Weekend’s Better Brain Health Breakfast # 6

Posted on January 16, 2011 by Ward Plunet | Permalink 1

Lasting Love

One of the most important things for our brain health are good social relationships, and this obviously includes our love interest.

In last week’s better brain breakfast edition I discussed how love can hurt. This week on a happier note there is a new report that suggests that love can last, even in couples married for more than a decade or two (an average of 21 years). Now the researchers selected participants that answered affirmatively to questions like, “are you still madly in love with your partner”, and it turned out they had sex on average 2.2 times per week.  They scanned the brains of these individuals while viewing a picture of their partner and compared that with when they viewed other pictures such as long-term friend; a long-term acquaintance; and a shorter-term acquaintance. What the researchers found:

Brain scans showed the ventral tegmental area and dorsal striatum lit up when participants looked at their spouse’s photo. Prior studies have shown those dopamine-rich regions of the brain, which are associated with reward and motivation, also light up in couples when they first fall in love, as well as when people snort cocaine.

“These people are not just kidding themselves. They seem to be having the same experience as newly in-love people,” Aron said.

Long-term, madly in love participants also showed more activation in regions of the brain associated with maternal attachment and pair-bonding, Aron said. Sexual frequency was associated with increased activity of the posterior hippocampus, an area implicated in hunger and craving.

To hunger and cravings.

So it is great to hear it is possible to still be ‘madly’ in love after 20 years being together. I guess one question what percentage of 20 year relationships maintain this level of love? Are there different types of love that keep long term relationships going?

The health advantages of early education

Now all this love and sex tends to lead to having children. And there is no stronger love than the ones parents have for their children and so they want them to have every advantage possible – especially when it comes down to education. We all know how important education is in our modern informational dominant world so how important is early education? It is well known that intensive education at an early age for lo-income children results in improvement in educational scores – but what about other health and well being measurements? New research now provides us with some of these answers.

Researchers found that participants had significantly better health and health behaviors and that these findings were independent of IQ, educational attainment or health insurance status…

Until it (this research project) came along, the benefit of education had never been proven using the gold standard in research methods-the randomized controlled trial. What we have found is that this educational intervention also reduced health risks like smoking and improved health outcomes as early as age 21,” said Dr. Muennig, assistant professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia’s Mailman School and principal investigator of the new study. “The health benefits were quite dramatic.”

This research suggests that early intensive education intervention not only increases educational ability but also several long term overall health outcomes and social choices, and you could probably argue overall brain health. Increase your children’s body and brain health and provide them with as rich and varied educational environment as possible (but don’t pressure them too much).

The brain scanning game to find out if you are good at games

Now when kids grow up, no matter what educational system they have been through, they start playing computer/video games. Some people are poor players, some okay, and some great. Could we predict their ability before they ever boot up a game?

Predict your computer gaming success with a brain scan. This wired article indicates that brain activity in the basal ganglia could predict 55 to 68 % of the differences in performance of a computer game.

“Our data suggest that some persistent physiological and or neuroanatomical difference is actually the predictor of learning,” said University of Illinois psychology professor and research leader Art Kramer in a statement.

Of  course most of us don’t have access to such brain scans. What do you do then? Well, if you just spend some time playing computer games you quickly find out if you are one of the fast learners or just average like most of us. Now you know you can blame it all on your basal ganglia.

Can this technique be used to predict performance in our kids in other domains: specific sports, math, architecture, engineering, music, to mention a few possibilities ?

Hope you are all having a happy and healthy weekend.

Weekend's Better Brain Health Breakfast

Want to double your brain’s processing ability?

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Ward Plunet | Permalink 1
Gothic chess set staunton
Image via Wikipedia

It is simple: become an expert at something.

Okay, I know it sounds like a joke, or like I was trying to sell you something, but new neuroscience research indicates that expert chess players (grand masters) literally double their processing power by using both sides of their brain to solve a problem, but only if the problem is specific to chess and not other problems.

Details:

Researchers tested 8 grand master chess players and a group of naive chess players on two different problems. One problem was chess specific: to identify if pieces on a chess board where in a check position. The second problem was a more general identification of geometrical shapes.

No surprise that the grand master chess players solved the identification of checkmate position compared to the novices. But what is interesting is by using fMRI researchers noted that the novices only used one side of their brain when trying to figure out the chess test. However, the expert chess players used both sides of the their brains: they parallel processed the problem – doubling their processing.

“… once the usual brain structures were engaged, the experts utilised additional complementary structures in the other half, to execute processes in parallel,”

What about the non-chess identification test?

The new to chess players like they had with the chess problem only used one side of the brain to try to solve this task. Interestingly our expert superior performing chess players also only used one side of their brain when doing this non-practiced task.

Take home message:

The research suggests if you practice a task extensively and become an expert (see: 10,000 hour rule to expertise) you likely start using a larger proportion of your brain, including parallel processing on both sides of the brain (double your fun), to increase the efficiency of working on a particular task – be it chess, brain surgery, guitar playing, video game playing, solving math problems, or other specific domain of expertise.

But you got to put in the time and it might not transfer to other cognitive tasks.

You can also check out how to increase your brain efficiency.

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What could account for our middle age peak in cognitive function: wiring?

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Ward Plunet | Permalink 2

Youth myth

It is a common myth in our culture that we peak for everything in 20′s. But interestingly there are components of our brain that do not fully mature until middle age.

Last week I posted about how for many cognitive functions including verbal memory, inductive reasoning, spatial reasoning, and verbal ability the peak does not occur until around age 53. And this is despite us losing 2 grams of our brain mass each year once we get past the age of 25.

Here is the graph showing the cognitive function as we age:

Lose brain mass but gain cognitive function

So how can we be losing brain mass but have many of our cognitive functions increase from the age of 25 to 53ish?

The brain does not fully develop until middle age

Usually we think of our body and brain becoming fully developed by our early 20′s. However, there is a growing body of research the points out that at least the brain keeps developing into middle age (actually we have known this for 20 years – but we tend to re-learn things a few times before they really settle in).

Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore points out that various parts of the brain continue to change in shape in our 30′s and 40′s. One of these areas is the prefrontal cortex:

The discovery is particularly significant as the prefrontal cortex is a key area of the brain and is often thought said to be key to what makes us human.

It is said to be involved with decision making, social interaction and many other personality traits.

But seeing changes in shape of the brain doesn’t tell us what components of the brain is changing. Is it generally thought that our gray matter (neurons) is reduced as we age and likely is the major contributor to the 2 grams of brain mass we lose each year past 25. But what about white matter – the insulator material that wraps around our axons (myelin) ?

White matter to the rescue

A longitudinal study that examined white matter over a lifetime found that white matter peaked at the ripe old age of 39. Interesting there was a correlation between maximum finger tapping speed and the measurement of myelin (white matter) they used – and they both in fact peaked at 39. Now finger tapping isn’t a higher cognitive function like inductive reasoning but if offers us some hints.

Is it about the Myelin?

Maybe myelin thickness around our axons correlate with motor and cognitive function better than other measurements of our brain (I will post another article giving more details on this later).

Now there is still an open question of why our myelin peak occurs at 39 but cognitive function not until after 50, but this makes more sense that what we normally think of: we mentally peak in our 20′s and that our brain is beginning to deteriorate after the age of 25.

It is possible that while our white matter peaks at age 39 it takes us some ability to fully use the potential of this wiring – part of our road to wisdom?

Take home message:

At least one major component of our brain, white matter, does not peak until the age of 39 and this correlates reasonably well with the large number of cognitive functions that do not peak until we are in our 40′s or 50′s (though there are likely other structural and cellular contributors to this peak of mental function in middle age).

aging, cognitive function

Weekend Better Brain Breakfast # 5

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Ward Plunet | Permalink 1

Meditation may help addiction

Over at Integratedneuroscience they have an interesting post about the growing body of research and practical tips on how you could use meditation to help with addiction:

…the mindfulness that accompanies meditation has shown to be more effective than behavioral strategies that encouraged avoiding thoughts of substance use. Such thoughts inevitably surface in recovery, and meditation may offer a method for awareness and acceptance of these thoughts. This, in turn, may limit the transformation of these thoughts into the action of substance use.

You don’t need to be addicted to drugs to use meditation to help you with other urges, such as overeating. The general concept is:

In Vipassana meditation, one does not try to deny or ignore thoughts related to addiction. Rather, when a thought or craving to use arises, Vipassana meditation teaches one to observe and accept the presence of the thought while not over-identifying with it. In this way, one can acknowledge the reality of such thoughts while learning to refocus energy and intention elsewhere. This type of meditation is appealing to some because it avoids blame and stigmatization related to the addictive thought process, while also acknowledging its reality.

Lover hurts, or at least the lost of love hurts.

We feel better and more alive when we are in love, but after a breakup things are not so rosy. When scientists scan the brain of people that have gone through a breakup but are viewing a picture of their former mate while being scanned:

…the spurned lovers showed activity in parts of the brain’s reward system, just as happy lovers do. But the neural pathways associated with cravings and addictions  were activated too, as was a brain region associated with the distress that accompanies physical pain.

So this is maybe why a breakup is as difficult as going cold turkey off some addictive drug.

How Positive Coaching affects the brain

Over at Senmes I found this short video discussing the difference between positive coaching which ‘opened’ up the brain compared to to more critical negative type coaching which “closed” the brain. Give it a view.

Positive coaching and the brain

Grass Fed Beef

If you are a meat eater should you be eating grass or grain fed beef? Over at Mark’s Daily Apple Mark covers this issue by looking at a recent study. In this study they examined people that were on a 4 week diet in which that ate beef that had been fed either grains or grass for 6 weeks.

Grass-finished eaters saw improved plasma and platelet fatty acid composition: less omega-6, more omega-3. This would presumably lead to a more balanced inflammatory response and, thus, better health.

Read the rest of his post for the complete story. The ratio of omega 3 and 6 is also considered important for brain health. The modern diet is heavily weighted toward omega 6 compared to 3, so any food choices we can make toward higher omega 3 (compared to 6) may provide better brain health.

The Next 100 billion technology market: gene sequencing

For a bit of brain stimulation and to keep up to date on a fast rising business and the latest in gene sequencing technology go check out this Fortune magazine article on the next 100 billion technology market.

Neuro-Lit-Crit: what the heck is that?

Neuro-Lit-Crit. Furthering our brain stimulation – can neuroscience energize (save) University Literature departments? In this NY times article they discuss the rise of Neuro-Lit-Crit and what it has to offer.

Weekend's Better Brain Health Breakfast

How much cognitive ability do we lose over time as we age?

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Ward Plunet | Permalink 2

Yesterday you learned after the age of 25 you lose 2 grams of your brain mass per year. That means at the age of 80 you have loss about 7.5 % of your brain mass. The question is how does this affect our cognitive ability?

Like much of scientific research there are some conflicting results. In a 2009 paper we get two graphs of fluid and crystallized intelligence:

This research suggests that both fluid (reasoning) and crystallized (knowledge) intelligence peaks at age 26, which would be very consistent with the results of peak brain mass in humans occurs at around 25 years old, and after that we can see a nice correlation between the 2% loss of brain mass and the cognitive decline seen in the graphs above.

However, other studies including this one from Nature Neuroscience Reviews that looked at the same people as they aged in a longitudinal study found the decline in cognitive function occurred considerably later.

You can see that perceptual speed peaks very early, the best performance occurred at age 25 –which is also consistent with the above results. This makes sense young people are ‘faster’. But when you look at some of the other cognitive functions we see some very interesting results.

The next earliest peak occurs in numeric ability which starts declining by the time people reach 46, but still high at age 39.

But maybe most interestingly is that for other cognitive functions like verbal memory, inductive reasoning, spatial reasoning, and verbal ability the peak does not occur until around age 53. Wow!

And verbal ability does not seem to peak until the age of 67. This you might argue makes sense since many of the best ever novels have been written by people past the age of 50.

Now one big difference between these two papers is what cognitive functions they tested, so this could possibly explain the somewhat conflicting results. But the fluid intelligence, which the authors also call reasoning, from the top paper peaked at 25 where the longitudinal study testing inductive reasoning didn’t peak until 53. So not sure why these two studies find such different peaks for reasoning based testing. As usual more research is required to fully elucidate the relationship between aging and cognition.

Take home message:

While some cognitive functions peak at around the age of 25, which correlates with peak brain mass, but it appears many other cognitive functions including inductive reasoning and verbal ability do not peak until sometime after 50 years old.

The next question is which correlates best with cognitive ability as we age: neuron or white matter loss.

aging, brain health, longevity

How much of your brain mass do you lose each year?

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Ward Plunet | Permalink 1
A chimpanzee brain at the Science Museum London
Image via Wikipedia

If you want optimum brain health you obviously want to preserve as much of your brain as possible as you age.

At birth your brain weighs in at about 400 grams (g) and grows to 1,200 g by the time you reach 6 years old. After that it grows more slowly until peaking at some time before you hit 25 years old at 1450 g. After the pivotal age of 25 your brain starts ‘shrinking’.

According to a 2009 paper researchers have found that the average brain loses about 2 grams per year from the age of 26 to 80.

So doing the math you would lose 108 g from your original 1450 g sized brain to settle down to 1,342 g. That is a loss of 7.5% of your total brain mass. After the age of 80 the rate of loss increases to 5 g per year.

Did you think you were really losing all that brain mass? Do you need it? We have all heard the story about us only using 10% of our brain so does it really matter if we loss 5 or 10% of our brain mass?

In general we hear about the mental decline that occurs with aging, but is this true, and if so how much do we lose and when? Is it related to the loss of brain mass?

Come back tomorrow and I will share some of the data.

Today’s lesson is that after the age of 25 we lose 2 g of our brain mass per year. Go out there today and do something to prevent this loss – exercise, stimulate your brain with novelty, and eat lightly.

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Weekend’s Better Brain Health Breakfast # 4

Posted on January 1, 2011 by Ward Plunet | Permalink 1

Hoping everyone had a great holiday season and looking forward to an successful 2011.

Many of us traveled during the holiday season and this post points to new research showing the negative affect on brains of continued jet lag in an animal model. A list of a few of the findings below indicate this is exact the opposite of what you want for good brain health:

  • It limits the growth of brain cells and reduces brain activity.
  • It leads to memory and learning problems.
  • Even a month after recovering, subjects were still suffering from its effects.

I have previously written about a couple treatments you can try for alleviating some of the affects of jet lag (viagra for reducing jet lag : and over at Mark’s Daily Apple they discuss fasting to alleviate jet lag (I couldn’t find my own past  article I wrote on this subject)) but even those these treatments might reduce some of the symptoms of jet lag doesn’t mean they are necessarily stopping the more adverse negative affects on your brain (though every-other-day fasting might since it helps prevent many diseases including neurodegenerative diseases).

Curcumin might be the new health food spice of 2011. I enjoyed the practical advice at the end of the article:

Use a curcumin supplement that contains piperine. Piperine is an alkaloid of black pepper that can increase curcumin absorption by 2000% in humans (13).

Take your curcumin with olive oil. Taking curcumin and olive oil together yields increased blood levels of curcumin (4).

I have previously written about curcumin but this additional practical information to increase the bio-availability of this spice is something I will add to my routine.

Learning new words rapidly changes your brain. I wanted to write up a piece on this new research but Deric Bownd beat me to it:

…after just 14 minutes of learning exposure to a new word, presentations of this word cause increased responses in the language cortex, reflecting rapid mapping of new word forms onto neural representations.

To me this is very interesting, but also makes sense. Our experiences, even at the simplest level of exposure to a new word, slightly alters our brain. To hear more about this provocative and philosophical meaningful theme go to my post from early this week that has a great video which I encourage everyone to watch.

Hope all of you are having a great start to 2011. Get out there and enjoy life.

Weekend's Better Brain Health Breakfast

I am my connectome – aren’t I?

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Ward Plunet | Permalink 1

The connectome simply put is the wiring diagram of your brain. But this is not so simple to obtain due the incredible complexity of the human brain.

I wrote previously in the last couple weeks of new research that indicates that one human brain has more ‘switches’ than all the computers in the world.

Work from researchers involved in this finding is featured in a TED talk from the summer of 2010 (h/t   brainposts ). Sebastian Seung is the presenter, and he presents some incredible visuals.

key fact: Our brain has a million times more connections than your genome has letters. Think about this the human genome has 3 billion base pairs, which would suggest that the human brain has 3 trillion connections.

The last 10 years might have been the decade of genome is the next one destined to be the decade of the connectome.

But the most philosophical interesting point of the video is when Sebastian talks about how our experiences changes our connectome, our wiring. Thinking could potentially change our brain wiring.

Do you think you are your connectome ? And if not what are you ?

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Born to be empathetic / sympathetic: mirror neurons – what is next?

Posted on December 24, 2010 by Ward Plunet | Permalink 1

During this holiday season we tend to be even more empathetic and compassionate than usual, so I think taking a deeper look at empathy would be interesting as we go through the season.

Here is a very good video that provides a narration and engaging hand drawn visuals to explain mirror neurons and how humans are soft wired for sociability, the “want-to-belong”, and empathy, but also how we can further evolve to a more global empathy.

Give it a view, and maybe keep it in mind during your holiday season, and hopefully after this period. We are still evolving, we can become even better.

p.s.   – a previous seasonal post: the saddest Christmas story I know, that happens to be directly related to the  ‘goodness’ of humans.

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Booting up synthetic cell / genome: 2010 Science story of the year

Posted on December 21, 2010 by Ward Plunet | Permalink 0
Craig Venter
Image by AJC1 via Flickr

This post will not do much directly for your brain health other than at plopping an interesting idea into it, which is good for it.

In early 2009 I wrote a piece predicting that in 2009 Craig Venter would be the first to boot up a synthetic genome.

“Rebooting a synthetic genome – think of what that really means. “Printing” off of a genome of whatever combination of genes, or even newly invented/tweaked genes, then taking that DNA and inserting it into an inert empty lipid bilayer of a cell and booting up the cell into a living organism.”

I was a few months off because he didn’t get this accomplished until early 2010. Well at least the paper did not get published until May 2010, which would suggest that he got this accomplished in 2009 as I predicted.

Here is a bit of the history of the build up to this biological milestone from my previous post:

“In a 2007 Science paper the Venter group fully replaced the whole genome of DNA from one bacterial species with another (Lartigue et al., 2008). The title of the paper is: “Genome transplantation in bacteria: changing once species to another.” They are calling this ‘genome transplantation’ and the recipient bacteria takes on the genotype and phenotype of the transplanted genome.

Now the above paper is just one more step in what I presume the long term goal of Venter et. al., In 2008 the Venter group reported in another Science paper the outstanding ability to ‘print’ out an entire genome (albeit relatively small) and placing the complete printed genome into a cell.

As mentioned in several of Venter’s recent presentations (TED conference video – see below at about the 18:00 minute mark – but don’t forget about the BIL conference) all that is left to do is ‘boot’ up the new cell/organism.”

And this final step: the booting up of a new cell/organism was accomplished and reported in early 2010. Therefore, I would deem this the science story of the year (though there are several other strong contenders).

Recently this story and a profile of the man behind it, Craig Venter, was featured in a 60 minute segment that is shown below. Check it out – it will stimulate your brain.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7076435n&tag=related;photovideo

He talks in the video about using this technique to build quicker vaccines and help the global warming problem.

But you need to really think what these scientist are doing here – this is what I wrote in my previous post:

“Now this first might not quite strike the amazement in you the way it did me – so let me explain (as Venter also does). Think about the near future and we have many many organisms DNA sequences stored away in databases. Not the actual DNA but just a sequence of 1s and 0s representing the DNA code (A, T, C, G) just as you would think of any other pieces of information stored on your computer or the internet cloud (be they pictures of your grandmother, love letters, or the complete works of Shakespeare). Now without any wet lab genetic manipulation but just the day to day editing all of us do on our computers (be it word processing, picture processing, emails, or computer programming) you now could ‘edit’ various pieces of genetic code from numerous diverse organisms and ‘compile’ a complete genome – a complete organism (sure some easy editing tools that also does some rudimentary check for viability would be helpful). And after you have your newly edited, digitized, DNA sequence composed of a string of 1s and 0s in some electrical memory format you press a button to send it to the ‘printer’. The DNA sequence printer then goes to work to build your exact DNA sequence in real life A, T, C, G code. You could then next take your DNA sequence and inject your naked DNA into an empty cell (no DNA code). The big question is would it ‘boot up’ and become alive – Venter would say yes of course it will.

Now he has demonstrated the cell will boot up, and does become alive !

And now it is reported that Venter is working on booting up a higher organism – a mouse – using the same ‘booting up’ technique. A potential top science story of 2011?

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