nurture

Brain Health Newsletter, February Edition, and Brain Awareness Week

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We hope you are enjoy­ing the grow­ing cov­er­age of Brain Fit­ness as much as we are. Below you have the Brain Fit­ness Newslet­ter we sent a few days ago-you can sub­scribe to this month­ly email update in the box on the right hand side.

In this post, we will briefly cover:

I. Press: see what CBS and Time Mag­a­zine are talk­ing about. Sharp­Brains was intro­duced in the Birm­ing­ham News, Chica­go Tri­bune and in a quick note car­ried by the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion news service.

II. Events: we are out­reach part­ners for the Learn­ing & the Brain con­fer­ence, which will gath­er neu­ro­sci­en­tists and edu­ca­tors, and for the Dana Foundation’s Brain Aware­ness Week.

III. Pro­gram Reviews: The Wall Street Jour­nal reviewed six dif­fer­ent pro­grams for brain exer­cise and aging, and the one we offer is one of the two win­ners. A col­lege-lev­el coun­sel­ing cen­ter starts offer­ing our stress man­age­ment one. And we inter­view a Notre Dame sci­en­tist who has con­duct­ed a repli­ca­tion study for the work­ing mem­o­ry train­ing pro­gram for kids with ADD/ ADHD.

IV. New Offer­ings: we have start­ed to offer two infor­ma­tion pack­ages that can be very use­ful for peo­ple who want to bet­ter under­stand this field before they com­mit to any par­tic­u­lar pro­gram: learn more about our Brain Fit­ness 101 guide and Exer­cise Your Brain DVD.

V. Web­site and Blog Sum­ma­ry: we revamped our home page and have had a very busy month writ­ing many good arti­cles. We also host­ed two “Blog Carnivals”- don’t you want to know what that means?
[Read more…] about Brain Health Newslet­ter, Feb­ru­ary Edi­tion, and Brain Aware­ness Week

Heart Rate Variability as an Index of Regulated Emotional Responding

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Con­tin­u­ing with the theme of a Week of Sci­ence spon­sored by Just Sci­ence, we will high­light some of the key points in: Appel­hans BM, Lueck­en LJ. Heart Rate Vari­abil­i­ty as an Index of Reg­u­lat­ed Emo­tion­al Respond­ing. Review of Gen­er­al Psy­chol­o­gy. 2006;10:229–240.

Defin­ing Heart Rate Variability
Effec­tive emo­tion­al reg­u­la­tion depends on being able to flex­i­bly adjust your phys­i­o­log­i­cal response to a chang­ing environment.

“… heart rate vari­abil­i­ty (HRV) is a mea­sure of the con­tin­u­ous inter­play between sym­pa­thet­ic and parasym­pa­thet­ic influ­ences on heart rate that yields infor­ma­tion about auto­nom­ic flex­i­bil­i­ty and there­by rep­re­sents the capac­i­ty for reg­u­lat­ed emo­tion­al responding.”

“HRV reflects the degree to which car­diac activ­i­ty can be mod­u­lat­ed to meet chang­ing sit­u­a­tion­al demands.”

The sym­pa­thet­ic (SNS) and parasym­pa­thet­ic (PNS) branch­es of the auto­nom­ic ner­vous sys­tem (ANS) antag­o­nis­ti­cal­ly influ­ence the lengths of time between con­sec­u­tive heart­beats. Faster heart rates, which can be due to increased SNS and/or low­er PNS activ­i­ty, cor­re­spond to a short­er inter­beat inter­val while slow­er heart rates have a longer inter­beat inter­val, which can be attrib­uted to increased PNS and/or decreased SNS activity.

The fre­quen­cy-based HRV analy­ses are based on the fact that the vari­a­tions in heart rate pro­duced by SNS and PNS activ­i­ty occur at dif­fer­ent speeds, or fre­quen­cies. SNS is slow act­ing and medi­at­ed by nor­ep­i­neph­rine while PNS influ­ence is fast act­ing and medi­at­ed by acetylcholine.

[Read more…] about Heart Rate Vari­abil­i­ty as an Index of Reg­u­lat­ed Emo­tion­al Responding