Ways to Beef Up your Brain

Forget where you left your keys this morning? Or maybe you left your umbrella in the office before a rainy evening.

Don't worry, it's probably not a sign of Alzheimer's — everyone is a little forgetful now and then.

But the prevalence of Alzheimer's and other types of dementia, which slowly deteriorate the brain's capacity to make new memories, retrieve older ones and perform other mental and physical tasks, is on the rise as the baby boomer generation hits retirement age. A 2007 Alzheimer's Association report estimated that more than 5 million Americans were currently living with the disease and that that total could reach 16 million by 2050.

Scientists are still trying to unravel the many mysteries of the brain — how our brain processes information, how memory works, how the brain ages and how diseases like Alzheimer's develop — so that we better understand our own minds and how to keep them healthy.

But while there is still a lot to learn about our noggins, several studies have worked out a few ways to help keep your thinking organ in shape, now and as you age.

1. Eat Your Brain Food

You are what you eat, or at least your brain is. A diet of junk food can junk up your brain, as things like trans fats and saturated fats, common in heavily processed foods, can negatively affect the brain's synapses. Synapses connect the brains neurons and are important to learning and memory. On the other hand, a balanced diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids — found in salmon, walnuts and kiwi fruit — can give the synapses a boost and help fight against mental disorders from depression to dementia.

2. Hit the Gym

Giving the rest of your body a workout can also improve your memory, make you think more clearly and decrease the risk of developing cognitive diseases, several studies have suggested. Because exercise is a mild stressor to your body, eating up the precious energy needed by the brain, it triggers the release of chemicals called growth factors that make the brain's neurons stronger and healthier. Half an hour every other day will do it, experts say. And don't forget to stretch: Stretching can help reduce stress, which can impact the memory centers of your brain.

3. Mind Benders

Give your brain a workout, too, with brainteasers, crossword puzzles and memory games — studies have shown that using these tools to stay mentally active can reduce the risks of developing dementia by building and maintaining a reserve of stimulation in your brain. Even following the current political campaign can provide a boost to the systems that control attention and learning that are hard-wired into the brain.

4. Memory tricks

Keeping information stored in your memory banks and retaining that memory with age may also be a simple matter of mind control. For example, confidence in your cognitive abilities could actually affect how well your memory functions, particularly for the elderly. Because some older adults tend to blame memory lapses on age, regardless of whether or not that is the cause, they can keep themselves from even really trying to remember. Prediction can also enhance memory: If you have a good idea of the information you'll need to recall later, you're more likely to remember it.

5. Give it a Rest

Sleep gives your brain a chance to replay the memories of the day and consolidate them for long-term storage. One study suggested that the brain can do its reviewing much faster when you're asleep than when you're wide awake — so no more all-nighters, students. A 90-minute mid-afternoon nap can even help solidify long-term memories, such as events or skills you are trying to master. Siesta anyone?

Of course, none of these mind-enhancing tips is fool-proof. Some studies have suggested that developing Alzheimer's and other types of dementia is partly a matter of genetics.

One such study, presented in July at the Alzheimer's Association's International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease, hinted at a connection between mothers who develop Alzheimer's and the chances their children will become afflicted in old age. Another suggests that having a specific pattern of proteins is a risk factor for the debilitating disease.

But for now, no one can predict exactly who will or won't develop dementia. While scientists work on better indicators and cures, doing your own part to keep your body and brain healthy is probably the best you can do.

Thompson, A. (08/15/2008). 5 Ways to Beef Up Your Brain. LiveScience. [Retrieved] 08/30/2012, [from] http://www.livescience.com

Books are tonic for the brain

London, Aug 26 (IANS) Reading is not just another leisurely activity or a way of brushing up your literacy skills and factual knowledge - it acts as a tonic for the brain too.

Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield suggests that reading helps to expand attention spans in kids. "Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end - a structure that encourages our brains to think in sequence, to link cause, effect and significance," she says.

"It is essential to learn this skill as a small child, while the brain has more plasticity, which is why it's so important for parents to read to their children. The more we do it, the better we get at it," Greenfield added.

Reading can enrich our relationships by increasing our understanding of other cultures and helping us learn to empathise, the Daily Mail reports.

"In a computer game, you might have to rescue a princess, but you don't care about her, you just want to win," explains Greenfield. "But a princess in a book has a past, present and future, she has connections and motivations. We can relate to her. We see the world through her eyes."

John Stein, emeritus professor of neuroscience at Magdalen College, Oxford, says reading is far from a passive activity. "Reading exercises the whole brain," he explains. Reading stories to children will help their brains develop the ability to analyse the cause, effect and significance of events

In 2009, a brain-imaging study in the US showed that reading about landscapes, sounds, smells and tastes, activates brain areas tied to these experiences in real life, creating new neural pathways. Simply stated, our brains simulate real experiences, which doesn't happen when you're watching TV or playing computer games.

In 2009, University of Sussex researchers showed how six minutes of reading can slash stress levels by more than two-thirds, more than listening to music or going out for a walk.

Indo Asian News Service. (08/26/2012). Books are tonic for the brain.  Yahoo News/ IANS India Private Limited . [Retrieved] 08/30/2012. [from] http://in.news.yahoo.com/books-tonic-brain-111145330.html 

Training can help boost visual ability

Washington: Until now it has seemed an irreparable limitation of human perception that we strain to perceive things in the very rapid succession of, say, less than half a second.

Psychologists call this deficit “attentional blink.” We’ll notice that first car spinning out in our path, but maybe not register the one immediately beyond it. It turns out, we can learn to do better after all.

In a new study researchers now based at Brown University overcame the blink with just a little bit of training that was never been tried before.

“Attention is a very important component of visual perception. One of the best ways to enhance our visual ability is to improve our attentional function,” said Takeo Watanabe, a professor in Brown’s Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences.

Watanabe and his team were at Boston University when they performed experiments. The bottom line of the research is that making the second target object a distinct colour is enough to train people to switch their attention more quickly than they could before. After that, they can perceive a second target object presented as quickly as a fifth of a second later, even when it isn’t distinctly coloured.

In the first and most important experiment, the researchers sat 10 people down at a computer and showed them a rapid-fire sequence of many white-on-black letters and just two white-on-black numbers. The characters would appear and disappear within a tenth of a second. People were then supposed to type the numbers they saw.

In one set of sequences the numbers were spaced only two characters, or a fifth of a second, apart. In another set the numbers were spaced apart by six characters, or more than half a second. People performed hundreds of rounds of each task.

Before training, which also lasted hundreds of rounds, people were much more likely to get the second number right when it was presented more than half a second after the first. If it was presented less than half a second later, there was a measurable attentional blink effect.

To train people, Watanabe and his team made only one difference: they coloured the second number red.

“A colour change can be very conspicuous. If all items are black and white and all of a sudden a colour item is shown, you pay attention to that,” Watanabe said.

After training, the researchers went back to presenting the subjects with the same kind of black and white letter-and-numbers sequences for two more days. In the more rapid sequence, the trained subjects were able to get the second number right much more often, almost exactly as during the sequence with a longer time between numbers. Attentional blink was almost completely gone.

In a second experiment they invited the subjects back an average of two-and-a-half months later. They found the perception performance increase was still in place.

To test whether the colour training was effective, rather than the mere repetition of the training, the team ran a training session for six new participants in which the second target number was not coloured. Then the scientists measured the volunteers’ performance. Without the increase in salience provided by colour, the subjects didn’t show an improved ability to spot the second rapidly presented target number.

The researchers also tested to determine whether the mere presence of colour helped extinguish attentional blink, even when it was not linked to the second target number. They asked eight new people to undergo a training in which the second target varied in when it was presented, but that the second character after the first stimulus was colored red, whether it was the target or not. People with this training also failed to improve.

“The results of experiments 3 and 4 together indicate that [attentional blink] is eliminated only when [target 2] is consistently attended to during training,” the researchers wrote.

That said, the effects of training were shown in successive experiments to take hold even when the experimenters varied the time interval between the first and second target numbers, and when the numbers were masked not by letters, but instead by gibberish characters.

Finally, the researchers ran the original experiment with nine volunteers in an fMRI machine to see what was going on in the brain before and after people received training. The goal was to see if training helped them process quicker targets like they do with the more slowly spaced targets or whether they pay attention differently. If the improvement came from processing, the researchers reasoned, they’d expect to see to brain activity when handling the more rapid sequence bear a greater resemblance to the brain activity during the slower sequence.

Instead they saw no such increased correlation in four parts of the brain. This gave credence, the researchers concluded, to the alternative explanation, which was that people were deciding to switch their attention more quickly after training, rather than processing the visual stimuli faster.

“Attention is a cognitive component of visual perception. We have shown that even a higher cognitive component of visual processing can be improved,” Watanabe said.

The researchers described their finding in a paper published the week of July 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Brain Training or Tutoring?

Does your child need brain training or tutoring? What’s the difference? Do you know? Take this short quiz, and see if you can tell the difference. Get a piece of paper, read through the two scenarios in each question, and write down which story is like brain training and which story is like tutoring.

Brain training or tutoring? Question #1
a.) An 9-year old boy is going out for soccer. He gets on to the team, but he starts to have trouble aiming the ball in the direction he wants it to go when he kicks. His coach pulls him aside and shows him how to control the angle of his kick, and tells him to go home and practice it. The boy practices his kick, and improves.
b.) Another young boy wants to play soccer, and tries out for the team. He cannot run as fast as the other boys, and is badly uncoordinated, so he doesn’t make the team. The coach suggests some weight training and balance exercises, and tells the boy that if he does those things faithfully, and runs every day, he will have a better chance to make the team next time. The next year, the boy comes back stronger and faster, and makes the team.

Brain training or tutoring? Question #2
a.) An acrobat sustains an injury in his wrists, which causes weakness in his grip. He cannot grip the handle of the trapeze anymore. Since his livelihood is at stake, he goes to a specialist, who shows him a series of exercises that he can do to heal and strengthen his wrists. The specialist tells him that once his wrists have healed and gets stronger, his grip will improve. After a few weeks of faithfully doing the wrist exercises, he finds that he can grip the trapeze bar again.
b.) Another circus performer, a clown, gets a severe case of chickenpox and misses several circus performances. When he gets back, he finds that the other clowns have changed the clown-car routine, and that he also has to learn a new joke… but they don’t have time to practice with him because they have a special clown meeting to go to. Since the performance is tomorrow night, the first clown goes to the Elephant Man, who knows the clowns’ routine by heart (his monologue is right after their routine, and so he’s seen it a few times) and asks him to go over it with him. After a few run-throughs, he feels confident in his ability to do the routine.

Brain training or tutoring? Question #3
a.) President Obama’s daughter is going to be interviewed by David Letterman, but she’s nervous, so when Mr. Letterman tells her what to do, she forgets. She’s never been on TV before, by herself without her father. So, she goes quickly to the President and explains that she doesn’t know what to do. He sits her down and talks her through all the steps. She thanks him for reminding her, and feels calmer, and does well in the interview.
b.) Andrea Bocelli takes on a talented pupil named Luigi. Luigi has a beautiful voice, but it is very weak. Luigi explains that he just can’t make his voice any louder than it is, and doesn’t know why. Bocelli looks at Luigi, who is a very skinny boy, and being very wise, tells Luigi that the problem is not in his voice, the problem is that his body is out of shape. He puts Luigi on a regimen of running and sit-ups. In a few months, Luigi’s voice is much stronger.

Brain training or tutoring: The Answers
Question #1
a.) tutoring b.) brain training
The little boy who makes the team, but has trouble kicking, is like a child who is doing fine in school, but just doesn’t “get” one subject, and needs a little extra help. A tutor can help a child think or approach a subject from a different angle. The boy who is not fast and strong enough to play, is like a child who wants to learn, but can’t because their cognitive skills need to be strengthened. The first child has a good foundation, but needs guidance. The second child needs to build up his foundation before he can play.
Question #2
a.) brain training b.) tutoring
The trapeze artist is frustrated because he has sustained an injury which has weakened his grip. This is like a person who is frustrated because of a TBI or other brain injury that has taken away some of their abilities. The right approach is to work on the weaknesses (the injury) to re-build strength, so that the abilities come back. The clown with chickenpox is like a child who is out of school for a while with an illness or other emergency, and misses material. A tutor can help (like the Elephant Man did) get the child back on track.
Question #3
a.) tutoring b.) brain training
President Obama’s daughter got nervous and forgot what to do. This is typical of some children who have trouble taking tests or getting good grades under pressure. A tutor can help the child gain confidence by giving them little tricks or tips that will help them along. Luigi the singer, however, is not suffering from nerves – he simply has weak muscles that are unable to support his voice, and he tires easily. Mr. Bocelli is like the brain trainer who targets the reasons behind a problem to solve the problem itself.
I hope these examples have helped to create a distinction in your mind between brain training and tutoring. Both are useful, but they function in different ways. It’s important to know the difference, because what we have found is that most children benefit from brain training – whether they are struggling or not – but that kids who really need brain training do not benefit from tutoring.