Brilliant Blog

Child Anxiety Theory and Treatment

A special issue of Cognition & Emotion

• Edited by Andy P. Field, Sam Cartwright-Hatton, Shirley Reynolds, Cathy Creswell

Despite the negative impact of anxiety in children, theories and research have lagged behind their adult counterparts. This special issue arose from an Economic and Social Research Council funded seminar series (Child Anxiety Theory and Treatment, CATTS).

It highlights four themes in theories and research into child anxiety: the appropriateness of applying adult models to children, the need to isolate causal variables, the need to take a developmental perspective, and the importance of parents. This issue aims to stimulate debate about theoretical issues that will inform future child anxiety research.

ISBN: 9781841698519

Published May 08 2008 by Psychology Press.

(hat tip: Mind Hacks).

Let's try this classic experiment, conceived by Simons and Chabris for their study on sustained inattentional blindness (PDF), and now packaged in a nicer

production. You will watch a brief video clip showing two teams, and your challenge is to count the TOTAL number of times that the basketballs change hands.

Click Here to view the Basketball Experiment clip.

You can read about the fascinating results here.

Credit for pic: Haines World

Driving as Next Brain Fitness Application? 

Last month, at the MIT/ SmartSilvers event where we presented our Brain Fitness Market Report, we discussed what specific applications, beyond the current emphasis on healthy aging, might take computerized cognitive training to a new level.  

Assessing and improving driving skills would be a top candidate, given both the well-defined nature of the need and the appearance of programs with growing evidence (both scientific and real-world) behind.

The New York Times Asks... 

Along these lines, the New York Times just published this article: Are You a Good Driver? Here’s How to Find Out. A few quotes:

- "COULD a video game make you a better driver? More important, could computer software prevent teenagers from making fatal mistakes or even weed out older drivers whose debilities make them crash-prone?"

- "There are already programs like AAA’s Roadwise Review (about $15), which is intended to help older people evaluate their driving."

- "There are other programs that will test mental agility and then use subsequent computer training sessions to improve a driver’s skills. One such program is an online application called DriveFit ($89), which was developed by CogniFit, an Israeli company specializing in cognitive training software. DriveFit uses visual and memory tests to measure 12 driving-related cognitive abilities."

What are we talking about 

You may be wondering, "What do these training sessions look like?". Well, if you have a few minutes to spare, why don't you try these exercises that come from MindFit (similar premise to DriveFit, developed by CogniFit too).

The "Inside and Outside" task was designed to train divided attention skills. Divided attention is the ability to pay attention to more than one thing at a time.

The "Two in One" task was designed to train one's ability to perform two tasks simultaneously.

Another question we often get when talking with insurance companies, "So, can we really train drivers to act smarter behind the wheel"? Well, it depends of what "smarter" means (we are not aware of brain training programs to make drivers avoid alcohol, or sleep-inducing medicaments, before driving), but there is growing evidence that specific cognitive skills that are important for driving can, indeed, be trained, resulting in better driving outcomes.

Researchers weigh in 

A key research reference: the published studies by Dr. Karlene Ball and Dr. Jerri Edwards. We had the fortune to interview Dr. Edwards recently, and this is what she had to say when I asked her to explain the results of their 2003 Human Factors paper (Roenker, D., Cissell, G., Ball, K., Wadley, V., & Edwards, J. (2003). Speed of processing and driving simulator training result in improved driving performance. Human Factors, 45: 218-233):

"Our goal was to train what is called the "useful field of view." The useful field of view is a measure of processing speed and visual attention that is critical for driving performance, and one of the areas that declines with age. It has previously been shown that this skill can be improved with training, so we wanted to see what effect it would have on the driving performance of older adults, and whether the training would be more or less effective than a traditional driving simulation course.

For the study, we divided forty-eight adults over fifty-five years old into two intervention groups of twenty-four people each. Each group received twenty hours of training. One group was exposed to a traditional driving simulator, where they learned specific driving behaviours. The other one went through the cognitive training program.

Both groups' driving performance improved right after their respective programs, but most benefits of the driving simulator disappeared by month eighteen.

The speed-of-processing intervention helped participants not only improve "useful field of view," the skill that was directly trained, but it also transferred into real-life driving, and the results were sustained after 18 months. And, by the way, the evaluation was as real as one can imagine: a 14-mile open road evaluation.

Faster speed-of-processing seemed to enable adults to react better to unexpected events that require a fast response and to reduce by 40% the number of dangerous manoeuvres on real roads (defined as those that required the training instructor to intervene during the evaluation)."

You can read the whole interview by clicking on Improving Driving Skills and Brain Functioning- Interview with ACTIVE's Jerri Edwards.

Note: the program used in that study, called Visual Awareness, was recently acquired by Posit Science Corporation.

In summary

In short, more likely than not, I'd reply YES to the question used to open the New York Times article. A well-designed video game CAN make one a better driver.

Of course, this is an emerging field, and much more research needs to be done before applications become mainstream, but the field certainly deserves more attention, research dollars, and engagement by insurance companies to design and conduct real-world trials.

Allstate: what about spending just a fraction of your scary ad campaign ad campaign budget in exploring additional potential solutions?

Interested a good, non-technical, summary of the implications of recent brain science in our daily lives? Biologist John Medina offers that in his article below (as part of our Author Speaks Series) and in his new book: Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Enjoy!

(Note: John will be in the Bay Area on April 8 and 9th, speaking at Google and San Jose Rotary).

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Brain Rules

-- By John Medina

Go ahead and multiply the number 8,388,628 x 2 in your head. Can you do it in a few seconds? There is a young man who can double that number 24 times in the space of a few seconds. He gets it right every time. There is a boy who can tell you the exact time of day at any moment, even in his sleep. There is a girl who can correctly determine the exact dimensions of an object 20 feet away. There is a child who at age 6 drew such lifelike and powerful pictures, she got her own show at a gallery on Madison Avenue. Yet none of these children could be taught to tie their shoes. Indeed, none of them have an IQ greater than 50.

The brain is an amazing thing.

Your brain may not be nearly so odd, but it is no less extraordinary. Easily the most sophisticated information-transfer system on Earth, your brain is fully capable of taking little black squiggles from a piece of bleached wood and deriving meaning from them. To accomplish this miracle, your brain sends jolts of electricity crackling through hundreds of miles of wires composed of brain cells so small that thousands of them could fit into the period at the end of this sentence. You accomplish all of this in less time than it takes you to blink. Indeed, you have just done it. What’s equally incredible, given our intimate association with it, is this: Most of us have no idea how our brain works.

This has strange consequences. We try to talk on our cell phones and drive at the same time, even though it is literally impossible for our brains to multitask when it comes to paying attention. We have created high-stress office environments, even though a stressed brain is significantly less productive. Our schools are designed so that most real learning has to occur at home. This would be funny, if it weren’t so harmful.

Blame it on the fact that brain scientists rarely have a conversation with teachers and business professionals, education majors and accountants, superintendents and CEOs. Unless you have the Journal of Neuroscience sitting on your coffee table, you’re out of the loop. My book is meant to get you into the loop.

12 brain rules

My goal is to introduce you to 12 things we know about how the brain works. I call these Brain Rules. For each rule, I present the science and then offer ideas for investigating how the rule might apply to our daily lives, especially at work and school. The brain is complex, and I am taking only slivers of information from each subject—non-comprehensive but accessible.

A sampling of the ideas you’ll encounter:

-For starters, we are not used to sitting at a desk for eight hours a day. From an evolutionary perspective, our brains developed while working out, walking as many as 12 miles a day. The brain still craves the experience, especially in sedentary populations like our own. That’s why exercise boosts brain power (Brain Rule #2) in such populations. Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in long-term memory, reasoning, attention, problem-solving tasks, and more. I am convinced that integrating exercise into our eight hours at work or school would only be normal.

- As you no doubt have noticed if you’ve ever sat through a typical PowerPoint presentation, people don’t pay attention to boring things (Brain Rule #4). You’ve got seconds to grab someone’s attention, and only 10 minutes to keep it. At 9 minutes and 59 seconds, something must be done quickly—something emotional and relevant. Also, the brain needs a break. That’s why I use stories in this book to make many of my points.

- Ever feel tired around 3 o’clock in the afternoon? That’s because your brain really wants to take a nap. You might be more productive if you did: In one study, a 26-minute nap improved NASA pilots’ performance by 34 percent. Even so, the brain isn’t resting while it sleeps. It is surprisingly active. And whether you get enough rest affects your mental agility the next day. Sleep well, think well (Brain Rule #7).

- We’ll meet a man who can read two pages at the same time, one with each eye, and remember everything in the pages forever. Most of us do more forgetting than remembering, of course, and that’s why we must repeat to remember (Brain Rule #5). When you understand the brain’s rules for memory, you’ll see why I want to destroy the notion of homework.

- We’ll find out why the terrible twos only look like active rebellion but are actually a child’s powerful urge to explore. Babies may not have a lot of knowledge about the world, but they know a whole lot about how to get it. We are all natural explorers (Brain Rule #12), and this never leaves us, despite the artificial environments we’ve built for ourselves.

Back to the jungle

What we know about the brain comes from biologists who study brain tissues, experimental psychologists who study behavior, and cognitive neuroscientists who study how the first relates to the second. Evolutionary biologists have gotten into the act as well. Though we know precious little about how the brain works, our evolutionary history tells us this: The brain appears to be designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment, and to do so in nearly constant motion. I call this the brain’s performance envelope.

If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to tear down both and start over.

In many ways, starting over is what the book is all about.

--John Medina, author of “Brain Rules,” is a developmental molecular biologist and research consultant. He is an affiliate professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He is also the director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University. His article on exercise and the brain was selected by the Harvard Business Review (Feb 2008) as one of its “Breakthrough Ideas for 2008.”

Superb blog article by Newsweek's Sharon Begley: The Lotus and the Synapse, introducing a new Study that shows compassion meditation changes the brain.

To read the original paper led by Richard Davidson and Antoine Kutz, click Here. We will be covering this in more detail next week.

An interesting recent article announcesPupils to start day with Nintendo Brain Training(UK's Daily Telegraph). Some quotes:

- "Children at 16 primary schools are to start each day by playing on a Nintendo games console, it was disclosed yesterday."

- "The pupils will play "brain training" exercises before lessons after a pilot scheme at a school in Dundee found that it boosted learning ability."

- "Children at St Columba's Primary in the city scored higher in maths tests and had improved concentration and behaviour after playing the Nintendo game More Brain Training from Dr Kawashima, the study showed."

- "LTS is working with school inspectors and Dundee University to carry out a larger pilot of the scheme, with 16 schools using the game every morning and another 16 acting as the control group."

Comments: Despite much searching, including asking the agency involved in that "pilot scheme at a school in Dundee", we have not been able to find any scientific paper describing the experiment and its results. We hope future articles will better reference and perhaps question the scientific research involved, so we can really evaluate whether Nintendo games are that, fun games, or can really make cognitive training claims and merit education and health-related attention. In the meantime...let's keep playing.

As part of our ongoing Author Speaks Series, we are honored to present today this excellent article by Dr. Shannon Moffett, based on her illuminating and engaging book. Enjoy!

(and please go to sleep soon if you are reading this late Monday night).
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Two years ago I finished a book on the mind/brain, called The Three Pound Enigma: The Human Brain and the Quest to Unlock its Mysteries . Each chapter profiles a leader in a different aspect of mind/brain research, from neurosurgery to zen Buddhism, from cognitive neuroscience to philosophy of mind. One of my subjects was Dr. Robert Stickgold, a zany, hyper-intelligent mensch of a Harvard sleep researcher. When I met him, I was in medical school and having a grand old time—I’d exacted an extension of my tenure beyond the customary four years, so I had enough time to write the book, do my coursework, and have a life. I was busy, but still got enough sleep, had time to exercise daily, and even went for dinner and a movie sometimes. Although I found Stickgold’s work interesting, there was a part of me that just didn’t get it.

Fast-forward to the present, when I am a resident in emergency medicine at a busy inner-city trauma center; I have two-year-old twins and a husband with a 60-hour-a-week job of his own. I do not exercise. I do not eat unless I can do something else productive at the same time, and even when I do get to sleep in my own bed, my slumber is fractured by the awakenings of two circadianly disparate toddlers. It seems to take me twice as long to “get” new concepts as it used to, and I never feel like I’m functioning at top speed. In short, I am a mess. And NOW I get what Stickgold’s work is all about, and understand that he is both quantifying and explaining exactly what I’m feeling.

Sleep is so obvious a physiologic need (from insects to mammals, all animals sleep) that it doesn’t even occur to most of us to wonder why we have to do it—why in the world would we need to lie down, paralyzed, for a third of our lives, with our brains in some sort of auto-pilot chaos? What do we get out of the process? It is astonishing how sparse is science’s answer to that question, but Stickgold and others are beginning to provide a solution, and their answer ought to make any of us who are interested in mental fitness sit up (or rather, lie down) and take notice.

When I met him, Stickgold was just hitting his stride in what would turn out to be his specialized area of research—the connection between sleep and cognition, and in particular, between sleep and memory. I had become interested in his work partly because he was using non-traditional research tools: while many neuroscience experiments involve setting their subjects tedious made-up tasks, Stickgold had heeded the suggestion of one of his undergraduate research assistants and was using video-games as his mental challenges.

Using the computer-game Tetris he’d found what many of us knew anecdotally: that just as they fall asleep after long Tetris practice sessions, players hallucinate images of the peculiarly-shaped Tetris tiles drifting down their fields of vision. It turns out, Stickgold found, that even subjects with severe amnesia, who couldn’t recall having played the game at all, had the same experience. He hypothesized that those images must have something to do with a particular kind of skill memory, known as procedural memory— the type of physical memory created when you practice the violin, or learn to play tennis, or write calligraphy. This type of memory is often preserved even in people with severe amnesia. It seems likely that sleep is serving to somehow organize this type of memory. And it turns out that without any further practice, the subjects showed improvement in their Tetris scores after they’d “slept on” their newfound skill.

In a more traditional experiment, Stickgold has shown that after a snooze, people performed much better on a recently-learned finger-tapping task than after the same amount of time without sleep. Even doubling the amount of time spent learning the task had an insignificant performance benefit compared to simply getting a night’s sleep between sessions. He later showed that you don’t even need a whole night’s sleep but that an hour’s nap can give you the same learning benefits (thank Heavens, I say, from my new vantage-point as a sleep-scavenger).

Stickgold also showed that subjects who weren’t allowed to sleep soon after learning a new skill never regained the lost benefit, and—unless given more practice/sleep cycles—never got quite as good at the skill as those who’d been allowed to sleep soon after their training sessions.

More recently, Stickgold’s lab has shown that sleep makes a stunning difference in the ability of a particular kind of memory known as “declarative” memory to withstand interference. Declarative memory has to do with facts: what you ate for breakfast today, where you last put your keys, what you read in this morning’s paper—all of these are declarative memories. In an elegant experiment, Stickgold taught a group of people a list of word-pairs. Then one half the group was sent off to bed, while the other half was asked to remain awake.

At the end of the waiting period, half the sleepers and half the awake subjects were taught another set of “interference” words, pairs designed to confuse the memory of the original pairings. Immediately afterward, all subjects were tested on the initial word-pairs. The group that had received the interference teaching but slept beforehand averaged about 76% on the test. The group that received the interference training but had remained awake between the two sessions averaged about 32%.

Apparently, just sleeping on the new information had somehow cemented it into subjects’ minds so that it was resistant to interference. To those of us who are desperate to retain—accurately—the new information with which we are bombarded each day, such research is eye-opening, and potentially life-changing.

Stickgold is not the only scientist studying human sleep, of course—there are others working on sleep and cognition (most with results similar to Stickgold’s), and more researchers providing convincing evidence that sleep boosts your immune system, improves your mood, and—oh yeah—helps you stay awake when you want to be. There is also evidence that getting poor or insufficient sleep raises your risk of obesity, heart disease and diabetes; increases your blood pressure; and makes you accident-prone: all great reasons to get a good night’s sleep (which, according to scientists, is 8-9 hours of uninterrupted slumber). Yet, like many Americans, I am more motivated by the studies showing sleep’s cognitive benefits. I had been going to go hit the books when I finished this piece—now I think I’ll just hit the hay. Maybe you should, too.

-- Shannon Moffet has an MD from Stanford University School of Medicine, and is in her residency in emergency medicine at Highland Hospital in Oakland, CA. Her book on the brain (and eight dynamic brain-mavens, including Robert Stickgold) is The Three Pound Enigma: The Human Brain and the Quest to Unlock its Mysteries. Moffett recently appeared on The Brain Fitness Program, which aired nationwide on PBS.

We are proud to announce that SharpBrains has joined the soon-to-be-launched Scientific American Partner Network.

Also, please visit us tomorrow Monday to read a superb article on Sleep and the Brain by Shannon Moffett, author of the superb book The Three Pound Enigma: The Human Brain and the Quest to Unlock its Mysteries. Moffett recently appeared on the PBS special The Brain Fitness Program, which aired nationwide on PBS.

Have a nice Sunday!

A few recent accolades for our just released Market Report:

"This report is a must have for those in the brain health industry. Finally, an easy to use objective resource organizing the flurry of global brain health activities. The State of the Brain Fitness Software Market report not only tells the story of cognitive training and brain fitness, but provides a broad range of data allowing one to more swiftly navigate the current terrain and future landscape."
-- Debra Raybold, Director, Brain Health Center, Memorial Hospital Health System, South Bend, Indiana.

"This report is comprehensive to say the least. It provides an essential service for long term care organizations who want to provide mind-enhancing programs and services. There is a bewildering array of technology currently available. Few, if any, of us have the resources or expertise to sort through all the literature to help determine what may work best for a given group of residents, as well as what is most practical from a staff implementation perspective. The State of the Brain Fitness Market report helps sort out the strengths and capacities of these new technologies and answers some urgent questions."
-- Beverly Sanborn, Vice President of Activities and Memory Programs at Belmont Villages Senior Living.

"Brain health and function is becoming a top priority in our society. This is as true for school children as it is for corporate executives or aging baby-boomers. It is a typical misconception about the brain that there is only one general intelligence to care about. It has been shown that there are many different cognitive abilities each of which may be trained systematically. While physical exercise increases the rate of formation of new nerve cells, mental exercise promotes their survival. It is in this context that an explosion of new "brain-training" software modalities have been developed. The 2008 State of the Brain Fitness Software Market report is a timely analysis of the status of this new and emerging market. Preliminary results from scientific investigations evaluating several of the programs suggest not only short-term improvement in the trained skills, but a more long lasting and extended response spanning related mental functions. The review clearly states that the impact of mental training on brain aging and dementing disorders remains unknown, but it profiles each approach regarding degree of scientific scrutiny, market segment, modality, and specific parameter being trained. Healthcare and insurance leaders will benefit immensely from this state of the art, comprehensive overview and insightful analysis."
-- Larry McCleary, M. D., former acting Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Denver Children's Hospital.

For more information, check out our Market Report section. Have a great weekend.

Behavior Analysis and Learning, 4/E

• By W. David Pierce, Carl D. Cheney

Behavior Analysis and Learning is an essential textbook covering the basic principles in the field of behavior analysis and learned behaviors. Both active researchers, the authors are disciples of a coherent theory – experimental analysis of behavior – pioneered by B. F. Skinner. Using this theory as a base to explain human behavior, researchers must understand the interactions between an individual and his or her environment. Expanding on concepts of the past editions, this book:

• is an advanced introductory text on operant conditioning from a very consistent Skinnerian perspective;
• covers a range of principles from basic respondent conditioning through applied behavior analysis into cultural design;
• treats the topic from a consistent world view of selectionism;
• elaborates on Darwinian components and biological connections with behavior; and
• expands most chapters with revised references and additional citations.

The material presented in this book provides the reader with the best available foundation in behavior science. The discovery of functional relations between the organism and the environment constitute the objective foundation for this book. These functional relationships are described, and their application in accounting for old behavior and generating new behavior is illustrated. As such, this book is a valuable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in psychology or other behavior-based disciplines.

ISBN: 9780805862607

Published March 20 2008 by Psychology Press (formerly published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).

What stresses you out ?

Whatever it is, how you respond to it may have more consequences than you think. Let me show you how.

Recapping from last months article (see Stress and Neural Wreckage: Part of the Brain Plasticity Puzzle)...our bodies are a complex balancing act between systems working full time to keep us alive and well. Any change which threatens this balance can be referred to as stress. Cortisol, a key component of the stress response, does an excellent job of allowing us to adapt to most stressors which last more than a couple of minutes. However, having to endure a high stressor for longer periods than half and hour or so negatively impacts the brain in various ways.

Sustained exposure to higher than normal levels of cortisol can result in“neural wreckage” via the pruning back of the number of brain cell connections involved in the formation of new memories. In addition, by a variety of mechanisms, these conditions can also increase the rate of neuronal cell death while decreasing the rate of new cell growth. In short, experiencing excessive chronic, long term stress is bad for the brain.

One of the keys to understanding the effects of stress and relaxation is understanding the autonomic nervous system. Although somewhat reductionist, the following breakdown will work for our purposes here. 

A balancing act

Each person’s autonomic nervous system is responsible for regulating digestion, circulation, breathing and the rest of our unconscious physiology. There are two sides to this system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. For simplicity’s sake, we will refer to these two sidesrespectively as fight/flight and feel/heal.

The sympathetic or fight/flightside of the autonomic nervous system is responsible for going, doing, reacting and responding to events, both internal and external; while the parasympathetic or feel/healside promotes relaxation, absorption and processing (of both nutrients and information). It may help to visualize these two components as being on opposite sides of a seesaw. The more we activate our fight/flight side, the less we access our feel/heal mechanisms and vice versa. Although both sides are equally important for proper functioning, it is the feel/heal systems which allow for relaxation and correlated drops in cortisol levels after fight/flight activation. When fight/flight autonomic nervous system activity dominates for too long, with the suppression of feel/heal activity, the result is the “neural wreckage” mentioned above. Fortunately it is possible to activate and even “strengthen” the feel/heal side of our autonomic nervous system via several relatively simple practices. 

To err is human 

The fight/flight systems evolved primarily as a means of dealing with threats to our immediate survival. Both fortunately and unfortunately, this reactionary system seems to be wired to err on the side of over-activation.This is fortunate in that this increases our chances of survival when faced with uncertain dangers…for example, a potentially man-eating unidentified silhouette lurking in the night. The unfortunate side of this mechanism is that in today’s cerebral, high stimulation world, we are often triggered by non-life threatening events such as getting caught in slow moving traffic or even by our own stagnate, worrying thoughts of the non-existent past or future. 

Stay in the moment 

One way to protect from the damaging effects of fight/flight over activation is to minimize its ignition in the first place. Engaging one’s senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch roots us in the present. By dropping into the moment we are not only maximizing our ability to deal with the given situation at hand (thereby minimizing potentially stress inducing complications), we are also flooding our brains with sensory information, such as the colors of a sunset or the subtle feel of a breeze on the cheek. Since our conscious awareness is only able to take and process a finite amount of information at a time, fully engaging our senses limits the amount of (often stress generating) mental chatter our brains are able to entertain. Practicing meditation or other activities requiring sustained focused attention (for example, sports or zen flower arranging) is a good way to saturate oneself in the present; thereby reducing our tendency to over-react and over-think our way into anxiety. 

Catch zzzzzzs 

Sleep deprivation has been to shown to sensitize the brain regions responsible for our reacting to situations via fight/flight….giving us a hair trigger of sorts. During sleep cortisol levels drop asfeel/heal mechanisms dominate (with the exception of brief spurts of rapid eye movement). People who do not get enough sleep not only get more exposure to cortisol during the night, but also have higher resting levels of this stress hormone during the day. Catching that first wave of fatigue in the evening instead of pushing through towards that “second wind” is usually a good idea for those of us lacking the luxury of sleeping in. 

Breathing 

The fascinating thing about breathing is that, although it works predominantly without our conscious awareness, it is one of the few parts of our autonomic nervous system that we can easily exert conscious control over. In fact, the simple act of purposefully taking three or more long slow deep breaths has the ability to shift our autonomic nervous system away from reactive, sympathetic fight/flight dominance towards more relaxed parasympathetic feel/heal activity. This enables the body’s cortisol levels to drop; again protecting the brain from prolonged exposure. 

Get kinetic 

Breaking a sweat while getting the heart pumping has multiple positive effects when it comes to protecting the brain from the onslaught of excessive stress. First off, exercise increases the overall tone of our parasympathetic (feel/heal) workings. This translates into a better ability to relax with all the associated benefits. As previously mentioned, prolonged exposure to stressful situations can inhibit the brain’s ability to generate new neurons (neurogenesis). Exercise on the other hand, has been proven to promote neurogenesis, counter balancing damage experienced under times of sustained “non-relaxation”. 

I hope you find this brief overview into ways one can stave off stress induced brain damage useful. Next time we will investigate how diet can work to improve and support cognitive functioning.Till then, be calm and take it easy.

                                                                                                                                                                          --- Gregory Kellett has a masters in Cognitive Neurology/Research Psychology from SFSU and is a researcher at UCSF where he currently investigates the psychophysiology of social stress. He wrote this article for SharpBrains.com to contribute to our public education initiative.

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Related blog posts

- Stress and Neural Wreckage: Part of the Brain Plasticity Puzzle 

- 30-second Stress Test

- Stress Management Workshop for International Women's Day

- Are yoga and meditation good for my brain?

Boost your visuospatial skills and learn about your brain
-- By Dr. Pascale Michelon

Visuospatial skills are used everyday in many ways, ranging from going from one room to another in your house to solving a jigsaw puzzle and navigating in a new city.

One specific visuospatial skill has to do with moving spatial information around in your head. It is called mental rotation. 

Let’s take an example. Can you picture in your head an arrow pointing to the right? Now, turn this arrow so it points to the left. Done? 

You have just performed a mental rotation! People use this ability when they read maps, use tools, play chess, arrange furniture, drive in traffic, etc. 

Mental rotation relies mostly on the parietal areas of your brain (orange section in the brain image above). 

Here is a brain exercise to stimulate your mental rotation skill. 

For each number, decide whether it is a normal or reversed number (see example below).

Note: NO FLIPS allowed!

Answers

Row 1: normal, reversed, normal

Row 2: normal, normal, reversed

Row 3: normal, reversed, reversed

--- This article was written by Pascale Michelon, Ph. D., for SharpBrains.com. Copyright 2008. Dr. Michelon has a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology and has worked as a Research Scientist at Washington University in Saint Louis, in the Psychology Department. She conducted several research projects to understand how the brain makes use of visual information and memorizes facts. She is now an Adjunct Faculty at Washington University, and teaches Memory Workshops in numerous retirement communities in the St Louis area.

For more exercises, check out our Brain Teasers section.

A couple of great blog carnival editions (collections of blog posts around specific topics):

- Encephalon: neuroscience and psychology.

- Grand Rounds: health and medicine. 

And a good Radar Roundup of brain-related news. Note: our estimate for the whole market in 2007 is $225m, not $110m; and the Consumer Segment (mostly Nintendo Brain Age/ Academy, but not all) accounts for $80m.

Posit Science Corporation announced today, at the annual International Long Term Care Insurance Conference, the launch of a new program called  InSight(TM) for visual processing training.

We have not yet had the chance to analyze the program, but several pertinent open questions posed by Alvaro last month to Posit Science representatives (see Posit Science Brain Fitness Program 2.0: Open Questions) haven't yet been addressed. Specifically:

- "It is public information that Posit Science has been working on a visual processing program for over a year. And this acquisition (of separate company Visual Awareness, Inc) just happened. So the obvious questions are a) how are you going to integrate 2 different products and approaches, b) and in such a short timeframe, by March?"

- "In fact, more research will be needed to show the efficacy of whatever you launch in March, which is not the same that has been used in the ACTIVE and other trials (since that program was not fully automated)."

- "May I suggest, to you and all other developers, that we need to see more solid controls? watching some educational DVDs is not the best high-quality control that will allow you to claim your cognitive training has been shown to be better than other cognitive training products, simply that cognitive training itself works."

We will keep you updated.

Here you are have the bi-monthly Digest of our 10 most Popular blog posts. (Also, remember that you can subscribe to receive our blog RSS feed, or to our newsletter at the top of this page if you want to receive this digest by email).

  After many months of work we have just released our inaugural report The State of the Brain Fitness Software Market 2008 for corporate executives, health care professionals, and investors. This report defines the emerging brain fitness software market and analyzes the size and trends of its four customer segments. For top 10 highlights and to purchase the report at a 10% discount (before March 20th) click here: Report: The State of the Brain Fitness Software Market 2008

Brain Fitness News and Events

NEWS FEATURE-Brain fitness seen as hot industry of the future (Reuters 03/12): The most comprehensive article we have seen so far covering this emerging field, based on our market report and with original reporting. Highly recommended read.

Brain, Education and Health events: two great upcoming events. Learning & The Brain (April 26-29, 2008. Cambridge, MA) and Brain Health Accross the Lifespan (May 15th, 2008. San Francisco, CA).

Hack your brain (NetworkWorld 03/05): good article on our panel last week in O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, mostly focused on the potential use of drugs and devices for "cognitive enhancement".

Health & Wellness

The brain virtues of physical exercise: Dr. Adrian Preda writes a thought-provoking article challenging us to think about physical exercise as the most unappreciated form of "brain exercise". Click on the link to tell Dr. Preda your questions and participate in the debate.

Mind Hacks and the Placebo Effect: Once we decide to do something, shouldn't we try to "placebo ourselves" in order to get the most out of it?

Education

The Power of Mindsight: Daniel Goleman, of Emotional Intelligence fame, writes a great article on parenting and "reparenting".

Eric Jensen on Learning and the Brain: in-depth interview with Eric Jensen, who founded the Learning Brain Expo, a conference for educators, and written multiple books to make brain research accessible to parents and educators, including the Enriching Our Brains book we featured last month.

Education @ New York Times Magazine: superb articles on education reform, social entrepreneurship and venture philantropy. Not directly brain-related, but a very stimulating read.

Brain Teaser

Making Ends Meet: other type of "ends".

Have a great week!

Note: this may be my last post in a few days because my wife is about to give birth to our first baby...but there will be some posts by Contributors, so you can still come back and enjoy).

A few very interesting New York Times articles over the last couple of days, plus a great opportunity for clinicians and researchers in Latin America.

- Well: When a Brain Scientist Suffers a Stroke

"Dr. Taylor recounts the details of her stroke and the amazing insights she gained from it in a riveting 18-minute video of her speech at the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference in Monterey, Calif., last month."

- Cases Without Borders: Psychotherapy for All: An Experiment

"The clinic is at the forefront of a program that has the potential to transform mental health treatment in the developing world. Instead of doctors, the program trains laypeople to identify and treat depression and anxiety and sends them to six community health clinics in Goa, in western India."

- Attention Deficits That May Linger Well Past Childhood

"Dr. Philip Shaw, the National Institute of Mental Health psychiatrist who led the imaging study, was surprised and dismayed to see the results taken up to bolster that brand of doubt. “The findings, if anything, are very good evidence of yet another major biological difference between kids with A.D.H.D. and typically developing children,” he said. “The study was very much a question about the biology of A.D.H.D., and I think the findings certainly would feed into the idea of A.D.H.D. as being a very real problem with a very clear biological basis.”

Latin American clinicians and researchers: You can't miss this opportunity. Vaughan from Mind Hacks, one of the best brain & mind bloggers, and am sure a superb psychologist, is looking for opportunities to work with you for 6-12 months. You can contact him directly bas indicated below. He says in this post: 

- "I qualify as a clinical psychologist in September and would like to work in Latin America for 6 months to a year afterwards."

- "If you know anyone in Spanish speaking Latin America who might be interested employing a newly qualified clinical psychologist who speaks passable Spanish (with room for improvement) and has a PhD in cognitive neuropsychiatry, please get in touch."

Space and Sense

• By Susanna Millar

How do we perceive the space around us, locate objects within it, and make our way through it? What do the senses contribute?

This book focuses on touch in order to examine which aspects of vision and touch overlap in spatial processing. It argues that spatial processing depends crucially on integrating diverse sensory inputs as reference cues for the location, distance or direction response that spatial tasks demand. Space and Sense shows how perception by touch, as by vision, can be helped by external reference cues, and that ‘visual’ illusions that are also found in touch depend on common factors and do not occur by chance.

Susanna Millar presents new evidence on the role of spatial cues in touch and movement both with and without vision, and discusses the interaction of both touch and movement with vision in spatial tasks. The book shows how perception by touch, as by vision, can be helped by external reference cues, and that ‘visual’ illusions that are also found in touch depend on common factors and do not occur by chance. It challenges traditional views of explicit external reference cues, showing that they can improve spatial recall with inputs from touch and movement, contrary to the held belief.

Space and Sense provides empirical evidence for an important distinction between spatial vision and vision that excludes spatial cues in relation to touch. This important new volume extends previous descriptions of bimodal effects in vision and space.

ISBN: 9781841695259

Published April 07 2008 by Psychology Press.

We read today how Panel Urges Schools to Emphasize Core Math Skills (Washington Post). Now, there is a more fundamental question to consider: what should the schools of the XXI century look like and do?.

To create a much needed dialogue, I asked one the most thoughtful education bloggers around to share her (I guess it's "her") impressions with us. Enjoy!
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What do we want our schools to do, and for whom? 

--By eduwonkette

"Schools," Stanford historian David Labaree wrote, "occupy an awkward position at the intersection between what we hope society will become and what we think it really is." What do we want our schools to do, and for whom?

Schools, like most organizations, have many goals. These goals often compete with and displace each other. Relying heavily on the work of David Labaree, I will discuss three central goals of American schools – social efficiency, democratic equality, and social mobility. Throughout the history of American education, these goals have been running against each other in a metaphorical horserace. While they are not mutually exclusive, the three goals introduce very different metrics of educational success. More often than not, they sit uncomfortably with each other.

The first goal of American schools – what Labaree terms "social efficiency" - is to prepare children to assume their place in the economy. Advocates of the social efficiency goal include business leaders and elected officials. Magnates like Lou Gerstner of IBM or Bill Gates, and even your local congressman, stress that students' human capital must be developed to ensure that we maintain a competitive economy. In this view, public schools are a public good. Each citizen's welfare is enhanced by the existence of a strong economy. Increasing students' academic achievement, as measured by their test scores or their grades, is the gauge of goal attainment.

The social efficiency perspective accepts that society is stratified. What this means is that in the stadium of life, the seats behind home plate are limited. Some seats provide better views than others, and not everyone can sit in the best seats. Inevitably, some fans will be relegated to the bleachers. Others may not squeeze into the stadium at all. The school's function, then, is to fit students of varying ability into appropriate locations in this social hierarchy. In this view, our country needs beauticians, doctors, and store managers, and schools function as a powerful sorting machine that efficiently allocates students to their rightful positions.

A second goal of public schools is to achieve democratic equality. It was this goal that propelled Horace Mann's 19th century quest to spread the "common school" and achieve universal elementary education. The republic could not persist, Mann argued, if students lacked a shared socialization experience that initiated them as members of a common polity.

According to Labaree, the democratic equality goal has two signature components. First, it demands that schools prepare children to become active citizens in a democratic society. Students, at the very least, must have the tools necessary to serve on a jury, vote, and understand the rights and responsibilities implied by our social contract. Second, to ensure equality in the political arena, it requires that social inequality remains in check. Achieving this goal does not necessitate equal outcomes. But it does charge schools with attenuating, rather than exacerbating, preexisting inequalities.

Schools' achievement of the first component of the democratic equality goal proves more difficult to measure than social efficiency. That's because these outcomes are not observed until well after students leave K-12 education. The second component, relative equality, is easily quantifiable and has been incorporated into the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which mandates that schools close the minority and socioeconomic achievement gap.

A third goal of public schools is social mobility. One perspective on the social mobility goal sees schools as breaking the link between parents and children. In this argument, schools level the playing field by providing a neutral venue in which each student can showcase his natural talent and merit. Because all students have an equal opportunity to succeed in this contest, America's unequal rewards are fair and legitimate.

A less charitable view of the social mobility goal conceives of education as an object of struggle. In the fierce contest to maintain or enhance one's relative position, educational credentials are powerful weapons. Scholars writing in this tradition contend that privileged kids benefit from the alignment of their dispositions with those valued by the educational system. For example, these parents teach their kids to seamlessly express their preferences, to respond to questions rather than commands, and to look adults in the eye. Schools, in expecting the same behaviors, give upper-middle class kids a leg up on their peers. Irrespective of one's take on the efficacy of schools in promoting social mobility, both sides agree that the social mobility goal is achieved when one's initial status is not a strong predictor of one's educational and labor market outcomes. Put simply, the child of doctors should be no more likely to make it to graduate school than the child of construction workers.

What's the problem? Can't our schools do it all? When it comes to these broad conceptual goals, the answer is no. For example, consider the tension between the social efficiency and social mobility goals. Should we provide vocational opportunities for lower achieving students? Or does doing so relegate working class kids to working class jobs, since they are more likely to have lower test scores? There are similar tensions between the democratic equality and social mobility goals. Does the SAT allow the best students to be identified, or give a mobility advantage to affluent kids with private tutors?

Labaree neatly summed up the problem this way: "From the perspective of democratic equality, schools should make republicans; from the perspective of social efficiency, they should make workers; but from the perspective of social mobility, they should make winners." Because we cannot succeed in all of these goals contemporaneously, we would do well to frankly acknowledge these education policy tradeoffs at our dinner tables, in our faculty lounges, and in our statehouses.

Please let me know your thoughts about this question, "What do we want our schools to do, and for whom?", so we can create a good give and take. Also, by mid-April I will write a follow-up article, more specific about the skills and competencies we would want our schools to foster. Many thanks to Alvaro for the invitation to guest blog at SharpBrains!

--eduwonkette is an anonymous blogger who writes a fantastic Education Week blog described as "Through the lens of social science, eduwonkette takes a serious, if sometimes irreverent, look at some of the most contentious education policy debates."

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Related posts:

- Are Schools (Cognitively) Nutritive for Children's Complex Thinking? by Thomas O'Brien and Christine Wallach.

- The First Step Is Failure by Joanne Jacobs.

- Brain Connection: Eric Jensen on Learning and the Brain

- The Adolescent Brain: Interview with Robert Sylwester

- The Art of Changing the Brain: Interview with James Zull

Quick links to excellent resources:

1) FEATURE-Brain fitness seen as hot industry of the future (Reuters)

2) Learning & the Brain Conference for Educators and Clinicians. April 26-29, 2008. Cambridge, MA

3) Brain Health Across the Lifespan Seminar for Health & Aging Professionals. May 15th, 2008. San Francisco, CA

For more info,  

1) FEATURE-Brain fitness seen as hot industry of the future (Reuters)

Note: Probably the most comprehensive article I have seen so far covering this emerging field, based on our market report and with original reporting. Highly recommended read.

 2) Learning & the Brain Conference for Educators and Clinicians

- April 26-29, 2008. Cambridge, MA

Description: "Cognitive neuroscience has discovered that the brain is not ‘hardwired’ from birth, but holds a remarkable lifelong power to change—a phenomenon called ‘plasticity.’ Positive or negative environments, exercise, nurturance, learning, and other experiences continue to change the brain throughout life. These revolutionary findings point to new possibilities for ‘rewiring’ the brain to help overcome learning disorders and to enhance memory, learning, IQ and achievement in all learners."

3) Brain Health Across the Lifespan Seminar for Health & Aging Professionals

- May 15th, 2008. San Francisco, CA

Description: "Research indicates the human brain generates new brain cells and that environmental input such as aerobic exercise changes the structure and function of the brain. These findings and the work of others have unleashed a cultural shift in America that underscores the importance of brain health. This program will teach the basics of your brain and propose a brain health lifestyle. A proactive and lifelong lifestyle for brain health relates to development of brain reserves that may delay the onset of neurodegenerative disease. Leading scientists will share their findings in layman’s terms. Come and join the revolution in brain health!"