PJEndicott

Anyone who has attended one of my courses will know that I am fascinated by the brain and how it works. This fascinating article appeared on http://www.hc2d.co.uk/content.php?contentId=14143Naps boost learning power today.

23rd February 2010

Lengthy afternoon naps may have a very beneficial effect upon the brain, according to a recent US study. Study author Matthew Walker, an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said that sleep was not just for the body, but that it was very much for the brain as well.

Jessica Payne, an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame, said that the finding filled in gaps about why sleep was important, and that the results were especially relevant for students trying to achieve high marks and people who find they lose memory as they age.

For the purposes of the study, scientists required 39 young adults to take two memory exercises over the course of the day.
The memory exercise used faces and names as a basis for measuring memory efficiency. Just over half the study participants were allowed to take a nap after the first exercise, while the other 19 were not. The nap was fairly long, at just over one and a half hours.
The researchers recorded a 10% lapse in people who stayed awake and then performed the memory test.

Researchers believe that people's ability to learn usually also declines by 10% between the hours of 12:00 pm and 6:00 pm.

The people who napped were also able to reverse this decline, meaning that their ability to remember the names and faces from the memory exercise was about 20% better than that of the control group.

Walker said that the study provided further evidence that sleep played a critical role in the processing of memory, and that people needed to get adequate sleep before learning something.

He said that the brain's ability to soak things up was not always stable, and that his team believed the brain needed periods of non-dreaming sleep in order to restore its learning capacity.

Could Chronic Stress Be Lowering Your IQ?
Health News
By VRP Staff
Are you too stressed to think straight? Is your brain fried… or your head ready to explode?
You might think these are just popular phrases. But there’s actually a lot of truth to them—and you might be surprised to learn just how much a stressful life could be battering your brain. In fact, research shows that chronic stress can do some considerable damage over the course of months and years, contributing to impaired cognition, mood and memory function in the long run.
Why? Scientists suspect that excessive levels of the stress hormone cortisol could be to blame. Numerous clinical studies have revealed that higher salivary cortisol is linked with poorer overall memory performance (including visuospatial memory, working memory, and selective attention) plus significant verbal memory deficits in subjects with major depression. Individuals struggling with common work-related “burnout” have also demonstrated noticeably slower performance on cognitive tests, when compared with healthy controls.
What’s worse, population studies suggest that Alzheimer’s disease (AD)—which is thought to be caused by overproduction of beta-amyloid peptides in the brain—may be linked to excess stress, too. Not only do chronically stressed individuals have a higher risk of AD, but studies on rats have shown that increased stress can actually magnify the damaging effects of beta amyloid on learning and memory, resulting in significantly worse cognitive impairment.

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Early Risers Crash Faster Than People Who Stay Up Late
Night owls belie slacker reputation by staying alert longer
By Siri Carpenter - From the September 2009 Scientific American Mind

Early birds may get the best worms—or at least the best garage sale deals—but they also tire out more quickly than night owls do. In a new study researchers Christina Schmidt and Philippe Peigneux, both at the University of Liège in Belgium, and their colleagues first asked 16 extreme early risers and 15 extreme night owls to spend a week following their natural sleep schedule. Then subjects spent two nights in a sleep lab, where they again followed their preferred sleep patterns and underwent cognitive testing twice daily while in a functional MRI scanner.
An hour and a half after waking, early birds and night owls were equally alert and showed no difference in attention-related brain activity. But after being awake for 10 and a half hours, night owls had grown more alert, performing better on a reaction-time task requiring sustained attention and showing increased activity in brain areas linked to attention. More important, these regions included the suprachiasmatic area, which is home to the body’s circadian clock. This area sends signals to boost alertness as the pressure to sleep mounts. Unlike night owls, early risers didn’t get this late-day lift. Peigneux says faster activation of sleep pressure appears to prevent early birds from fully benefiting from the circadian signal, as evening types do.

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Brain 'not fooled' by sweeteners: Hc2d.co.uk
1st September 2009
(http://www.hc2d.co.uk/content.php?contentId=12518)
Using a brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers observed the ways peoples’ brains responded when they ingested four different artificial sweeteners mixed as a cocktail.
The four sweeteners contained in the cocktail were aspartame, acesulfame K, cyclamate and saccharin. They were mixed in proportions that researchers said would help them to mimic the taste of sugar. Subjects drank orange drink sweetened with sugar and the four sweeteners on alternate days, so that the two tastes would become less distinct in their minds.

Paul Smeets, a neuroscientist at University Medical Center Utrecht and the leader of the study, said that when the drinks were administered on alternate days, the subjects were unable to tell the difference between their tastes.
However, even though the subjects reported not knowing which drink was which, the fMRI scans showed different brain activity depending on which sweetener was ingested. And whereas the artificially sweetened orange drink only activated the amygdala, the drinks flavoured with sugar activated both the amygdala and the caudate nucleus. The caudate nucleus is a region of the brain involved in learning and memory, whose activity in the study subjects Smeets surmises represented an unconscious estimate of caloric value. Smeets said that his team believes the brain can distinguish between a caloric and a non-caloric sweet drink, even if people cannot.

The study raises questions about how useful artificial sweeteners are for people who are on a diet, in line with conclusions some studies have drawn that artificial sweeteners do not reduce calorie consumption. Some studies have shown that drinking diet soft drinks or other artificially sweetened beverages can actually stimulate appetite and food consumption, while others have shown that this only occurs in people who do not drink the beverages regularly.

Guido Frank, a psychiatrist who studies brain responses to sweeteners at the University of Colorado at Denver, said that if people could manage to replace all of their sugared drinks with a combination of a glass of water, a can of diet soda and three carrots, that would be one example of a good dietary routine. He said that instead, people could argue that using large amounts of artificial sweeteners is not helpful for people on a diet because the brain cannot be tricked.
Smeets said he was unsure if an artificial sweetener would ever truly fool the body’s response system.

Brain training has 'some effect'
Researchers tested a computer program called Brain Fitness on a group of almost 500 people age 65 and older, in a study partially funded by the game’s manufacturer.
Half of the test group played the game for one hour a day over a period of eight weeks, while other half of the group spent their time watching educational videos and taking quizzes. At the end of the study, researchers found that the people who played the game had better attention and memory than the other group.The subjects themselves reported improvements in overall thinking skills, as well as mental focus.

Liz Zelinski, professor of gerontology and psychology at the University of Southern California and one of the researchers, said that scientists do not know for certain whether or not thinking games improve anything beyond the activities that people practice.She said that they are not likely to build the brain if people find themselves doing things they have done before.

Some studies have shown that intellectually challenging work or a rich social life can protect the brain from memory loss due to ageing.Glenn Smith, lead author of the study and a professor of psychology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota, said that he began his research as a skeptic, but changed his mind, and now even appreciates the work done by the developers of the game Brain Fitness.He said that scientists used to believe brain cells died and could not be replaced, whereas now there is a more hopeful notion of the malleability and plasticity of the brain.Zelinsky said that the Nintendo DS games Brain Age and Brain Age 2 are not likely to be games in which players make any new neural connections, although they are fun, pleasant diversions that might have some benefits.However, she said that things that happen to the brain early in life are a strong predictor of what happens later in life, and that Alzheimer’s patients who had lots of education when they were young are more robust when facing the disease.

Art Kramer, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who specializes in brain ageing, said that the benefit of playing such games has yet to be proven.

There is Medicine in These Waters (The Teleosis Institute)
http://www.teleosis.org/pdf/symbiosis/There_Medicine_Waters.pdf
Today, in the U.S. and Europe, municipal drinking water typically has 100 or so pharmaceutical medicines and personal care products in significant concentrations. Various hormones, antidepressants, and antibiotics end up in our waterways, the most common being aspirin, statins, hypertension medications, and hormones of women. In fact, 80% of the waterways sampled included such common medicines as acetaminophen (24%), the hormone estradiol (16%), Ditiazem, a blood pressure medication (13%), Codeine (11%), and antibiotics (10%). The risks of this chemical pollution go relatively unrecognized and certainly unanticipated. Nevertheless, the Strategy Plan 2000 for the U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development makes identifying the risks of pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) one of top five goals for protecting human and ecological health.

Not all there - People Management

Publication date: 29 April 2009

Source:
Australian Human Resources Institute

Companies are increasingly moving from staff health promotion to full-blown health schemes that often include discounted private health care, company gyms, health checks and weight-loss and quit-smoking programs. Many of the schemes are aimed at cutting the sick leave bill and reducing what is being termed “presenteeism” – staff operating below their capacity due to illness.

There is differing opinion as to whether health schemes are beneficial.
http://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/pm/articles/2009/04/not-all-there.htm

Workplace stress: All stressed up with somewhere to go - Personnel Today
Stress may have been something of a Cinderella condition but now we can say it's been to the ball and then some. For example, last year saw the ground-breaking case of Dickins v O2. This Court of Appeal ruling made it clear that employers could be responsible for huge damages if they don't manage stress-related illness among employees adequately.
In brief, telecoms company O2 had appealed against a December 2007 tribunal ruling that awarded Susan Dickins, a former O2 finance and regulatory manager, £109,754 damages for psychiatric illness negligently caused by stress at work. Having lost its appeal, O2 was liable for the award.
http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2009/04/28/50437/workplace-stress-all-stressed-up-with-somewhere-to.html

How to safely get your daily dose of Vitamin D
A spate of new studies suggests vitamin D offers health benefits far beyond strengthening bones. Researchers report that “the sunshine vitamin” may cut cancer risks and help the immune system fight infections. Together these studies raise the possibility that a brief daily dose of sun combined with a vitamin D supplement could help stave off everything from breast cancer to the flu.
http://www.bioneers.org/node/2297

Spread the good word Use Printed Stress Balls by Justin Foss (extract only)
Ever wondered how the stress balls work? Why is it that every time you squeeze on one, or focus on working on it for a minute or two it feels good? The history of stress balls date backs to the old Chinese civilization when combinations of two hard balls were used in order stimulate acupressure points on one s palms and increase blood circulation. Over the years, stress balls have changed form and shape but the basic scientific phenomenon behind the functioning of it remains the same.

It is two-fold:
1. Help stimulate the various pressure points in your palm
2. Take your mind off the stress and help you concentrate on working the stress ball.
Both the above help in reducing stress due to daily grids. Today, we live in a world where people do not have time to stop and talk. We do not know our neighbors; we may not even know our colleagues beyond work. We often lack motivation and routine gets hold of the best in us.