Dr Adam's Blog

An article from the Guardian Newspaper on the 24 of Feb 09 quoted Susan Greenfield professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, as saying that Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Bebo are “Rotting our Brains”.

In a presentation to the House of Lords she was quoted as saying, “social networking sites are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity".

Before we go any further there is no hard science behind any of her claims as social networking sites have not been around long enough to measure their impact. However it is important to have the debate.

In particular the Prof was concerned about their impact on children. She says "If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales. Perhaps when in the real world such responses are not immediately forthcoming, we will see such behaviours and call them attention-deficit disorder. It might be helpful to investigate whether the near total submersion of our culture in screen technologies over the last decade might in some way be linked to the threefold increase over this period in prescriptions for methylphenidate, the drug prescribed for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Greenfield also warned there was a risk of loss of empathy as children read novels less. "Unlike the game to rescue the princess, where the goal is to feel rewarded, the aim of reading a book is, after all, to find out more about the princess herself."

Before we climb on her band wagon we have to make sure that we are not just falling into the “kids of today”, style view of generational decline. When the clock was developed, society predicted that people would no longer enjoy the moment, the printing press was touted as making us all intellectually lazy, and finally the telephone was going to make us all anti-social. With any social change we often predict that everything is going to hell in a hand basket.

Having saying that networking sites don’t get off the hook that easily and we need to be aware of some of their dangers.

Common concerns are:

1.    Online experiences are superficial and do not lead to cognitive development.

2.    Instant response and high accessibility will lead to poor attention spans and difficulty interacting with people face to face. Also they feed a preference for immediacy.

3.    Reduced social intelligence through poor awareness of social cues, inability to read facial expressions and a lack of empathy for other people.

4.    Long screen time is directly correlated with obesity and metabolic disease in both adults and children.

Even though these concerns seem to make logical sense it is only point 4 that has some hard research behind it. Having said that previous research has proven that days of constant interruption and distractions leads to poor attention control and focus. Therefore the big question is, am I using these sites as a tool or are they running my life.

So what is the verdict? Well if we want hard facts the only thing is we can say is watch this space, to see what new research comes up with.

However intuitively we need to be discerning about how much time we spend on these. Social networking sites can be great to develop relationships and they can even be used as a business tool. But they can also take over and reduce our productivity.

Are you a Twit?

Another player in the market is Twitter (Twitter.com). Twitters tag line is “What are you doing?”. In a nut shell you update your profile (under 140 characters) so that people can find out what you are doing at any moment, from “Mowing the lawn” to “Having coffee”. The number of people using Twitter is growing at 1,382 percent.

The question is do people really need that information?

Milwaukee Bucks (basketball) forward Charlie Villanueva got a severe talking-to from his coach when he learned that Villanueva posted a message to his Twitter feed — a “tweet” — from his mobile phone during halftime while he was playing Boston.

Some celebrities are using it too, you can find out what Brittany Spears is doing with her time, mmmm maybe not the best choice, as well as Hiliary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Is Twitter keeping us connected or is it unnecessarily distracting us?

With any tool we have to be discerning about the impact it has on our lives and whether it is adding to our quality of life or diminishing it.

Taken from
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/technology/17distracted.html?th&emc=th

Driven to Distraction
SAN FRANCISCO — On the day of the collision last month, visibility was good. The sidewalk was not under repair. As she walked, Tiffany Briggs, 25, was talking to her grandmother on her cellphone, lost in conversation.
Phones aren't just distracting drivers; they make pedestrians inattentive too.
“I ran into a truck,” Ms. Briggs said.
It was parked in a driveway.
Distracted driving has gained much attention lately because of the inflated crash risk posed by drivers using cellphones to talk and text.
But there is another growing problem caused by lower-stakes multitasking — distracted walking — which combines a pedestrian, an electronic device and an unseen crack in the sidewalk, the pole of a stop sign, a toy left on the living room floor or a parked (or sometimes moving) car.
The era of the mobile gadget is making mobility that much more perilous, particularly on crowded streets and in downtown areas where multiple multitaskers veer and swerve and walk to the beat of their own devices.
Most times, the mishaps for a distracted walker are minor, like the lightly dinged head and broken fingernail that Ms. Briggs suffered, a jammed digit or a sprained ankle, and, the befallen say, a nasty case of hurt pride. Of course, the injuries can sometimes be serious — and they are on the rise.
Slightly more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms in 2008 because they got distracted and tripped, fell or ran into something while using a cellphone to talk or text. That was twice the number from 2007, which had nearly doubled from 2006, according to a study conducted by Ohio State University, which says it is the first to estimate such accidents.
“It’s the tip of the iceberg,” said Jack L. Nasar, a professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State, noting that the number of mishaps is probably much higher considering that most of the injuries are not severe enough to require a hospital visit. What is more, he said, texting is rising sharply and devices like the iPhone have thousands of new, engaging applications to preoccupy phone users.
Mr. Nasar supervised the statistical analysis, which was done by Derek Troyer, one of his graduate students. He looked at records of emergency room visits compiled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Examples of such visits include a 16-year-old boy who walked into a telephone pole while texting and suffered a concussion; a 28-year-old man who tripped and fractured a finger on the hand gripping his cellphone; and a 68-year-old man who fell off the porch while talking on a cellphone, spraining a thumb and an ankle and causing dizziness.

Young people injured themselves more often. About half the visits Mr. Troyer studied were by people under 30, and a quarter were 16 to 20 years old. But more than a quarter of those injured were 41 to 60 years old.
Pedestrians, like drivers, have long been distracted by myriad tasks, like snacking or reading on the go. But the constant interaction with electronic devices has made single-tasking seem boring or even unproductive.
Cognitive psychologists, neurologists and other researchers are beginning to study the impact of constant multitasking, whether behind a desk or the wheel or on foot. It might stand to reason that someone looking at a phone to read a message would misstep, but the researchers are finding that just talking on a phone takes its own considerable toll on cognition and awareness.
Sometimes, pedestrians using their phones do not notice objects or people that are right in front of them — even a clown riding a unicycle. That was the finding of a recent study at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., by a psychology professor, Ira Hyman, and his students.
One of the students dressed as a clown and unicycled around a central square on campus. About half the people walking past by themselves said they had seen the clown, and the number was slightly higher for people walking in pairs. But only 25 percent of people talking on a cellphone said they had, Mr. Hyman said.
He said the term commonly applied to such preoccupation is “inattention blindness,” meaning a person can be looking at an object but fail to register it or process what it is.
Particularly fascinating, Mr. Hyman said, is that people walking in pairs were more than twice as likely to see the clown as were people talking on a cellphone, suggesting that the act of simply having a conversation is not the cause of inattention blindness.
One possible explanation is that a cellphone conversation taxes not just auditory resources in the brain but also visual functions, said Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. That combination, he said, prompts the listener to, for example, create visual imagery related to the conversation in a way that overrides or obscures the processing of real images.
By comparison, walking and chewing gum (that age-old measure of pedestrian skill at multitasking) is a snap.
“Walking and chewing are repetitive, well-practiced tasks that become automatic,” Dr. Gazzaley said. “They don’t compete for resources like texting and walking.”
Further, he said, the cellphone gives people a constant opportunity to pursue goals that feel more important than walking down the street.
“An animal would never walk into a pole,” he said, noting survival instincts would trump other priorities.

For Shalamar Jones, 19, the priority was keeping in touch with her boyfriend. Last month while she was Christmas shopping in a mall near San Francisco, she was texting him when — bam! — she walked into the window of a New York & Company store, thinking it was a door.
“I thought it was open,” she said, noting that no harm was done. “I just started laughing at myself.”
The worst part is the humiliation, said Christopher Black, 20, an art student at San Francisco State University who 18 months ago had his own pratfall.
At the time, Mr. Black said, the sidewalks were packed with pedestrians. So he decided he could move faster if he walked in the street, keeping close to the parked cars. The trouble is he was also texting — with a woman he was flirting with.
He unwittingly started to veer into the road, prompting an oncoming car to honk. He said he instinctively jumped toward the sidewalk but, in the process, forgot about the line of parked cars.
“I splayed against the side of the car, and the phone hit the ground,” he said. He and his phone were uninjured, except for his pride. “It was pretty significantly embarrassing.”

Dr Ad's comment
Just another study that shows being Present and focused helps our brain be more productive and helps us get better performance.

Taken from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/opinion/17kristof.html?th&emc=th

Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex and Giving

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 16, 2010

Want to be happier in 2010? Then try this simple experiment, inspired by recent scholarship in psychology and neurology. Which person would you rather be:

Richard is an ambitious 36-year-old white commodities trader in Florida. He’s healthy and drop-dead handsome, lives alone in a house with a pool, and has worked his way through a series of gorgeous women. Richard’s job is stressful, but he spent Christmas in Tahiti. Unencumbered, he also has time to indulge such passions as reading (right now he’s finishing a book called “Half the Sky”), marathon running and writing poetry. In the last few days, he has been composing an elegy about the Haiti earthquake.

Lorna is a 64-year-old black woman in Boston. She’s overweight and unattractive, even after a recent nose job. Lorna is on regular dialysis, but that doesn’t impede her active social life or babysitting her grandchildren. A retired school assistant, she is close to her 67-year-old husband and is much respected in her church for directing the music committee and the semiannual blood drive. Lorna believes in tithing (giving 10 percent of her income to charity or the church) and in the last few days has organized a church drive to raise $10,000 for earthquake relief in Haiti.

I adapted those examples from ones that Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, develops in his fascinating book, “The Happiness Hypothesis.” His point is that while most of us might prefer to trade places with Richard, Lorna is probably happier.

Men are no happier than women, and people in sunny areas no happier than people in chillier climates. The evidence on health is complex, but even chronic health problems (like those requiring dialysis) may have surprisingly little long-term effect on happiness, because we adjust to them. Beautiful people aren’t happier than ugly people, although cosmetic surgery does seem to leave patients feeling brighter. Whites are happier than blacks, but only very slightly. And young people are actually a bit less happy than older folks, at least up to age 65.

Lorna has a few advantages over Richard. She has less stress and is respected by her peers — factors that make us feel good. Happiness is tied to volunteering and to giving blood, and people with religious faith tend to be happier than those without. A solid marriage is linked to happiness, as is participation in social networks. And one study found that people who focus on achieving wealth and career advancement are less happy than those who focus on good works, religion or spirituality, or friends and family.

“Human beings are in some ways like bees,” Professor Haidt said. “We evolved to live in intensely social groups, and we don’t do as well when freed from hives.”

Happiness is, of course, a complex concept and difficult to measure, and John Stuart Mill had a point when he suggested: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”

But in any case, nobility can lead to happiness. Professor Haidt notes that one thing that can make a lasting difference to your contentment is to work with others on a cause larger than yourself.

I see that all the time. I interview people who were busy but reluctantly undertook some good cause because (sigh!) it was the right thing to do. Then they found that this “sacrifice” became a huge source of fulfillment and satisfaction.

Brain scans by neuroscientists confirm that altruism carries its own rewards. A team including Dr. Jorge Moll of the National Institutes of Health found that when a research subject was encouraged to think of giving money to a charity, parts of the brain lit up that are normally associated with selfish pleasures like eating or sex.

The implication is that we are hard-wired to be altruistic. To put it another way, it’s difficult for humans to be truly selfless, for generosity feels so good.

“The most selfish thing you can do is to help other people,” says Brian Mullaney, co-founder of Smile Train, which helps tens of thousands of children each year who are born with cleft lips and cleft palates. Mr. Mullaney was a successful advertising executive, driving a Porsche and taking dates to the Four Seasons, when he felt something was missing and began volunteering for good causes. He ended up leaving the business world to help kids smile again — and all that makes him smile, too.

So at a time of vast needs, from Haiti to our own cities, here’s a nice opportunity for symbiosis: so many afflicted people, and so much benefit to us if we try to help them. Let’s remember that while charity has a mixed record helping others, it has an almost perfect record of helping ourselves. Helping others may be as primal a human pleasure as food or sex.

Dr Ad's thought
Makes you think how does this affect your culture at work?  I am sure the fallout would be greater engagement, culture and work place performance.By focusing and engaging with others at work we increase our level of happiness!!

Taken From the New York Times

By BENEDICT CAREY

Published: October 5, 2009

In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”

Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.

In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.

When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

“There’s more research to be done on the theory,” said Michael Inzlicht, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, because it may be that nervousness, not a search for meaning, leads to heightened vigilance. But he added that the new theory was “plausible, and it certainly affirms my own meaning system; I think they’re onto something.”

In the most recent paper, published last month, Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The doctor of the title has to make a house call on a boy with a terrible toothache. He makes the journey and finds that the boy has no teeth at all. The horses who have pulled his carriage begin to act up; the boy’s family becomes annoyed; then the doctor discovers the boy has teeth after all. And so on. The story is urgent, vivid and nonsensical — Kafkaesque.

After the story, the students studied a series of 45 strings of 6 to 9 letters, like “X, M, X, R, T, V.” They later took a test on the letter strings, choosing those they thought they had seen before from a list of 60 such strings. In fact the letters were related, in a very subtle way, with some more likely to appear before or after others.

The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.

But perform they did. They chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story, a coherent one.

“The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”

Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex spikes significantly. The more activation is recorded, the greater the motivation or ability to seek and correct errors in the real world, a recent study suggests. “The idea that we may be able to increase that motivation,” said Dr. Inzlicht, a co-author, “is very much worth investigating.”

Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.

Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.

The following was taken from a Harvard Business Review article!

Do you have trouble concentrating? Find yourself easily distracted? Before getting in a tizzy that you have attention deficit disorder or something worse, check your stress level. New research shows that stress interferes with attention. The good news is that easing stress reverses these changes.

In a report in the January 20, 2009 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Conor Liston and his colleagues at Cornell's Weill Medical College and The Rockefeller University show that stress blunts the growth and connections of nerve cells in part of the brain that helps keep you focused. The researchers recruited 20 medical students. Each had his or her brain scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while taking a test that gauges the ability to shift attention from one task to another. Think of it as a multitasking test. The students underwent the scan just before taking their licensing exams--a stressful event--and a month later, after a vacation.

Those who were most stressed out by the prospect of taking the licensing exam were the least efficient at shifting their attention back and forth between tasks, the researchers reported. The greater the perception of stress, the poorer the attention to the task. On the fMRI scans, the attention-shifting task lit up several brain regions involved in attention and focus, including the prefrontal cortex. Stress dimmed the connections between these regions. Interestingly, a month of post-exam vacation reversed the disconnects.

Attention is like a Ming vase--highly prized, yet fragile and easily broken.

In a New York Times op-ed piece, columnist David Brooks wrote this gem about attention:

Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses. If forced to choose, we would all rather our children be poor with self-control than rich without it.

Some people are born with this power. Some learn to cultivate it. Others struggle constantly to focus. For many of us, attention is continually shattered by the small hammers of email, IM, a BlackBerry, blogs, YouTube, the Drudge Report, and countless others. Chronic stress helps them knock harder.

Although reducing stress seems to be an obvious solution to improving attention, there's no evidence that popular techniques like meditation, the relaxation response, and others will help you concentrate better. They may, but few studies have tackled this connection.

A proactive approach is unplugging yourself from distractions. A study by Microsoft's Eric Horvitz and Shamsi T. Iqbal of the University of Illinois showed that it took office workers 10-15 minutes to return to an interrupted task after responding to a distraction like an instant message. Their attention wandered to previous unreturned emails, IMs, blog browsing, Web site surfing, checking RSS feeds, and social networking before returning to the task at hand.

After having spent one too many long days at work with little to show for it, I started my own small distraction-reduction plan. Instead of keeping Outlook and my RSS feeds open all day, I now fire them up every couple hours, do what needs to be done, and close them again. It feels like it's working, and I feel a bit less stressed. If Dr. Liston and his gang are right, it could be the start of a feedback loop that will help me harness "the ultimate individual power."

What are you doing to keep office distractions to a minimum?

Posted by Dr Adam Fraser
Taken from http://www.naturalnews.com/025616.html

If you want to stay mentally sharp all your life and haven mental health, new research shows the time to intervene is now. Alzheimer's disease and dementia have complex causes that involve nutritional neglect as well as genetic risk factors and predisposition. Genetic risk factors for cognitive decline may remain dormant and never get switched on unless deficiencies in key nutrients are present. This suggests that nutritional status throughout the lifetime determines cognitive outcome. This is very good news because it means that people willing to make good nutrition a priority may not need to experience cognitive decline and the diseases that go with it.

Study spotlights key nutrients needed to prevent brain damage and improve performance

The importance of early nutritional intervention and prevention of deficits in critical brain nutrients was the finding of researchers at the Center for Cellular Neurobiology and Neurodegenerative Research at the University of Massachusetts. Their study, reported in the January edition of Nutrition Research, hypothesized that a combination of nutritional additives may be able to provide neuro-protection.

They used alpha-lipoic acid, acetyl L-carnitine, glycophosphocholine, DHA, and phosphatidylserine to reduce reactive oxygen species in normal mice by 57%, and prevent the increase in reactive oxygen species normally observed in mice eating a vitamin-free, iron-enriched, oxidative-challenged diet. They demonstrated that supplementing with these nutrients prevented the marked cognitive decline otherwise observed in normal mice maintained on this challenging diet.

The results of this study spotlight what a difference eating a healthy diet and supplementing can make. They also vividly portray the destructive force of a diet lacking in nutrients.

Short-term memory is improved by a supplement regimen

In another study done at the University of Toronto, researchers demonstrated that old dogs can be taught new tricks. Their purpose was to examine whether commercially available dietary supplements thought to be protective of neural tissue could improve mental function in aged beagles. The supplements they studied were phosphatidylserine, Ginko biloba, vitamin E and pyridoxine (a B6 vitamin). As reported in the April, 2008 Canadian Veterinary Journal, baseline data was obtained for nine beagles that were then grouped in a crossover design. One group received the supplements and the other group served as a control, with these conditions reversed for the second phase of the study.

The researchers discovered that performance accuracy on neuropsychological tests of short-term, visual-spatial memory was significantly improved in the supplemented dogs compared with control dogs, and the effect was long lasting. The fact that both groups of dogs could be powered up with the supplements helps make these results particularly conclusive.

These super nutrients for the brain are easily obtainable

Many relatively young and healthy people have digestive systems that work well and are populated by lots of friendly bacteria. These people usually have no problem assimilating an abundance of nutrients from diets consisting of whole foods. But as the bloom of youth is left behind, it becomes more difficult to assure optimal nutrition through food alone.

Production of pancreatic enzymes slows as people age, leaving a lower level of enzymes available to help break down foods for digestion. Intestinal bacteria can be compromised by use of antibiotics, pesticides in food, chlorine in drinking water, and general environmental pollution. A lowered intestinal population means less digestion and assimilation of food. Stress is another factor influencing how well a person is able to digest and assimilate food.

The health of a person's digestive system along with his age is a determinant of how well even the best of food is digested. It is also a criterion for deciding whether to depend completely on the diet for good nutrition or to make the decision to use supplements. Taking supplements of these nutrients will allow assurance that a quantified amount is consumed. Supplements of these nutrients are readily available, but in come cases can be costly. Whether the decision is to obtain nutrients exclusively from diet or to use supplements, it is important to understand what these nutrients do and from what foods they can be obtained.

Phosphatidylserine leads the pack of compounds beneficial to the brain

Used in both studies because of its known effects on the brain, phosphatidylserine (PS) is a member of a class of chemical compounds known as phospholipids. It is present in the inner leaflet of every cell in the body, but the largest amounts are found in brain cells, where it is responsible for keeping cell membranes fluid, flexible, and ready to process essential nutrients. PS has been implicated in a myriad of membrane-related functions.

As a cofactor for a variety of enzymes, PS is thought to be important in cell excitability and communication. It has been shown to regulate a variety of neuroendocrine responses that include the release of acetylcholine, dopamine and noradrenaline. PS has been demonstrated to influence tissue responses to inflammation, and has the potential to act as an effective antioxidant, especially in response to iron-mediated oxidation.

Signs of reduced PS levels can appear as early as the mid 30s. When PS levels begin to decrease, so do the abilities to learn, remember, and stay mentally alert. Depression may also develop as a result of PS insufficiency. Eating foods rich in PS or taking it in supplemental form may raise the levels in the brain and prevent or even reverse age-related declines in brain function. Numerous double-blind studies have suggested that PS can be used as an effective treatment for Alzheimer's disease and dementia

Parris Kidd, Ph.D., the authority on PS who has written several definitive books about the compound, recommends intake of 300 mg of PS a day. The best dietary source for PS is fatty fish such as mackerel. A quarter pound serving of mackerel will provide about 450 mg of PS. Organ meats are another source, and fermented soybeans contain PS. It is also found in small amounts in some leafy greens.

Alpha-lipoic and acetyl L-carnitine dubbed "fountain of youth" for the brain

A combination of alpha-lipoic acid (LA) and acetyl L-carnitine (ALC) made research headlines recently when it was given to old lab rats that then began acting like young lab rats. In the words of the lead researcher, they "got up to do the Macarena". This definitive study underscored the impact of these key nutrients on the brain.

LA and ALC work in the mitochondria of the cells, where energy is generated by burning food in the presence of oxygen. When cells are fully oxygenated they have a higher level of energy. But this firing process subjects the mitochondria to high levels of free radical damage. As people age, their mitochondria become so damaged by free radicals that they lose their ability to function efficiently, and the result is less energy in the cells of the brain and body resulting in diminished activity. Adding the LA/ALC combo helps prevent oxidative damage and helps restore mitochondrial decay.

Supplementing with LAL/ALC has also been shown to improve spatial and temporal memory by either masking or reversing metabolic problems caused by cellular aging and oxidative stress. Adding AL/ALC as a preventative may increase mitochondrial biogenesis and reduce free radicals, greatly slowing deterioration of the mitochondria.

Dietary sources of LA are spinach, broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables, beef, brewer's yeast, and organ meats. Dietary sources of ALC are meat, fish, poultry, and dairy products. Fruits, vegetables and grains contain very little ALC.

The combination of these compounds as a supplement is available in a patented product. Each compound is readily available separately. When combined, LA and ALC work at significantly lower concentrations than they each do individually.

GPC optimizes mental focus, memory and brain repair

Over twenty clinical trials have been performed on glycerophosphocholine (GPC), and its effects on more than four thousand humans have been studied. Results have shown that GPC is a high effective brain nutrient that supports focus, concentration, recall, and cognitive processing. It was found to revitalize declining mental function and promote healthy mood levels, including positive attitude and sociability. GPC has been used to aid recovery of brain function following injury or circulation deprivation.

In two double-blind trials, GPC was found to restore memory and concentration in young people with drug related memory impairment. Older adults showed improved reaction time when taking GPC, indicating their brains were more alert and focused. Brain wave patterns were improved by the addition of GPC.

Clinical trials have shown that GPC helps the brain recover functions lost during aging, and may benefit those with dementia and Alzheimer's. When given 1200 mg of GPC for six months, Alzheimer's patients showed improvement in cognition, behavior and daily living activities.

An authority on GPC as well as PS, Parris Kidd, Ph.D. says "GPC is unquestionably the most important nutrient for anyone who has suffered a stroke or a brain injury." He refers to five published trials in which GPC was successfully used to enhance stroke recovery. GPC was injected intramuscularly daily for a month and then administered orally for the following five months. In the first phase of treatment, neurological function recovered 20-30 percent, and recovery continued during the second phase.

Food sources of GPC are fish, meat, poultry and dairy products. Dr. Kidd's advice for anyone using the supplemental form is to start by taking 300-1200 mg in the morning. After 1-2 days, the dose can be increased if more mental focus or neuronal repair nutritional support is needed. Taking it within 6 hours of bedtime may make it difficult to fall asleep.

DHA makes people say fish is great brain food

Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) is the building block for the brain and retina of the eye. The brain is 60 percent fat, and DHA is the most abundant fatty acid in the brain, comprising 25 to 35 percent. DHA is essential for supporting a healthy brain and nervous system. It has been associated with memory function, visual acuity, and maintenance of positive mood. It is the only fatty acid associated with reduced risk of age related cognitive decline.

DHA promotes electrical activity at the cellular level. The cells in the brain, retina and other parts of the nervous system have a complex network of connecting arms that transport electrical messages throughout the body. The presence of DHA in nerve cell membranes is critical because this is where messages are transmitted. It is at the membrane that nerve cells perform their unique function of generating electric impulses that are the basis of all communication in the nervous system. When DHA is in short supply, this communication system breaks down or becomes less effective.

DHA is critical for the developing brain, and is found in abundance in breast milk. The young body can synthesize DHA , but as aging beings, this ability declines and DHA must be obtained from food sources or supplements. The richest sources of DHA are fatty fish, red meats, animal organs and high quality eggs. Supplemental DHA can be obtained from fish oil, however cod fish oil is low in DHA.

Sources:

Parris Kidd, Ph.D., Phosphatidylserine, springboard4health.com.

Lipoic Acid, Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University.

Acetyl L-carnitine, Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University.

Parris Kidd, Ph.D., and Suzanne Copp, M.S., GPC: Optimizing Mental Focus, Memory, and Brain Repair, crayhonreseach.com.

Essential Fatty Acids, Linus Pauling Institute at Orgeon State University.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 10, 2008) — Just 20 minutes of any physical activity, including housework, in a week is enough to boost mental health, reveals a large study published ahead of print in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

While regular exercise is known to be good for mental health, no one seems able to agree on how much, or what type of activity, is best.

The findings are based on a representative sample of almost 20 000 men and women who were quizzed for the Scottish Health Survey about their state of mind and how much weekly physical activity they engaged in.

Over 3000 participants were deemed to be suffering from stress or anxiety, using a validated scoring system.

But any form of daily physical activity was associated with a lower risk of distress, when other influential factors, such as age, gender, and the presence of a long term condition, were taken into account.

The range of activities, which proved beneficial, included housework, gardening, walking, and sports, although the strongest effect was seen for sports, which lowered the risk of distress by 33%.

The results also indicated that while just 20 minutes improved mental state, the more activity a person indulged in, the lower were their chances of psychological distress.

Physical activity curbs the risks of a range of serious diseases, such as heart disease and certain cancers.

And it improves several biological risk factors, such as glucose intolerance and inflammation, which have themselves been linked to depression and dementia, say the authors.

Posted By Dr Adam Fraser 7/2/09.
taken from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080409205840.htm

MONDAY, Jan. 26 (HealthDay News) -- In people with type 2 diabetes, higher average blood glucose (sugar) levels may be linked to lower brain function, according to a new study.

Researchers found that patients with higher levels of hemoglobin A1C (a measure of average blood glucose levels over 2 to 3 months) had significantly worse results while doing cognitive tasks that tested memory, speed and the ability to manage multiple tasks at the same time. Higher A1C levels were also associated with lower scores on a test of global cognitive function. There fore high glucose levels reduced brain performance and productivity.


The findings from the Memory in Diabetes (MIND) study were published online Monday in the journal Diabetes Care. MIND is a sub-study of the Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes (ACCORD) trial.

"Even a mild impairment in cognitive function is of concern for people with type 2 diabetes," lead researcher Dr. Tali Cukierman-Yaffe, of Tel-Aviv University in Israel, said in an American Diabetes Association news release.

However, the researchers noted it's not yet clear whether higher blood sugar levels increase the risk for cognitive impairment or whether cognitive impairment decreases the body's ability to control blood sugar levels. They hope the question will be answered in the ongoing ACCORD-MIND study, which will test the theory that lowering A1C levels could improve cognitive function.

Previous research found that people with diabetes are 1.5 times more likely to suffer cognitive decline and dementia than people without diabetes.

Posted January 26, 2009, by Dr Adam Fraser
taken from the following website.
http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/healthday/2009/01/26/higher-blood-sugar-could-impair-thinking.html

I was recently at a conference in New Zealand and the speaker before me was a neuro-anatomist who was speaking on Neural Plasticity. Neural Plasticity means that the brain has an amazing capacity to alter how its neurons are organised. For many years it was thought that after we reached adulthood, the neurons in the brain were set. However we now know that you can change the density and capacity of neurons in your brain.

For example when you first started to drive the neural patterns for this activity was quite weak and unco-ordinated, the more you drove the stronger this neural pattern became and the better you got at driving.

Further evidence comes from stroke patients. A stroke is where part of the brain dies due to a lack of blood flow. Following a stroke, researchers observed that other regions of the brain took over the function of the part of the brain that had died. For example if they lost the ability to speak, over time with rehab and concerted effort, surrounding areas of the brain took up this function and they regained the ability to speak.

Talents
We all have different talents! We are good at some things and terrible at others. Some people are good at artistic things like music or languages, while others are better at analytical endeavours like maths and science.

Here’s why!

 The brain is divided up into specific regions, one for planning, one for language, one for co-ordination, etc.

A talent is just a higher density of neurons in a certain part of the brain. Sporty people have a high level of neurons in the co-ordination areas of the brain, while some one with a good memory got more neurons in the memory area of the brain. Simple!

When we try something that we don’t have a talent for, we find it difficult and most people quit and never try it again. Because of this the neurons in that area of the brain fail to develop. This is the wrong approach as with effort you can increase the density of the neurons in every area of the brain and get better at any task.

For example if you do not have a flair for languages and you try to learn one, it tends to be difficult for you and you most likely give up. However if you persevered it would get easier for you.

What does this mean for us? No matter what your current ability, with effort you can always develop it and improve your performance.

Don’t focus on whether you are talented at something focus on how much effort you are putting into it. Accept that some things take more time than others, but it will become easier.

Posted by Dr Adam fraser

At a recent conference the speaker before we was a neuro-anatomist talking about the effects of hydration on mental performance. Our brain is made up of a series of neural connections. These neurons have a small space in between them called a synapse that is full of water. When a signal runs along a neuron it gets to the synapse and releases a chemical called a neuro-transmitter which carries the signal across the water to the next neuron.

New research has shown that by the time you become thirsty the water in your synapse is so dehydrated that the signal has trouble getting through. The result is that your brain can’t function as well and your ability to learn, react, store information and retrieve information is significantly reduced. For a happy brain that gives you high performance, creativity, and productivity ensure you are properly hydrated. Aim for 2 litres a day.

Posted by Dr Adam Fraser