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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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The Benefits of Holiday Laughter

Dec 22

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

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. 

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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 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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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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Weight loss and the brain

Apr 29

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

With spring and summer wardrobes just around the corner, many of us are thinking about shedding a few pounds.

Again.

The truth is that, compared to keeping it off, losing weight is a piece of cake (unfortunate metaphor, we admit). In fact, 95 percent of dieters gain their weight back. Sometimes they gain even more than they lost.

So what do the 5% know that the rest of us don’t know?

Researchers are discovering that the secret of people who lose weight—and keep it off—might not be in what they know, but in how they think.

A study of 4500 successful dieters has revealed that people who are successful at keeping weight off tend to process information using the lower left quadrant of their brain (let’s  call this “B” quadrant). People tend to have a dominant quadrant through which they process information. This doesn’t mean they can’t process information in other ways, but the “favored” quadrant is like a mental default the brain automatically uses unless intentionally directed otherwise.

People who favor the “A” quadrant (upper left) tend to be analytical problem solvers, while people who favor the “C” quadrant (lower right) tend to be more focused on emotions and relationships. “D” quadrant (upper right) thinkers are visual thinkers who like fun and risk.

“B” quadrant thinkers, however, are inclined toward structure, discipline and routine. People who lost 30 to 60 pounds and kept it off—often for five years or more—scored noticeably higher in using this portion of their brain. This makes sense since planning meals, counting calories and maintaining a consistent exercise schedule all rely on the kind of structure-friendly skills concentrated in that portion of the brain.

Does that mean those of us who are analytical, relationship-minded, and/or visual thinkers are doomed to be yo-yo dieters forever?

No way. Read the rest of this entry »

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Equality in Education

Jan 26

Posted by LearningRx in Brain Science and Health, Brain Training, Cognitive skills, IQ and LearningRx, Resources for Parents, Special Education, Uncategorized, What Are the Costs? | No Comments

Whatever you believe about social equality, it cannot be denied that education is a major factor.

A recent report from The Economist shows the effect education has on life. Better brains get better jobs. A better job means more money. More money means the ability to send your children to a better school, and the cycle continues.

Even among people who appear to “beat” the odds—folks who rise from humble beginnings to the highest eschalon of society—brain power is often a factor. As The Economist points out, “People from humble origins sometimes rise to the top. Barack Obama was raised by a single mother. Lloyd Blankfein, the boss of Goldman Sachs, is the son of a clerk. What such people usually have in common is uncommon intelligence.”

Is an expensive education the only way to get a better brain? Or are there alternatives?

The vision of Dr. Ken Gibson, founder of LearningRx, is to make cognitive training available to everyone. The one-on-one training offered by 70 LearningRx brain training centers across the country not only strengthens cognitive skills such as attention, focus and mental processing, it also increases intelligence. In fact, students who receive LearningRx brain training increase their IQ by an average of 15-20 points. In an effort to help as many people as possible experience the benefits of a better brain, LearningRx is pursuing a partnership with the National Science Foundation and Virginia State University to study innovative approaches to improve the academic performance of minority students at selected inner-city schools. In an address to our congress (read it here) the Principal Investigator for the case, Dr. Oliver Hill, says this:

We have been using the procedures developed by an educational firm called LearningRx, which runs cognitive learning centers around the country. The data collected in these centers over the last few years Read the rest of this entry »

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habits and the brain

Jan 19

Posted by LearningRx in Behavior and Symptoms, Brain Health, Brain Science and Health | 1 Comment

We’re almost three weeks into those New Year’s Resolutions.

So how are you doing?

If you’re like 40 to 45% of Americans, this month you made a least one resolution for the coming year. What are your chances of actually making the changes you vowed to make? Statistics indicate that, for every 20 people who make a New Year’s promise to themselves, 4 people will break that promise within the first week. Ten more will abandon their good intentions within three months, and of the six people who make it past that three month mark, only 3 will still be going strong by the time the year comes to an end.

In his blog, Business Mind Hacks, business coach Alex Schleber talks about the length of time it takes to truly ingrain a new habit. Rebuffing the traditional advice that it takes 21 days to form a new habit, Schleber says it actually takes between 30 and 60 days–and says that the reason it takes that long is rooted in the physiology of the brain.

It has to do with white matter in the brain called myelin. Myelin forms a protective coating around well-used pathways in the brain, helping to insulate those pathways and allowing information to be transmitted up to 200 times faster than along less established pathways. In other words, the more you repeat any behavior, the more efficient and protected that habit becomes. (For a fun slideshow showing how myelin helps athletes and others develop true talent, click here). Read the rest of this entry »

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Color and The Brain

Dec 21

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

During the holidays, the color red is everywhere we look, from bulbs and bows to Santa’s trademark threads.

What impact does this favorite holiday hue have on your brain?

For starters, studies show that the color red increases appetite (no wonder holiday goodies are so hard to resist!). Also, when people are exposed to the color red, tests show they become more cautious and attentive to detail, and memory skills improve as well.

In one study, more than 600 people were asked to perform various tasks, usually on a computer. When tasks (such as proofreading) required focus, people performed as much as 31 percent better when their computer screen had a red background.

In contrast, researchers say the color red can keep us from performing our best in situations where creativity and analytical thinking are required. For these tasks, people perform better after being exposed to the colors green and blue. Read the rest of this entry »

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