Religion May Cause Brain Atrophy

Women's exercise linked to lower cognitive skill - health - 07 January 2011 WOMEN who habitually take strenuous exercise might be at risk of damaging their cognitive function later in life. Strenuous exercise is known to reduce oestrogen levels in women and girls. This can delay the start of menstruation, and can lead to irregular periods in adult women. Low levels of oestrogen in premenopausal women have been linked to impaired mental function in later life. Mary Tierney at the University of Toronto, Canada, reasoned that strenuous exercise might therefore lead to impaired cognition in later life. The overall benefits of regular exercise are well established, but Tierney says the possible impact of strenuous exercise on cognition should be investigated further to see if it is significant.

Analysis Of Neurotech Industry - News Markets How Brain Imaging Could Help Predict Alzheimer's Developing drugs that effectively slow the course of Alzheimer’s disease has been notoriously difficult. Scientists and drug developers believe that a large part of the problem is that they are testing these drugs too late in the progression of the disease, when significant damage to the brain makes intervention much more difficult. “Drugs like Lilly’s gamma secretase inhibitor failed because they were tested in the wrong group of patients,” says Sangram Sisodia, director of the Center for Molecular Neurobiology at the University of Chicago. People in the mid or late stages of the disease “are too far gone, there is nothing you can do.” New brain imaging research may help solve that problem. “Brain changes that predict progression will hopefully allow us to detect the disease early, before it has caused irreversible damage,” said Sarah Madsen, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, at a press briefing at the conference.

Brain is not fully mature until 30s and 40s (PhysOrg.com) -- New research from the UK shows the brain continues to develop after childhood and puberty, and is not fully developed until people are well into their 30s and 40s. The findings contradict current theories that the brain matures much earlier. Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a neuroscientist with the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, said until around a decade ago many scientists had "pretty much assumed that the human brain stopped developing in early childhood," but recent research has found that many regions of the brain continue to develop for a long time afterwards. The prefrontal cortex is the region at the front of the brain just behind the forehead, and is an area of the brain that undergoes the longest period of development. Prof. In earlier research Professor Blakemore studied the brains of teenagers in detail, as reported in PhysOrg. Explore further: Study: Our brains compensate for aging

Exercise Improves Old Brains The moment of truth has arrived, again. The holidays have passed, the leftovers are dwindling and you have renewed your annual New Year's resolution to get back into shape... for real. Don't worry, you are not alone. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 63 percent of Americans have a Body Mass Index (BMI) in excess of 25 (defined as overweight), while a quarter are greater than 30 (obese). As we get older, those extra pounds start to affect other areas of our health, contributing to the onset of diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol and even sexual function. Several new studies in the last month have now built stronger links between our levels of physical activity and the health of our most important body part, the brain. Shrinking brain According to John Ratey, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of "Spark: the revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain" (2008, Little, Brown), "Age happens. Make new brain cells

120 Ways to Boost Your Brain Power Here are 120 things you can do starting today to help you think faster, improve memory, comprehend information better and unleash your brain’s full potential. Solve puzzles and brainteasers.Cultivate ambidexterity. Use your non-dominant hand to brush your teeth, comb your hair or use the mouse. Write with both hands simultaneously. Switch hands for knife and fork.Embrace ambiguity. Readers’ Contributions Dance! Contribute your own tip! There are many, many ways to keep our brains sharp. Time on the Brain: How You Are Always Living In the Past, and Other Quirks of Perception I always knew we humans have a rather tenuous grip on the concept of time, but I never realized quite how tenuous it was until a couple of weeks ago, when I attended a conference on the nature of time organized by the Foundational Questions Institute. This meeting, even more than FQXi’s previous efforts, was a mashup of different disciplines: fundamental physics, philosophy, neuroscience, complexity theory. Crossing academic disciplines may be overrated, as physicist-blogger Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed out, but it sure is fun. Like Sabine, I spend my days thinking about planets, dark matter, black holes—they have become mundane to me. But brains—now there’s something exotic. So I sat rapt during the neuroscientists’ talks as they described how our minds perceive the past, present, and future. McDermott outlined the case of Patient K.C., who has even worse amnesia than the better-known H.M. on whom the film Memento was based. Alas, they couldn’t.

This Is Your Brain On Caffeine Ever miss your daily cup of coffee and subsequently get a pounding headache? According to reports from consumers of coffee and other caffeinated products, caffeine withdrawal is often characterized by a headache, fatigue, feeling less alert, less energetic and experiencing difficulty concentrating. Caffeine withdrawal is at its worst between 24 to 48 hours and lasts up to a week. Researchers from the University of Vermont College of Medicine and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine sought to investigate the biological mechanisms of caffeine withdrawal in a paper published recently in the online edition of the scientific journal Psychopharmacology. The group examined caffeine’s effects in a double-blind study, which involved the administration of caffeine and placebo capsules. Acute caffeine abstinence also produced changes in EEG (increased theta rhythm) that has previously been linked to the common withdrawal symptom of fatigue.

Brain Workshop - a Dual N-Back game Women's exercise linked to lower cognitive skill - health - 07 January 2011 WOMEN who habitually take strenuous exercise might be at risk of damaging their cognitive function later in life. Strenuous exercise is known to reduce oestrogen levels in women and girls. This can delay the start of menstruation, and can lead to irregular periods in adult women. Mary Tierney at the University of Toronto, Canada, reasoned that strenuous exercise might therefore lead to impaired cognition in later life. The overall benefits of regular exercise are well established, but Tierney says the possible impact of strenuous exercise on cognition should be investigated further to see if it is significant. Subscribe to New Scientist and you'll get: New Scientist magazine delivered every week Unlimited access to all New Scientist online content - a benefit only available to subscribers Great savings from the normal price Subscribe now! More From New Scientist 'Iron Man' plants are supercharged by nanotech power (New Scientist) Bacterial explanation for Europa's rosy glow (New Scientist)

How can I improve my short term memory? Q: How can I improve my mem­ory? Is there a daily exer­cise I can do to improve it? A: The most impor­tant com­po­nent of mem­ory is atten­tion. Elab­o­ra­tion and rep­e­ti­tion are the most com­mon ways of cre­at­ing that per­sonal inter­ac­tion. One com­mon tech­nique used by stu­dents, is actu­ally, not that help­ful. These tech­niques do help you improve your mem­ory on a behav­ioral level, but not on a fun­da­men­tal brain struc­ture level. Focus Alert­ness, focus, con­cen­tra­tion, moti­va­tion, and height­ened aware­ness are largely a mat­ter of atti­tude. If you want to learn or remem­ber some­thing, con­cen­trate on just that one thing. Strat­egy: When you learn some­thing new, take breaks so that the facts won’t inter­fere with one another as you study them. Keep read­ing…

Brain Food: How to Eat Smart It's common to resolve to lose weight, but any sane person dreads a diet's dulling effect on the brain. In fact, many studies have shown that counting calories, carbs or fat grams, is truly distracting — to the point that it taxes short-term memory. But how we eat can affect our minds at more fundamental levels, too. Whether you are seeking brain food for exams or just want to be at your sharpest ever day, here are five things you should know about feeding your brain: 1. The brain, which accounts for 2 percent of our body weight, sucks down roughly 20 percent of our daily calories. More recently evolved areas of the brain, such as the frontal cortex (it's like the CEO of the brain), are particularly sensitive to falling glucose levels, while brain areas regulating vital functions are more hardy, said Leigh Gibson of Roehampton University in England. This is not to suggest that we should constantly slurp soda to keep our brains functioning optimally. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Brain Fitness Program and Neuroplasticity Update (11/10/10): Have you seen PBS great spe­cials on Brain Fit­ness and Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity ? The Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram DVD ($24.95) “The Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram is based on the brain’s abil­ity to change and adapt, even rewire itself. In the past two years, a team of sci­en­tists has devel­oped computer-based stim­u­lus sets that drive ben­e­fi­cial chem­i­cal, phys­i­cal and func­tional changes in the brain. Dr. PBS aired in Decem­ber 2007 a spe­cial pro­gram on neu­ro­plas­tic­ity, brain fit­ness, aging and the brain titled “Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram”. In 2008, PBS released a sec­ond DVD: Brain Fit­ness 2: Sight and Sound DVD ($24.95) “This pro­gram, specif­i­cally designed to help peo­ple get the most from their vision and hear­ing as they age, con­sid­ers how these senses change through­out life and what peo­ple can do to keep them healthy and fully functional.” 1. 2. 3. Do sup­ple­ments improve mem­ory? “Kudos for an excel­lent resource!

Physical Exercise and Brain Health What is the con­nec­tion between phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cises? Do they have addi­tive effects on brain health? Are they redundant? Let’s start by review­ing what we know about the effects of phys­i­cal exer­cise on the brain. The effect of phys­i­cal exer­cise on cog­ni­tive performance Early stud­ies com­pared groups of peo­ple who exer­cised to groups of peo­ple who did not exer­cise much. Lau­rin and col­leagues (2001) even sug­gested that mod­er­ate and high lev­els of phys­i­cal activ­ity were asso­ci­ated with lower risk for Alzheimer’s dis­ease and other dementias. The prob­lem with these stud­ies is that the exer­cis­ers and the non-exercisers may dif­fer on other fac­tors than just exer­cise. The solu­tion to this prob­lem is to ran­domly assigned peo­ple to either an aer­o­bic train­ing group or a con­trol group. In 2003, Col­combe and Kramer, ana­lyzed the results of 18 sci­en­tific stud­ies pub­lished between 2000 and 2001 that were con­ducted in the way described above.