brain activity while showing love-sick men and women photos of their former-sweethearts, and then photos of platonic friends. They also measured brain activity as they exposed subjects to physical pain with a hot probe on the arm. And guess what? The same parts of the brain lit up when exposed to physical pain and memories of the ex.  

What does this mean for you if you’ve just experienced a painful breakup? For starters, don’t beat yourself up about feeling bad. Researchers believe your brain is wired to help you move on, survive and eventually thrive by lumping memories of your past relationship in the same category as rope burns and root canals.

Another finding from this study and many others shows that, when you’re happy in a relationship, the brain releases the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine which creates a sense of craving, reward and motivation. It’s a hard habit for your brain to break because, after a breakup, thinking of your ex can still release levels of dopamine. Which means, even as your brain is processing your memories as pain, it’s also rewarding you for those same thoughts.

No wonder recovering from a broken heart is such a roller coaster!

The good news is that researchers determined that most of their lovelorn subjects felt a lot better about their breakups after about ten weeks.

When love ends, time is on your side. Your heart needs time to adjust. Apparently, so does your brain. 

Like a lot of kids, David played sports in school. But concussions sustained on the wrestling mat and gridiron hurt his ability to perform well in school and even in his career. After graduating from a police academy, David was rejected by 56 police departments because his test scores were too low. The 32-year-old husband and father began to wonder if his dream job would ever turn into reality.

David explains what happened next in a video testimonial that was voted the winning entry in a quarterly contest sponsored by LearningRx.

LearningRx is the largest one-on-one brain training company in the world, with nearly 80 centers across the country. Their clinically proven programs consist of intense mental exercises—done one-on-one with a personal trainer—that stimulate the brain to strengthen existing neural connections and even create new ones. The results?  Kids and adults who go through their programs experience dramatic and measurable improvements in how fast and efficiently they can think, read, learn, focus and remember.

David contacted the LearningRx Brain Training Center in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He worked with a professional brain trainer for 12 weeks. He calls his improvements after brain training “amazing.”

“At first I looked at my trainer and I’m like, ‘You’re crazy. There’s no way I’m going to be able to do this stuff,” he says of the day he began the program. “But on my last day of training, we went back and repeated the exercises I’d done on that first day, and I just sat back and said, ‘I had a problem with that?’ It’s amazing how fast I progressed and how much I could comprehend at the end. I was amazed.”

Clients of all ages turn to personal brain training, and include kids and adults with learning struggles; people with ADHD, dyslexia and autism; high achieving students and career adults who want even sharper mental performance; senior adults looking to improve memory and stay mentally sharp; and victims of strokes or traumatic brain injuries who need to regain lost brain skills.

In his contest-winning video, David describes the improvements in his memory and mental skills that allowed him to –finally!—land the job of his dreams. In the final week of his 12-week brain training program, David tested with yet another police department. This time he landed the job, and was sworn into service on January 3^rd.

Click here to watch the winning video. 

We don’t think much about blinking. For the most part, it’s an involuntary process that keeps our eyes hydrated. But when we blink, we lose information, even if it’s just for a fraction of a second. In fact, during a typical day, blinking means you spend about 44 minutes with your eyes closed.

This is why, when we’re watching something that interests us, we tend to blink less often. Again, it’s not something we think about, just an involuntary response to not wanting to miss out on whatever has captured our attention.

A recent study of the blink patterns of two-year-olds –some of whom were typically developing children and some of whom had an autism spectrum disorder—revealed fascinating insights on what is actually happening in their brains.  Noticing that children blink less often while watching videos, researchers wondered if toddlers with autism, who have impairments in social communications, would show the same blink patterns as typically developing kids.

They showed 93 toddlers a video featuring two children in a wagon who get into an argument over whether the wagon door should be open or shut.

What they discovered was that typically developing toddlers blink less—indicating increased interest—during the emotional exchange between the two children in the video.

Toddlers with autism, however, blinked less—indicating increased interest—during the parts of the video that showed physical objects in motion, such as the wagon door being slammed.

Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer for Autism Speaks, says that if a child is not visually engaged with the social world, it can “impact the development of neural systems that underlie social behavior which rely on social stimulation for development.”

One of the benefits of the study is that it provides a way to measure a child’s interest and engagement with various stimuli, and can even be used to gauge the effectiveness of various therapies. 

Whether you’re riding in a one-horse sleigh, sledding, caroling, baking cookies or chillin’ with family and friends, the holidays brim with opportunities for lots of laughter.

What’s all that joviality doing to your brain?

Laughing stimulates a part of your brain called the nucleus accumbens, which then releases the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine. This creates a brain-chemical chain reaction that elevates your mood, makes you feel connected to those around you, reduces stress & pain, and even boosts your immunity!

Here are some other interesting things you may not know about laughter: 

• When you laugh, you use 15 different facial muscles
• The average grown up laughs approximately 17 times every day
• We are 30 times more likely to laugh when we’re with other people than when we are by ourselves
• Laughing causes the inner lining of blood vessels to relax and expand, increasing blood flow to your entire body.

Finally, a good belly laugh burns 3.5 calories. Which is a good thing to remember as we’re eating all those holiday goodies. 

How can you grow your brain? You can always follow the example of London taxi cab drivers and memorize a labyrinth of 25,000 city streets as well as thousands of tourist attractions and hot spots. 

While many major cities try to simplify driving by arranging streets in user-friendly grids (or identifying streets by sequenced numbers or alphabetized names), London’s streets are particularly random. The maze of streets requires a unique approach for men and women who want to make a living navigating the confusing tangle. To earn their licenses, cab-drivers-in-training spend four years riding around the city on a moped, memorizing streets and routes. Even then, the licensing test is so difficult that only about half of these drivers-in-training actually pass.

Researchers have realized for some time that London cab drivers have larger-than-normal hippocampi, which is the area of the brain responsible for long-term memory and special navigation. This raised an important question: Do people born with bigger memory centers tend to do better on the licensing exam and, thus, become cab drivers? Or do cab drivers start out with normal sized hippocampi and experience unusual growth due to the intense memorization?

After following 79 aspiring cab drivers for four years, measuring the growth of their hippocampi with brain scans, researchers now know the answer: London cab drivers appear to start out with normal memory centers that “plump up” to accommodate the demand of their profession.

Boston University’s Howard Eichenbaum, a neurobiologist, summed up the importance of these findings by saying, “It shows you can produce profound changes in the brain with training,” adding,  “That’s a big deal.” 

This holiday season, there’s a good chance you’re going to eat your fill of turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and pecan pie. And you’ll probably polish it all off with a good cup of coffee.

And if you’re tempted to feel guilty about chowing down on all your holiday favorites, maybe this’ll make you feel better:

Many traditional holiday favorites are actually good for your brain!

Stuffing, for example, is chock-full of bread crust, which is rich in antioxidants. And researchers say that the ursolic acid found in cranberries can improve cognitive function by increasing the brain’s sensitivity to insulin. It can also correct metabolism errors caused by obesity and protect against brain damage immediately following a stroke.

And as for that pie and coffee, you’ll be happy to know that a recent study conducted at the Center of Cellular Neurobiology at the University of Massachusetts  recommends eating about a handful of pecans every day to delay the progression of age-related motor neuron degeneration. And the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease published a study indicating that the caffeine in coffee at least partially blocked the production of a protein that can clog the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, as well as stimulate the production of GCSF, improving communication between neurons.

More pie, anyone? 

Every weeknight, Jenn and Eric Williams helped their daughter Amanda study her spelling words. Every Friday the third grader came home with the same bad news: She flunked the spelling test.

Amanda’s teachers tried to help by modifying assignments. Amanda was also seeing a reading tutor once a week, too. But evenings at the Williams’ home remained stressful, with homework taking more than two hours, complicated by what Jenn describes as whining, delay tactics and even fits.

Jenn says, “Reading had always been hard for Amanda. She’s just like me in that regard. I was never diagnosed with dyslexia, but my brother was, and I know I struggle with it, too.”

Six months earlier, Jenn had received a postcard from a company called LearningRx with a checklist of 20 symptoms of dyslexia. When Jenn saw that every single symptom described either Amanda or Jenn herself, she kept the postcard to show her husband.

“I knew LearningRx was the answer,” Jenn says. “Maybe because I struggle in the same way, I knew Amanda’s problem wasn’t lack of effort. The problem had something to do with her brain. Things just weren’t sinking in.”

Eric wasn’t as convinced. He thought he and Jenn could still help Amanda by simply working harder. It wasn’t until the following spring—when no amount of working with Amanda could help her correctly spell more than three words out of 15—the couple decided to see if brain training could help their daughter.

Amanda began a 12-week brain training program at the LearningRx Brain Training Center in Maple Grove, MN. She worked one-on-one with a brain coach five to six hours a week, doing mental exercises designed to strengthen the weak brain skills that were making life frustrating.

Amanda was so relieved.

“I thought LearningRx was going to be boring. I thought it was going to be torture,” the animated nine-year-old says today. “But it was actually fun! We got to play games, and I was surprised that those games helped my reading.”

The “games” Amanda loves are actually a very targeted sequence of mental exercises incorporating the five key elements of effective brain training—practice, intensity, sequencing, loading and feedback. LearningRx, a pioneer and leader in the field of brain training, consistently gets dramatic gains for their clients by administering these exercises in a personal coaching environment.

Jenn says the changes for her daughter were huge.

“We went from two stressful hours of homework every night to less than half an hour—and no stress! We used to spend 30 minutes every night studying for spelling tests that Amanda failed every time. By the end of LearningRx, we were waiting until Friday morning, running through the spelling words for 10 minutes, and Amanda was coming home with 100% on every quiz.”

Perhaps even more significant is that, since brain training, Amanda loves to read. She says, “Before LearningRx, I read very skinny chapter books. Now I can read thicker books,” adding, “Reading started to get more fun when I started to understand the books. I thought, ‘Well, this book is kind of interesting, and I want to read it more so I can get onto the next book and read more interesting stuff!’”

She also has more free time now that homework is easier. “I can play with my friends, play on the computer, video chat with my Aunt Linda, watch more TV, ride my bike or roller skate instead of spending so much time on homework. And homework—this is really surprising me to say this—but it’s much more fun!”

Jenn has also seen a big change in her daughter’s confidence. The mother of three says that, before LearningRx, she could see that her daughter’s self-image was being shaped by her struggles. “She no longer has that stigma of thinking, ‘I’m a really bad reader, I’m dumb, I’m not good at anything.’ She’s more confident. And I definitely have more hope for her future. Eric and I used to have a pit in our stomachs when we thought about college and the future for Amanda. We don’t have that now. I feel now that she’ll be able to go to college and do fine.”

Jenn recommends LearningRx to other parents of kids struggling with reading or homework. She says drugs aren’t the answer. She also believes school accommodations, while easing some stress, aren’t the answer either. “I didn’t want that for my daughter. Modifications aren’t realistic for life. I didn’t want a Band-Aid. I wanted a solution.”

Amanda has her own advice for kids struggling like she did. “I would tell other kids that LearningRx is the opposite of what you think. It’s fun, and it’s going to make school easier, better and very nice. I used to say ‘I can’t do this,’ and now I say ‘I can do this! I can do anything if I try!’”

Amanda is the winner of the most recent LearningRx video testimonial contest. To see Amanda tell her story in her own words, watch her video here. 

Halloween may be over, but there’s a good chance you’ve got plenty of Halloween candy lying around your house. Maybe you’ve got a bowl of unclaimed miniature Snickers from trick-or-treat no-shows. Or maybe you simply know where your kids hid their stash of goodies. Either way, you—and your kids—probably have access to lots of sugary goodies from the October 31^st tradition.

We don’t need to tell you that indulging your sweet tooth by binging on all that candy isn’t good for you. You already know that too much sugar will impact the size of your waist. Did you also know it can also impact the size of your brain?

Here’s how it works:

Your body produces a brain chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (or BDNF). This chemical is a good thing, because it helps your brain grow and create new neurons. In other words, if you want a healthy brain with the ability to expand neural connections and function well, you want as much BDNF as possible.

Unfortunately (and we do mean unfortunately, since we like candy as much as you do), research shows that high sugar diets can significantly decrease levels of BDNF.

How important is BDNF to your ability to think, learn and remember? In one experiment, rats had the best ability to learn and remember when they had high levels of BDNF. It took only two months of a high sugar/high fat diet to decrease the amount of BDNF in their brains and for the rats’ ability to learn and remember to be significantly impaired as a result.

This year, do your brain a favor and don’t make leftover Halloween candy a fifth food group. Just because Halloween is supposed to be frightening doesn’t mean it’s okay to do scary things to your brain. 

The problem has been defined as “voluntarily delaying an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay.” Sound familiar?

Why do we procrastinate? According to one team of experts—made up of Drs. Joseph Ferrari and Timothy Pychyl—and quoted on psychologytoday.com, there are three basic types of procrastinators:

1. Arousal types or thrill seekers who look for the euphoric rush of getting something done at the last minute.

2. Avoiders who may be acting out of fear of failure, or otherwise avoiding painful emotions they have attached to the task at hand.

3. Decisional procrastinators, who struggle with—you guessed it!—making decisions.

And while the vote is split on whether procrastination is learned or biological or both, everyone agrees there’s a proven link between procrastination and ADHD.

If you struggle with procrastination, time management strategies can help you compensate for poor attention and decision-making skills. (Check out this slideshow filled with tips to help you prioritize and organize your life better!)

A growing number of kids and adults struggling with ADHD and/or procrastination, however, are turning to personal, one-on-one brain training as a permanent solution to the problem.

Brain training doesn’t just alleviate the symptoms of ADHD or compensate for the weak skills that are creating the problem. Instead, it strengthens the underlying brain skills of attention and decision, eliminating the problem altogether. In fact, LearningRx, the premiere personal brain training company in the world, says that more than a third of kids and adults who come to them on ADHD meds are able to stop or reduce medications before even completing the 12 to 32 week brain training programs.

Want to get more done in your life? Click here to find a LearningRx Brain Training Center near you, then give them a call and ask for a free brain training demonstration. 

What’s not to like about health, money and happiness?

According to a couple of researchers from Pennsylvania State University and Harvard University, health is the number one predictor of happiness, followed by income. Sociological researcher Glenn Firebaugh and grad student Laura Tach came up with the findings and say that, among their study subjects, the happiest people tended to be physically  healthy, followed by those who made relatively higher income (meaning they made more money than other people their same age).

What does brain training have to do with any of this?

According to a study by the US Department of Labor, a gain of just 10 points in IQ can result in greater earnings by as much as $18,000 a year, while other studies show a correlation between statewide IQ scores and how healthy folks are who live in that state. Finally, a proven method of raising IQ an average of 15 to 20 points is working with a personal brain training coach like those offered through LearningRx, the largest one-on-one brain training company in the world.

It’s just like you learned back in math class: If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. In other words, if one-on-one brain training means higher IQ, and higher IQ means greater health and more money, and health and wealth are prime predictors of happiness, then what’s the first step to being happier?

The answer is easy.

Click here to find the LearningRx Brain Training Center near you.