Brain Training Blog

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Heartache and the Brain

Jan 24

Posted by LearningRx in Brain Research, Brain Science and Health | No Comments

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. 

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What Do Blinking Patterns Tell Us?

Jan 16

Posted by LearningRx in A Mom's Journal, Autism, Brain Research, PDD Autism and Asperger's | No Comments

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. 

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New Study Proves that Your Job can Change Your Brain–Just Ask These Cabbies!

Dec 13

Posted by LearningRx in Brain Research, Brain Science and Health, Brain Training | No Comments

 

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.” 

 

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The Brain Benefits of Holiday Foods

Nov 22

Posted by LearningRx in Brain Health, Brain Research | No Comments

 

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? 

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The Effects of Sugar On Your Brain

Nov 2

Posted by LearningRx in A Mom's Journal, Brain Health, Brain Research, Brain Science and Health, Resources for Parents | No Comments

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 31st 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. 

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ADHD Awareness Month

Sep 21

Posted by LearningRx in Attention Skills, Brain Health, Brain Research, Brain Science and Health | No Comments

September is National ADHD Awareness Month, and in their ongoing quest for answers, researchers continue to discover new things about the common diagnosis, estimated to affect up to 16% of school aged children and close to 5% of adults. In the United States alone, roughly 8.8 million adults are thought to struggle with the condition.

A new study has found a link between adult ADHD and a certain form of dementia.

After Alzheimer’s, DLB is the second most common form of dementia. DLB stands for, of all things, “Dementia with Lewy Bodies.” Lewy bodies, named after the doctor who discovered them, are spherical protein deposits found in nerve cells that disrupt the normal functioning of the brain’s important chemical messengers.

Currently DBL accounts for 10% of dementia cases (although many doctors think it is vastly underdiagnosed, since it shares some characteristics with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease).

In a recent study, researchers in Argentina studied  509 people in their 70s (360 of them with DLB) and discovered that nearly half of the men and women who ended up with DLB in their senior years also had adult ADHD. The occurrence of adult ADHD in seniors with DLB was more than three times the rate in the group without DLB.

Dr. Angel Golimstok, one of the authors of the study, says that it looks like the same neurotransmitter pathway problems are involved in the development of both conditions. 

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National Youth Sports Week

Jul 20

Posted by LearningRx in A Mom's Journal, Brain Research, Resources for Parents | No Comments

An estimated 45 million kids in the U.S. participate in youth sports every year, and they’re starting younger than ever. Gymnastics classes are available for kids still in diapers and the SoccerTots® franchise caters to kids as young as 18 months.

National Youth Sports Week this July 20 – 24 is designed to draw attention to the rewards of participation for kids of all ages. And now a new study suggests another benefit: sports may actually make kids think faster. The study in the Journal of American College of Sports found that athletes appeared to have a faster processing speed than non-athletes, likely due to regularly making split-second evaluations and decisions.

A New York Times piece on the study notes that it’s possible that the athletes always had advanced processing abilities and that’s what made them better athletes, rather than the athletics turning them into faster thinkers. Either way, the study shows that better athletes have faster processing speed.

This is something brain training students have realized for years. Students who come to LearningRx for academic reasons routinely report improvement in sports. LearningRx brain training strengthens their cognitive skills (including processing speed) and they, in turn, become better athletes, reporting they can read the playing field more clearly, quickly and fully, think several moves ahead, and focus longer. They also report better hand-eye coordination, better mastery of the playbook, and even better balance.

Aside from the newfound mental benefits of sports, the physical benefits of exercise are well documented. According to the American Heart Association, physical activity helps control weight, reduce blood pressure, and reduce the risk of certain cancers and diabetes. To get those benefits, the Centers for Disease Control recommends children and adolescents get at least one hour of physical activity each day.

If your kids are having trouble meeting that goal, consider an organized youth sport. Aside from the physical benefits, (and newly realized mental advantages) participating in youth sports can build self-esteem and confidence, leadership skills, and self-discipline. It can also teach the value of sportsmanship, teamwork, time management, perseverance, cooperation and more. Plus, and perhaps most importantly for kids, it can be a whole lot of fun. (Even if they’re too young to tell you so!)

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The Link Between Strength Training and Brain Fitness

Jun 7

Posted by LearningRx in Brain Health, Brain Research | No Comments

Turns out there’s a link between strength training and brain fitness. So much so that a recent study published in the Archives of Neurology discovered that people with more muscle strength cut their chances of developing Alzheimer’s in half! The study was conducted on a group of people with an average age of 80 years. Among this group, only one out of ten people with stronger muscles developed Alzheimer’s, compared to two out of ten people with weaker muscles.

Another study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, has shown that strength training has even more impact on brain fitness than balance and toning exercises.  The study followed 155 women ages 65 to 75. Half the women were asked to work out with dumbbells and weight machines a couple times a week for a year. The other half were asked to spend that year doing balance and toning exercises. At the end of the study, the women who had worked out with the weights also improved their scores on cognitive tests, testing higher in the ability to make decisions, resolve conflicts and focus. The women who had done balance and toning exercises, however, actually showed a slight deterioration in cognitive skills.

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Workaholics Run Greater Risk of Developing Dementia

May 19

Posted by LearningRx in Brain Research, Cognitive skills | No Comments

Workaholics work longer hours. That means their brains are active more hours of the day, right? That must mean they have sharper mental skills, right?

Wrong.

In fact, the opposite appears to be true. Research has linked longer work hours with weaker mental skills. In fact, one study of 2,214 middle-aged civil servants concluded that employees working more than 55 hours a week had poorer mental skills than their 40-hour-work-week counterparts.

Brain imaging specialist Dr. Daniel Amen reminds us to think of the brain as a computer that needs to hibernate, shut down and re-boot on a regular basis to prevent brain fatigue. Quoting the conclusions of a different study—this one tracking 7000 workers over more than a decade—Dr. Amen says that working 11 hours a day or more not only increases your risk of heart attack by 67 percent, it also increases your chances of developing dementia later in life.

While researchers aren’t sure exactly why people who work longer hours have weaker mental skills and are at greater risk of dementia, they say factors may include getting less sleep, experiencing more stress, and/or embracing a less healthy lifestyle. In one study, employees who worked longer hours also reported sleeping less, having more symptoms of depression, and using more alcohol than people who worked a normal 40 hour week.

“This study should give pause for thought to workaholics,” reflected Harriet Millward of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust. “We already know that dementia risk can be reduced by maintaining a balanced diet, regular social interactions and exercising both our bodies and minds. Perhaps work-life balance should be accounted for, too.”

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Get a Bigger Brain

May 11

Posted by LearningRx in Brain Research, Brain Science and Health, Cognitive skills | No Comments

In a recent study, people who learned to juggle grew bigger brains.

And if you think we’re clowning around, we’re not.

German researchers took 24 non-jugglers and divided them into two groups. One group was asked to do nothing; the other group was asked to practice juggling for three months. The researchers took brain scans of both groups before and after the three month experiment. What they discovered was that the dozen people who had learned how to juggle had grown more brain!

The extra brain cells were in the areas of the brain responsible for visual processing and motor skills (which makes sense when you think about the hand-eye coordination necessary for juggling).

The researchers were scanning for brain volume, rather than brain activity. As a result, while they can see that the new jugglers grew more brain cells, they don’t know the purpose of the increase. At least not yet. They’re still looking into the neural connections and brain activity related to those new cells.

The other interesting development was that, when the new jugglers stopped practicing for three months, the bigger parts of their brains decreased in size. In other words, when it comes to your brain, you snooze, you lose. To get the most out of your brain, you gotta keep using it.

 So the next time you go to the circus and see a clown wearing a big hat, you’ll know why. With a bigger brain, he probably needs the extra space.

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