brain-damage

Stress and Neural Wreckage: Part of the Brain Plasticity Puzzle

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Victoria Crater MarsEdi­tor’s Note: Below you have a very insight­ful arti­cle on stress by Gre­go­ry Kel­let, a researcher at UCSF. Enjoy!

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“My brain is fried, toast, fraz­zled, burnt out. How many times have you said or heard one ver­sion or anoth­er of these state­ments. Most of us think we are being fig­u­ra­tive when we utter such phras­es, but research shows that the bio­log­i­cal con­se­quences of sus­tained high lev­els of stress may have us being more accu­rate than we would like to think.

Crash Course on Stress 

Our bod­ies are a com­plex bal­anc­ing act between sys­tems work­ing full time to keep us alive and well. This bal­anc­ing act is con­stant­ly adapt­ing to the myr­i­ad of changes occur­ring every sec­ond with­in our­selves and our envi­ron­ments. When it gets dark our pupils dilate, when we get hot we sweat, when we smell food we sali­vate, and so forth. This con­stant bal­anc­ing act main­tains a range of sta­bil­i­ty in the body via change; and is often referred to as allosta­sis. Any change which threat­ens this bal­ance can be referred to as allo­sta­t­ic load or stress.

Allo­sta­t­ic load/stress is part of being alive. For exam­ple just by get­ting up in the morn­ing, we all expe­ri­ence a very impor­tant need to increase our heart rate and blood pres­sure in order to feed our new­ly ele­vat­ed brain. Although usu­al­ly man­age­able, this is a change which the body needs to adapt to and, by our def­i­n­i­tion, a stressor.

Stress is only a prob­lem when this allo­sta­t­ic load becomes over­load. When change is exces­sive or [Read more…] about Stress and Neur­al Wreck­age: Part of the Brain Plas­tic­i­ty Puzzle

Looking inside the Brain: is my Brain Fit?

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MRI scanner neuroimaging

Today we have the plea­sure to have Dr. Pas­cale Mich­e­lon, one of our new Expert Con­trib­u­tors, write her first arti­cle here. Enjoy, and please com­ment so we hear your thoughts and engage in a nice conversation.

(Btw, if you notice some sim­i­lar­i­ty between the col­ors in the fMRI scan below and the look & feel of this site…well, the rea­son is that those orange-grey fMRI col­ors were our inspi­ra­tion! the orange col­or denotes the most brain activation).

- Alvaro

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You have prob­a­bly heard about CAT and MRI scans (pro­duced thanks to machines like the one to the top right). So you know that these are tech­niques that doc­tors and sci­en­tists use to look inside the brain.

You have prob­a­bly also heard about brain fit­ness and how impor­tant it is to keep a healthy brain to be pro­tect­ed against age-relat­ed and dis­ease-relat­ed brain damages.

The ques­tion we ask here is the fol­low­ing: Can we use brain scans to eval­u­ate how fit the brain is? Before we try to answer this ques­tion let’s start with the basics and try to under­stand how brain scans work.

Brain imag­ing, also called neu­roimag­ing, allows one to [Read more…] about Look­ing inside the Brain: is my Brain Fit?

MindFit, Posit Science, Happy Neuron

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The Seat­tle Times has a good brief arti­cle today on Posit Sci­ence, Hap­py Neu­ron Games and us (they men­tion Mind­Fit Brain Work­out to “work on short-term mem­o­ry, nam­ing, divid­ed atten­tion, plan­ning, hand-eye coor­di­na­tion and oth­er cog­ni­tive measures.”).

Check Is your brain ready for the challenge?

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For the record (giv­en a read­er’s com­ment below I changed the word “focus” with “men­tion”), we think Posit Sci­ence offers a great and inten­sive pro­gram most­ly focused on audi­to­ry pro­cess­ing, that Hap­pyNeu­ron offers a wider vari­ety of games online so it is a less struc­tured “pro­gram”, and Mind­Fit is a com­bi­na­tion of both approach­es (struc­tured pro­gram, wide vari­ety). Each of them are use­ful tools-it depends on what you may want to accom­plish. Sharp­Brains does not pro­duce any of them.

Cogmed, Freeze-Framer, IntelliGym, MindFit, Posit Science

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We are spend­ing more time talk­ing to jour­nal­ists these days. A fre­quent ques­tion we receive is, “OK, which com­put­er-based pro­grams do you con­sid­er to be Brain Fit­ness Pro­grams, not just “games” for pure fun”?.

Our answer: the rate of devel­op­ment of new pro­grams by neu­ro­sci­en­tists world­wide is real­ly increas­ing, and there are already a few out there that com­bine good under­ly­ing sci­ence with embed­ded qual­i­ty assess­ments and user-friendly guide­lines and exercises from a fit­ness and pre­ven­tion (vs. med­ical “pre­scrip­tion”) per­spec­tive. Some of these are:

Cogmed Work­ing Mem­o­ry Train­ing pro­gram (RoboMemo), helps chil­dren with atten­tion deficits to over­come the work­ing mem­o­ry gap. and is dis­trib­uted exclu­sive­ly through select­ed clin­i­cal providers.

Freeze-Framer is a bio­met­ric-based sys­tem that helps peo­ple of all ages and occu­pa­tions (from stu­dents to nurs­es and traders) get into The Zone of opti­mal learn­ing and per­for­mance by man­ag­ing the neg­a­tive effects of stress and anx­i­ety. Our part­ner is the Insti­tute of HeartMath.

Intel­li­Gym  pro­vides a men­tal work­out to improve core bas­ket­ball abil­i­ties, such as coor­di­na­tion, atten­tion con­trol, periph­er­al vision, and perception.  Yes, this can be trained. It is bas­ket­ball spe­cif­ic, so we don’t rec­om­mend it for oth­er sports. Our part­ner is ACE.

Mind­Fit helps train 14 dif­fer­ent cog­ni­tive func­tions that are impor­tant for healthy aging. Even if the activ­i­ties are help­ful for peo­ple of all ages (I per­son­al­ly use it as my “brain gym” dur­ing flights, being in my mid-30s), the look & feel is more appro­pri­ate for peo­ple over 50, so we rec­om­mend it main­ly for that group. Our part­ner is Vig­or­ous Mind.

Posit Sci­ence offers an inten­sive pro­gram for train­ing core audi­to­ry pro­cess­ing abil­i­ties. Audi­to­ry pro­cess­ing is one of the areas that typ­i­cal­ly decline with age, so this would be a great start­ing point for any­one, usu­al­ly above 60 giv­en the mar­ket­ing we see in their web­site, who may be expe­ri­enc­ing prob­lems with his/ her hear­ing and under­stand­ing capa­bil­i­ties. We do not offer this pro­gram through our web­site, but cer­tain­ly respect their sci­en­tists and research.

We are con­stant­ly look­ing for new ones, so keep tuned.

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