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To Improve Your Brain, Exercise Your Body

January 15, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

exercise

Sitting in front of a computer screen to play brain games is not the best way to enhance or maintain your cognitive abilities. First of all it doesn’t really work. And second, it involves sitting. Standing is only marginally better. (And playing brain games on a portable electronic device while walking is just an accident waiting to happen.)

As John Medina writes in Brain Rules:

The brain appears to be designed to (1) solve problems (2) related to surviving (3) in an unstable outdoor environment, and (4) to do so in nearly constant motion.

The links between physical exercise and brain health have been getting a lot of attention lately. Here are summaries of some of the research with links to the articles (click on the titles). The last two of these studies were included in my post last fall on Five Ways to Improve Your Brain; the first three are more recent.

Get Moving

A neuroscientist (Wendy A. Suzuki) says there are powerful benefits to exercise that are rarely discussed.

When I was about to turn 40, I started working out regularly after years of inactivity. As I sweated my way through cardio, weights, and dance classes, I noticed that exercise wasn’t just changing my body. It was also profoundly transforming my brain—for the better.

The immediate effects of exercise on my mood and thought process proved to be a powerful motivational tool. And as a neuroscientist and workout devotee, I’ve come to believe that these neurological benefits could have profound implications for how we live, learn and age as a society.

  • Exercise combats stress.
  • Increased levels of physical exercise can result in improved memory
  • Exercise improves our ability to shift and focus attention.
  • Exercise could help students better absorb everything from history lessons to chemistry experiments–and they’d be happier too.
  • Exercise could make students more imaginative at school and adults more creative at work.
  • The longer and more regularly you exercise through your life, the lower your chances are of suffering from cognitive decline and dementia as you age.
Do… build your body

We often make a distinction between brains and brawn. In fact, getting in shape is one of the surest ways to build your mind. Physical activity not only establishes a better blood flow to the brain; it also triggers a surge of proteins such as “nerve growth factor” that can help stimulate the growth and maintenance of neural connections in the brain.

The benefits seem to stretch from cradle to grave: children who walk to school get better grades, while taking a leisurely stroll seemed to boost pensioner’s concentration and memory. What’s more, a wide variety of exercises can help, from gentle aerobic exercise to weight training and body building; just choose a training regime that suits your current fitness.

Study suggests physical activity makes it easier for the brain to change

Learning, memory, and brain repair depend on the ability of our neurons to change with experience. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on December 7 have evidence from a small study in people that exercise may enhance this essential plasticity of the adult brain.

The findings focused on the visual cortex come as hopeful news for people with conditions including amblyopia (sometimes called lazy eye), traumatic brain injury, and more, the researchers say.

“We provide the first demonstration that moderate levels of physical activity enhance neuroplasticity in the visual cortex of adult humans,” says Claudia Lunghi of the University of Pisa in Italy.

“By showing that moderate levels of physical activity can boost the plastic potential of the adult visual cortex, our results pave the way to the development of non-invasive therapeutic strategies exploiting the intrinsic brain plasticity in adult subjects,” she adds.

While further study is needed, the researchers think that this effect may result from a decrease with exercise in an inhibitory neurotransmitter called GABA. As concentrations of this inhibitory nerve messenger decline, the brain becomes more responsive.

Regardless of the mechanism, the findings suggest that exercise plays an important role in brain health and recovery. They come as especially good news for people with amblyopia, which is generally considered to be untreatable in adults.

“Our study suggests that physical activity, which is also beneficial for the general health of the patient, could be used to increase the efficiency of the treatment in adult patients,” Lunghi says.

Lifting weights, twice a week, may aid the brain

Most studies of exercise and brain health have focused on the effects of running, walking or other aerobic activities. A few encouraging past studies have suggested that regular, moderate aerobic exercise such as walking may slow the progression of white matter lesions in older people.

But Teresa Liu-Ambrose, a professor of physical therapy and director of the Aging, Mobility, and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, wondered whether other types of exercise would likewise be beneficial for white matter. In particular, she was interested in weight training, because weight training strengthens and builds muscles.

After a year-long study, women aged 65-75 who had lifted weights twice per week displayed significantly less shrinkage and tattering of their white matter than the other women. Their lesions had grown and multiplied somewhat, but not nearly as much. They also walked more quickly and smoothly than the women in the other two groups.

Note that the result was only achieved in the group who lifted weights twice per week, not in a group who lifted only once a week.

Regular exercise changes the brain to improve memory, thinking skills

In a study done at the University of British Columbia, researchers found that regular aerobic exercise, the kind that gets your heart and your sweat glands pumping, appears to boost the size of the hippocampus, the brain area involved in verbal memory and learning. Resistance training, balance and muscle toning exercises did not have the same results.

Many studies have suggested that the parts of the brain that control thinking and memory (the prefrontal cortex and medial temporal cortex) have greater volume in people who exercise versus people who don’t. “Even more exciting is the finding that engaging in a program of regular exercise of moderate intensity over six months or a year is associated with an increase in the volume of selected brain regions,” says Dr. Scott McGinnis, a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School.

How much exercise is required? The study participants walked briskly for one hour, twice a week. That’s 120 minutes of moderate intensity exercise a week. Standard recommendations advise half an hour of moderate physical activity most days of the week, or 150 minutes a week. If that seems daunting, start with a few minutes a day, and increase the amount you exercise by five or 10 minutes every week until you reach your goal.

If you don’t want to walk, consider other moderate-intensity exercises, such as swimming, stair climbing, tennis, squash, or dancing. Don’t forget that household activities can count as well, such as intense floor mopping, raking leaves, or anything that gets your heart pumping so much that you break out in a light sweat.

Filed Under: Brain, Brain & Mind Roundup, Habit, Living, Memory, Mind Tagged With: Brain, Cognition, Memory, Mind, Physical exercise

Be Good to Your Brain

December 4, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

brain workoutWant to stay mentally sharp? There are all kinds of things you can do: listen to music, read a book, gaze at a building, help someone out, get involved in a hobby.

These activities not only make you feel good, they also happen to be very good for your brain in a variety of different ways.

Click on the links to read the full articles.

Listening to music benefits the brain in 8 surprising ways.

Playing a musical instrument benefits your brain even more by giving it an excellent “full-body” workout.

Looking at buildings designed for contemplation may produce the same health benefits provided by meditation—and with less effort.

Dancing, getting some hobbies, and reading (among other things) all help to keep your brain young.

Speaking of reading, ditching the e-reader once in a while and reading an actual book can increase your comprehension, make you more empathetic, and even improve your sleep.

No matter how old you are, learning a new language improves gray matter density and white matter integrity.

Finally, giving really is better than receiving—for you and for your brain.

Be good to your brain and your brain will continue being good to you!

Filed Under: Brain, Brain & Mind Roundup, Learning, Living, Memory, Mind Tagged With: Architecture, Brain, Language, Mental Sharpness, Mind, Music, Reading, Writing

How Free Is Your Will?

September 4, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Chocolate-Cake

Here are links to a few articles and videos by some of my favorite scientists, researchers, and writers who focus on the brain—specifically on the part of the brain we’re not aware of but which so strongly affects every aspect of our lives.

Of course, much of what is being discovered about how the brain actually works is revolutionary in and of itself. But the access we have to it is no less revolutionary. An internet connection is all it takes to read, watch, or listen to the latest developments. By now, I take that access for granted. But that doesn’t stop me from appreciating it.

Click on the titles to get to the articles.

The Possibilian

David Eagleman, author of Incognito

The brain is a remarkably capable chronometer for most purposes. It can track seconds, minutes, days, and weeks, set off alarms in the morning, at bedtime, on birthdays and anniversaries. Timing is so essential to our survival that it may be the most finely tuned of our senses. 

 When I came across Incognito on a bookstore shelf, I picked it up because I had read (and torn out) this article from The New Yorker. There’s a local connection, too. Eagleman attended Albuquerque Academy, which is only a few minutes away from where I live. So far, he’s the only scientist I’m aware of who uses the terms alien subroutines and zombie systems to describe our unconscious processes.

How Your Mind Works

Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

Any video with Daniel Kahneman in it is worth watching. Thinking, Fast and Slow can be a bit of a slog to get through in places (at least if you’re mathematically challenged like I am). But Kahneman’s spoken explanations are disarmingly clear and straightforward.

How Free Is Your Will?

Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph LeDoux

Philosophers have debated for years whether we deliberately make each of the many decisions we make every day, or if our brain does it for us, on autopilot. Neuroscientists have shown, for example, that neurons in the brain initiate our response to various stimuli milliseconds before we’re even aware that we’re taking such an action.

This link includes the video conversation between Gazzaniga and LeDoux along with the song “How Free Is Your Will?” performed by Le Doux’s band The Amygdaloids. The concept of a rock band composed of neuroscientists is mildly mind-bending. But they’re not bad.

Gut Feeling: How Intestinal Bacteria Could Manipulate Your Brain

David DiSalvo, author of What Makes Your Brain Happy, and Why You Should Do the Opposite

We’ve all heard about the bacterial universe within our bodies, but what’s less well known is just how vast this universe is in comparison to the rest of us: bacteria outnumber all of the cells in our body 100 to 1. And just like us, certain bacteria have a taste for certain nutrients, and they’ve developed ways of influencing their hosts to deliver more of their preferred vittles to the dinner table.

Yes, DiSalvo says, your brain may have made you eat that huge piece of chocolate cake. But apparently “the nervous system superhighway that runs from the digestive system all the way to the base of the brain” is a two-way street. What you eat can influence your brain in constructive–or non-constructive–ways.

The Invisible Gorilla (featuring Daniel Simons)

If you haven’t seen this one yet, just watch it.

Filed Under: Brain, Brain & Mind Roundup, Consciousness, Living, Mind, Unconscious Tagged With: Brain, Consciousness, Free will, Mind, Neuroscience, Selective Attention, Time, Unconscious

What’s the Link between Creativity and Mental Illness?

August 14, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

English: Portrait of Virginia Woolf

Do the words tortured and genius go hand-in-hand? If you’re highly creative does that mean you’re more susceptible to mental illness? Do you, in fact, need to have a mental illness in order to be creative?

The link between creativity and mental illness has been a subject of discussion and speculation at least since Aristotle suggested there was one. More recently, it has been the subject of much scientific study. The topic is in the limelight once again due to Robin Williams’ suicide.

This edition of Brain & Mind Roundup (#5)  links to four articles by, or citing the work of, Nancy Andreasen and Shelly Cooper, two researchers who study creativity and who have published books on creativity and the brain.

Click on the titles to read the full articles.

Secrets of the Creative Brain

Nancy Andreasen (The Atlantic)

Andreasen is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who began exploring the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness in the 1960s when she studied a group of writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She writes:

I have spent much of my career focusing on the neuroscience of mental illness, but in recent decades I’ve also focused on what we might call the science of genius, trying to discern what combination of elements tends to produce particularly creative brains. What, in short, is the essence of creativity? Over the course of my life, I’ve kept coming back to two more-specific questions: What differences in nature and nurture can explain why some people suffer from mental illness and some do not? And why are so many of the world’s most creative minds among the most afflicted? 

The Relationship between Creativity and Mental Illness

At brainpickings, Maria Popova provides a beautiful and thoughtful presentation of Nancy Andreason’s book The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius. Popova says:

One of the most interesting chapters in the book deals with the correlation between creativity and mental illness, bringing scientific rigor to such classic anecdotal examples as those evidenced in Van Gogh’s letters or Sylvia Plath’s journals or Leo Tolstoy’s diary of depression or Virginia Woolf’s suicide note. Having long opposed the toxic “tortured genius” myth of creativity, I was instantly intrigued by Andreasen’s inquiry, the backdrop of which she paints elegantly:

Did mental illness facilitate [these creators’] unique abilities, whether it be to play a concerto or to perceive a novel mathematical relationship? Or did mental illness impair their creativity after its initial meteoric burst in their twenties? Or is the relationship more complex than a simple one of cause and effect, in either direction?

And this is where the monumental importance of her study shines: What Andreasen found wasn’t confirmation for the “tortured genius” myth — the idea that a great artist must have some dark, tragic pathology in order to create — but quite the opposite: these women and men had become successful writers not because of their tortuous mental health but despite it.

The Real Link Between Creativity and Mental Illness

Scott Barry Kaufman (SciAm)

Scott Barry Kaufman, Scientific Director of The Imagination Institute and a researcher in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, investigates the measurement and development of imagination. He questions Andreason’s findings and looks deeper, writing:

The oft-cited studies by Kay Redfield Jamison, Nancy Andreasen, and Arnold Ludwig showing a link between mental illness and creativity have been criticized on the grounds that they involve small, highly specialized samples with weak and inconsistent methodologies and a strong dependence on subjective and anecdotal accounts.

Is there any germ of truth to the link between creativity and mental illness? The latest research suggests there is something to the link, but the truth is much more interesting.

It seems that the key to creative cognition is opening up the flood gates and letting in as much information as possible. Because you never know: sometimes the most bizarre associations can turn into the most productively creative ideas. Indeed, Shelley Carson and her colleagues found that the most eminent creative achievers among a sample of Harvard undergrads were seven times more likely to have reduced latent inhibition.

Latent inhibition is a filtering mechanism that we share with other animals, and it is tied to the neurotransmitter dopamine. A reduced latent inhibition allows us to treat something as novel, no matter how may times we’ve seen it before and tagged it as irrelevant. Prior research shows a link  between reduced latent inhibition and schizophrenia.

Creativity and Psychopathology: A Shared Vulnerability Model

In this paper, Shelly Carson, Harvard researcher on creativity, psychopathology, and resilience, and author of The Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life, reviews “the empirical evidence for an elevated risk of three disorders in creative individuals: mood disorders, schizospectrum disorders, and alcoholism.”

While creativity is considered a positive personal trait, highly creative individuals have demonstrated elevated risk for certain forms of psychopathology. [In] this paper I argue that a model of shared vulnerability explains the relationship between creativity and psychopathology. This model, supported by recent findings from neuroscience and molecular genetics, suggests that biological determinants that confer risk for psychopathology interact with protective cognitive factors to enhance creative ideation.

Carson

Elements of shared vulnerability include cognitive disinhibition (which allows increased stimuli into conscious awareness), an attentional style that is driven by novelty-salience, and neural hyperconnectivity that may increase associations among disparate stimuli. These vulnerabilities interact with superior meta-cognitive protective factors, such as high IQ, working memory capacity, and cognitive flexibility, to produce an enlarged body of stimuli that is available in conscious awareness to be manipulated and combined to form novel and original ideas.

~ ~ ~

Reading and writing about this topic inevitably makes me think of my partner, who died nearly 10 years ago. He had a very high IQ, good working memory, and great cognitive flexibility, all of which seem to have mitigated the vulnerability factors, which were also present. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which wreaked some havoc in his early and mid-life before it was treated. At times, he was more than a little eccentric, with maybe a touch of mad genius about him. (Always interesting, that’s for sure!)

He was extremely creative, prolifically so, in a variety of areas–especially writing, art, and music–and he continued to be creative while he was on medication, which was very effective for him. So clearly his bipolar bent, if you will, didn’t cause him to be creative. But there was definitely a link there. Those areas of shared vulnerability were significantly moderated by medication, but also by his own awareness and self-monitoring. And maybe that’s something to take away from this, too. Self-awareness and self-monitoring are great tools for keeping us grounded even in the midst of our wildest flights of imagination.

Filed Under: Brain, Brain & Mind Roundup, Creating, Living, Mind Tagged With: Creativity, Creativity and Mental Illness, Creativity and the Brain

Brain & Mind Roundup #4

July 20, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Day 283 / 365 - Skills

Links to current stories related to the brain and the mind. Click on the titles to read the full stories.

Talent vs. Practice: Why Are We Still Debating This?

Scott Barry Kaufman (SciAm)

Practice does not make perfect. The now-famous 10,000-hour rule was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. But subsequent studies have debunked the idea that the number of hours you put into practicing a skill is a better predictor of your eventual success than the amount of talent you start out with. But it isn’t an either/or situation, either.

Kaufman says:

All traits, including the ability to deliberately practice, involve a mix of nature and nurture. In fact, there is no such thing as innate talent. That’s a myth that is constantly perpetuated, despite the fact that most psychologists recognize that all skills require practice and support for their development– even though there are certainly genetic influences (which influence our attention and even our passions).

Like All Animals, We Need Stress. Just Not Too Much

Richard Harris (WLRN Miami FL)

Stress can lead you to an early grave, but stress can also save your life. In fact, we can’t live without it. Stress also helps us pay attention and remember things. And a life without any kind of stress would actually be boring.

We tend to assume that modern life provides us with more stress than our ancestors had to deal with, but that’s just another assumption (like the idea that all stress is bad for us).

It’s not like stress is mounting up in our modern age—it’s just [that] the flavor of it is changing. –David Linden, professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and author of  The Compass of Pleasure.

And that flavor isn’t changing as much as you might think [Harris says]. Our poll finds that over the past year, the major causes of stress in Americans are still those age-old troubles: illness, disease and the death of a loved one.

Study Cracks How Brain Processes Emotion

(Science Daily)

A Columbia University study conducted by Junichi Chikazoe, Daniel H. Lee, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, and Adam K. Anderson concludes:

Although feelings are personal and subjective, the human brain turns them into a standard code that objectively represents emotions across different senses, situations and even people.

Despite how personal our feelings feel, the evidence suggests our brains use a standard code to speak the same emotional language.

If you and I derive similar pleasure from sipping a fine wine or watching the sun set, our results suggest it is because we share similar fine-grained patterns of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex.

Well, maybe someone will come up with a dating service that includes neurological testing to determine whether both prospective partners demonstrate “similar fine-grained patterns of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex” when enjoying the same activities or eating the same kind of food.

Filed Under: Brain, Brain & Mind Roundup, Living, Mind Tagged With: Brain, Emotion, Mind, Practice, Stress, Talent, Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule

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