by Rick Téllez BRAIN DECLINE BEGINS AT AGE 27! Or says a study from the University of Virginia. The seven years study, headed by Timothy Salthouse, indicates adults achieve their peak mental performance around 22 and mental decline starts as soon as age 27. Most of us believe it is inevitable — one day or another our mental abilities are going to shift into reverse. The University of Virginia study seems to confirm that we become slower, less attentive, and more rigid. Unfortunately, this process starts before age 30! But here’s the good news: in the 21st century we have the tools to avoid brain decline. Not only can we stop brain decline, we can even reverse if we know how and if we are willing to make the effort! THE PROBLEM OF AGING Brain performance decreases with age in several cognitive skills: Attention decreases. The result is that we have difficulties concentrating on a single thing. It may happen that we are reading a book and after a while, we have to move back and re-read it because we did not pay attention to what we were reading along the last minute. Our ability to analyze at the same time different pieces of information decreases, this means, our working memory performance is lower, and it is more difficult for us to hold in the mind different information at the same time. Decline in the short-term memory makes us more forgetful. We forget things that we did not forget before, things like where did we put the keys, what is the name of a known person or where did we park the car. Processing speed decreases. It takes us longer to understand things and to make decisions. As a consequence, many people feel reticent to learn new things because they find it more difficult. They would rather rely on what they already know. But avoiding to learn new things accelerates brain decline. An interesting paradox: brain decline promotes brain decline! WHY DECLINE HAPPENS There are many reasons why brain performance decreases with age, including nutrition and genes, but the most basic reason is simply we do not challenge ourselves. Around peak performance age many of us have already constructed most of our mental automatic systems, those are, structures of thinking that allow us to easily move in the world. You can call them habits. From that age on, we rely on habits for doing almost everything. We feel comfortable using them because we know how they work and what the expected results will be. Hence, we repeat them once and again to solve the same things. Once we have built our set of habits, we have created our personal comfort zone. The comfort zone is that psychological place were we feel safe and that we control the situation. We know what to do if something happens. We know how to solve the problems that lie within the zone. It is our zone of (mental) relax. Everything we do in life is related to the creation of our comfort zone. Above everything, we want to be comfortable. Until we achieve this, we work hard and challenge ourselves. Once achieved, we decide to stay within it, making challenge and effort disappear from our lives. Moving only within our comfort zone has two side effects in the brain: One, it strengthens the brain connections of the habits we repeat. This means that the more we do the same thing, the more we are condemned to do it again. So we stay within our comfort zone. We avoid using and training of our other abilities that lie outside that zone. Two, the capacity of the brain to create new neurons and connections (called neurogenesis) decreases because we don’t use it to learn new things. Again, the effect is that it will be even more difficult for us to create new connections, that is, learn new things. At this point, moving away from that comfort zone is very difficult because we have a limited...
New findings in neuroscience give hope to brain injured patients...
posted by kaysvela
A recent study at the University of Western in Ontario, Canada is suggested a second look at coma patients in a vegetative state may be required before “pulling the plug”. Following an experiment with MRI technology, Professor Adrian Owen and Postdoctoral Fellow Lorina Naci have determined that a man in a coma – the result of a serious car accident – is aware of his surroundings and his identity. This breakthrough finding challenges many of the assumptions about “vegetative” patients, and gives hope to their families. Dr. Owen, a Canada Research Chair, is behind the groundbreaking studies that examine patients under the medical sentence “vegetative state”. He suggests that these patients are simply incapable of “generating” — which simply means they don’t have the ability to communicate. However, he says these patients still have the intention to communicate, making them a conscious human being with functioning capacities. MRI images prove Dr. Owens hypothesis to be true. Using a comparison chart of a healthy human brain and that of a vegetative patient he provides a visual aid that shows the specific areas of the brain that signal a “yes” or “no” answer to a set of questions. The questions used have specific answers routed in the patient’s reality to test if the brain is of sound mind. Dr.Owen is not the only doctor leading the research in neuroscience. Jill Bolte Taylor originally entered the field of brain science as a result of her schizophrenic brother. She became a highly acclaimed scientist at Harvard University. On Dec. 10, 1996 a blood vessel exploded in the left half of her brain. From that day forward Jill could no longer walk, talk becoming an infant in a woman’s body. In her book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s...
Stanford Researchers Made Big Advancement Against Cancer...
posted by Dave Bunnell
Stanford Researchers Made Big Advancement Against Cancer