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If that’s true then help me find the other 90%.

homersbrain

Or maybe that’s a myth.

This is an idea that goes back to early 1800’s, often promoted by the phrenologists who thought that specific human behaviors and characteristics could be deduced by the pattern and size of bumps on the skull.

This was a hotly debated topic: some believed that brain function could be localized to particular regions of the brain and others believed that the brain acted as a whole.

Dr. Eric Chudler, a behavioral neurophysiologist, and Research Associate Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Washington, wrote a well researched article that refutes the 10% concept.

The myth started 100 years ago and has stuck.

A prominent researcher, Karl Spencer Lashley (1890-1958), believed that memory was not dependent on a specific part of the cerebral cortex. Rather the loss of memory was proportional to the amount of cerebral cortex that was removed.

He showed that the ability of rats to solve simple tasks, such as mazes and visual discrimination tests, were not affected by large cerebral cortical lesions. As long as a certain amount of cortex remained, the rats appeared normal on the tests he did.

Those experiments led to the belief that only a small portion of the brain is used.

Next thing you know prominent people were supporting the idea that we don’t use much of our brain’s capacity – folks like physicist Albert Einstein and anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Who’s counting!

Give or take a few, there’s about 100 billion neurons in the human brain. Plus there’s another ten to fifty times that number of glial cells in the brain.

Would you behave normally without 90 billion neurons and billions of glial cells? Would you be just fine if 90% of your brain was removed?

Scientists have proven this 10% idea is a myth.

Brain imaging (positron emission tomography scans or PET scans) show that much of your brain is active while you perform different tasks.

You can develop disabilities as a result of damage to small areas of your brain, such as those caused by strokes. And some neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease also affect only specific areas of the brain. Damage to even a small part of the brain seems to have significant effects.

Evolution wouldn’t work this way either.

From an evolutionary perspective, it is unlikely that a brain that is 90% useless would develop. The brain is an expensive organ to maintain and utilizes a large supply of the body’s energy resources.

Dr. Chudler’s conclusion? There is no hidden storehouse of untapped brain power. We use all of our brain.

Dr. Chudler’s article appeared on the Brain Connection website:
http://www.brainconnection.com/

Also, The Brain Blog written by Michael Merzenich, PhD is a good read.

And don’t let those 100 billion neurons sit around idly. They could be solving some of these tough puzzles available on our website: braingamessoftware.com

phrenology.jpg

By the way, those wacky phrenologists not only thought they could read the bumps on your skull, but they would write all over your head. Warning: take them off your medical provider list.

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If you’ve ever wanted to know what it’s like to be a dog, this book is for you.


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“Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know” is a new book by Alexandra Horowitz that shows what the world is like from a dog’s point of view.

It may be the first neurological study of dogs.

Horowitz writes that their sense of smell, hearing and vision shape their perception of their surroundings.

Creatures of the nose.

Dogs have extraordinary sense of smell. A beagle nose has 300 million receptor sites, for example, compared with the six million that we have.  And they can smell things continuously because of their snout design.

We have exhale before we can inhale fresh air.  On the other hand, dogs pull air deeper into their nose as well as exhaling some air through the side slits in their snout.  So dogs can hold a scent longer than we can and they can continuously refresh what they smell without interruption.

The nose knows.

Not only do dogs detect odors better than us but this continuous sniffing provides them with a sense of time based on the strengthening and weakening of the odor.

For example a dog senses a familiar odor ahead (usually a spray of some dog’s urine), it grows stronger as the dog approaches and grows weaker as the dog moves on.  This gives a dog a sense of the passage of time.

Seeing more.

A dog’s vision also affects its sense of time.

Dogs have a higher “flicker fusion” rate than we do, which is the rate at which retinal cells can process incoming light, that is “the number of snapshots of the world that the eye takes in every second.”

This is one of the reasons dogs respond so well to subtle human facial reactions: “They pay attention to the slivers of time between our blinks.”

It also explains why dogs are so good at grabbing a Frisbee or a tennis ball right out of the air.  Horowitz says that dogs are not only seeing the world faster than we do but actually seeing a little more of it each second.

Dogs with long noses, those bred for hunting or herding, have photo¬receptors clustered along a horizontal band spanning the middle of the eye. This is called a visual streak, and those dogs “have better panoramic, high-quality ¬vision, and much more peripheral vision than humans.”

Responding to your tone.

We know that dogs hear high pitched sounds that we can’t hear.  But their ability to pinpoint where a sound is coming from is not as good as ours.  Their hearing helps them find the general direction of a sound and then their acute sight and sense of smell take over.

And dogs don’t really understand exactly what you are saying when you say “sit.”  They are responding to the “prosody” (the patterns of stress and intonation in a language).  High-pitched sounds mean something different than low sounds; rising sounds contrast with falling sounds,” Horowitz writes.

Dogs respond to baby talk “partially because it distinguishes speech that is directed at them from the rest of the continuous yammering above their heads.”

From wolves to pets.

While dogs are descendants of wolves they’ve discarded many of their traits along the way.  For example they don’t form packs and they hunt individually rather than cooperatively.

And unlike wolves, dogs will look you in the eye.  Horowitz writes that dogs seem to be predisposed to inspect our faces for information, for reassurance, for guidance.

insideadog

Here’s a good description of the book and a short video at Simon and Schuster, the publisher’s site.

One thing is for sure, despite a strong sense of smell, super vision and hearing, dogs are just not ever going to be good at playing games on their PC’s.  So exercise some of your human superiority and show your pet what a wiz you are a gaming.  There are lots of them at our website, Brain Games Software.

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You keep losing your keys, forgetting appointments, you don’t remember someone’s name, your brain feels a bit fried.

Is this a bad sign?

playingcomputergame

The bad news is that as we get older many of us suffer from declining mental facilities.   By the time people get into their 70’s there is a pretty good chance of suffering a decline.

One in three American’s over 71 years old have some diminished mental function.

A study by Duke University Medical Center, published last year in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that 22% (5.4 million people) of that population have begun to see their mental facilities decline.

Add that to a previous estimate of 3.4 million Americans with full dementia and that exceeds one third of the 25 million Americans over 71 years old. That’s more than eight million people.

Is one in three of us doomed to lose our mental capacities?

There’s plenty you can do to try to avoid that fate. Here’s some commonly recommended activities that can help to keep your brain fit.

Top Ten Brain Fitness Techniques:

  1. Play games. Try the challenging ones like Sudoku, crosswords, and mind teasers. Great mental stimulation and good for relieving stress.
  2. Eat the right fat. Stick with the healthy Omega-3 fats like salmon, nuts, flax seed and olive oil.
  3. Exercise. Physical exercise gets your blood pumping into your brain and feeds it healthy oxygen.
  4. Learn a new skill. Learning a language, or woodworking or how to cook can work out a different part of your brain and keep you stimulated.
  5. Change your habits. Break out of your daily routine and do something you normally don’t do like take a walk at lunch or go to the theater.
  6. Change your routine. If you are right handed, try using your left hand for simple tasks (I’m trying this now and it’s kind of hard!) Drive a different way to work. Anything that forces your brain to take notice that you are doing something different.
  7. Read. Not the same old stuff you normally read but something out of your regular area of interest. Read any history lately? Or science? It can open your mind up to new interests.
  8. Hang out. You need to be social, hang around your friends and get into lively discussions. Great for your brain and entertaining too.
  9. Write. You can write about anything – your childhood, vacations, work, dreams, or anything that pops into your head. It stimulates your mind and activates areas of the brain you may not be using. Who knows, maybe there’s a best seller locked up in that brain.
  10. Drink to your health. OK, within reason. A glass (for women) or two (for men) is the maximum recommended daily dose of alcohol. Drinking in moderation has healthful benefits such as fighting heart disease as well as relieving stress and may lower the risk of dementia. (The definition of a drink: 12 ounces (oz.) of beer, 5 oz. of wine or 1.5 oz. of 80-proof distilled spirits.)

That’s pretty easy. All-in-all, it’s kind of fun to change what you do every day and to discover new things.

Ready to start with a new game? Visit our site to see what’s new. Braingamessoftware.com

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Rosemary.  People have consumed it for over 1,000 years.
rosemary2
Any good cook will use it in an Italian dish. It grows like a weed in dry climates like the Mediterranean.

Plus, researchers describe it as the perfect drug to protect brain cells from the ravages of free radicals.

It’s good for your brain. How about that?

A collaborative group from the Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham Institute) in La Jolla, CA and in Japan, report that the herb rosemary contains an ingredient that fights off free radical damage in the brain.

The active ingredient in rosemary, known as carnosic acid (CA), protects the brain from stroke and neurodegeneration that is due to injurious chemical free radicals.

These radicals are thought to contribute not only to stroke and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s, but also to the ill effects of normal aging on the brain.

Why is rosemary a “perfect” drug?

It seems that the carnosic acid is activated by the free radical damage itself. So the carnosic acid is only used when it’s actually needed. Technically this is a “pathological-activated therapeutic” which basically activates your body’s own defense system.

If you want more details, read this article in Science Daily.

If you want to cook with rosemary, here’s something tasty and authentically Italian:

Rosemary focaccia, from Gourmet Magazine.
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/106275

What better way to eat your brain healthy meds.

Or if you’re looking for a way to relax, playing a game is a good idea. There’s some good stress reliving games here: braingamessoftware.com.

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Your brain’s BFF

Who would have thought that blueberries could be your best friend forever?

blueberries1

You’ve probably heard about oxidation, free radicals and the benefits of antioxidants.

But it’s probably worth recapping the benefits of antioxidants for your brain.

Oxidation is a chemical reaction that can produce free radicals, which start chain reactions that damage cells. Oxidative stress is thought to contribute to the development of a wide range of diseases.

And, by the way, the brain is particularly vulnerable to oxidation damage because it has a high metabolic rate.

Although oxidation is a necessary part of our human chemistry, sometimes enough is enough. You can slow and prevent some oxidation by eating foods that are rich in antioxidants.

It’s just like your mother told you, and probably your family doctor. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables because they are high in antioxidants. Additionally, grain cereals, legumes and nuts are beneficial. Raw is better because cooking exposes food to oxygen and takes away the antioxidants.

What about just gobbling up some supplements?

Some studies have suggested antioxidant supplements have health benefits but other large clinical trials didn’t find any benefit for the supplements tested. And taking excessive dosages may be harmful.

So stick with the fresh food. You get the nice healthy antioxidants along with all those other vitamins, minerals and fibers that are great for the rest of your body.

If you want to know more about antioxidants, there’s a lot of details at this Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antioxidants

Blueberries – one of the best antioxidant foods to eat.

There’s nothing to eat at this website but there’s oxidant-free games: braingamessoftware.com

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When it comes to mental fitness, how did this brainy guy keep his noggin’ in shape?

alberteinstein.jpg

Albert Einstein showing off one of his “brain fitness” techniques.

Note to Al: You should be wearing a helmet!

Nearly nine out of ten people think that it is possible to improve brain fitness.

That comes from an interesting study released by the American Society On Aging, called the Attitudes and Awareness of Brain Health Poll.

What did people think was useful for keeping their brains fit? These are the top eight activities that they think are good for the brain:

  • Avoiding tobacco (70%)
  • Eating fresh fruits and vegetables (67%)
  • Doing crossword puzzles (67%)
  • Reducing stress (64%)
  • Limiting alcoholic drinks to one per day or fewer (63%)
  • Spending time with family and friends (62%)
  • Seeing the doctor regularly (61%)
  • Working with numbers (60%)

By the way, you can see that your mum was right about the veggies.

They also enthusiastically support the idea of brain check-ups.

Nine out of ten people interviewed say that it is important for people to have their thinking abilities checked just like they have physical health check-ups.

This study is a good read. In addition to details about how people feel about keeping brain healthy, there are reports from experts in the field that articulate the research supporting the benefits of keeping your brain fit.

The poll, sponsored by the MetLife Foundation, surveyed a total of 1,000 residents of the United States who participated in telephone interviews conducted by Harris Interactive. (OK, just because Snoopy is their spokesdog, it doesn’t reflect on the quality of this poll. Ahh, is it possible to have a spokesdog?)

Pedal over to our website sometime: braingamessoftware.com

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Yes!  Here’s the plan:

1. Run to the market

2. Buy these yummy looking antioxidants

3. Play Sudoku while you are eating them

blueberries2

Have you heard of the “brain plasticity movement?”

Read this article in the US World Report about keeping your brain fit. I thought this article had something to do with credit cards, but no, it’s the plastic in your head they are talking about.

For decades, scientists assumed that humans were born with all the brain cells they’d ever have. Then, in the 1970s, researchers showed that new brain cells and neural pathways form through the end of life.

“This was the beginning of the brain plasticity movement, the understanding that when we challenge our brains, the brain cells sprout new dendrites, which results in increased synapses, or contact points.” according to Dr. Gene Cohen, director of the Center on Aging, Health and Humanities at George Washington University.

The Incredible Shrinking Brain

Here’s a fact you don’t really want to think about too much : your brain is shrinking.

The article points out that this inevitable physical changes starts in early adulthood but become especially marked after about age 60 or so. Gradually, the brain shrinks, losing around 0.5 percent to 1 percent of its volume each year after that age threshold.

That explains why I can’t remember where the heck I left my car keys.

In any case, the story points out there is a growing consensus that there is plenty that can be done to slow the age-related declines in memory, mental speed, and decision making that affect most people.

Like many experts say, a healthy diet (fruits and veggies have lots of antioxidants), physical exercise (anything except watching TV) and mental stimulation (like playing brain games) is what you need.

And if you need a source of games to play, we’ve got a bunch at our site, Brain Games Software.

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A guest post from Kat Sanders. She regularly posts at The Pharm Tech Blog.

There are many reasons to be grateful to technology and the millions of ways it has made life easier and more comfortable for all of us.

We cannot imagine a world without technology today, because it has crept into every aspect of our lives and made itself indispensable in more ways than one.

Not many people (unless they’re die-hard technophobes) have anything against technology, but if there’s one grouse I have, it’s that the hundreds of thousands of wonderful invention of mankind have contributed to the comprehensive dulling of the human brain.

When you think of it, our brain cells have less work to do because of the conveniences that technology offers us:

  • We don’t remember things that we used routinely commit to memory: How many of us bother to remember phone numbers of friends and family members when it’s just easier to dial them from the contact lists on our mobile phones? And how many of us keep directions in mind after the advent of the wonder we call GPS? You have to admit that technology has made things easier for the idiots among us, but it has not done anything useful for the longevity and continued health of our neurons.
  • Everything is handed to us on a platter that we don’t have to work for it anymore: With the Internet and related technology, searching for information has become so much easier than it was a decade ago. While you would think this is a good thing, what we do not realize is that there is a surfeit of information out there and not many of us bother to check which sources are authentic and which are not. This is because information is being handed to us without us having to go in search of it, without our brains being involved, that we stop questioning its veracity.
  • Mindless activities are replacing intelligent ones: Technology and gaming have come together to bring violence and action into our lives. While games, those of the indoor kind, were supposed to keep your brains in working order in another life, today, they serve to exercise nothing except your hand and eyes. Your brain is hardly involved, and you react instinctively rather than intelligently.

With the high occurrence of mental illnesses like Alzheimer’s and other degenerative brain diseases, it’s time to focus on mental health and on activities that help improve you’re cognitive and memory functions.

By-line:
This article is written by Kat Sanders, who regularly blogs on the topic of pharmacy tech certificate at her blog The Pharm Tech Blog.  She welcomes your comments and questions at her email address: katsanders25@gmail.com.

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That’s right – the food industry has turned us into junkies.
We crave fat, salt and sugar. This is not part of our DNA. It’s an addiction that we have acquired over the past couple of decades.

endofovereating

David Kessler, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration has written a book called “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.” It addresses the problem of obesity in our society and how the food industry has been contributing to our craving for unhealthy food.

Dieting doesn’t work.

Kessler wanted to understand why people continue to eat even when they are no longer hungry.

“Why is it that Americans continue to crave such foods as potato chips and candy bars long after they feel full? No one has ever explained what’s happening to them and how they can control their eating,” he says in his book.

Kessler is a 57-year-old pediatrician and professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.

He was commissioner of the FDA from 1990 to 1997. He worked hard to improve the labeling of food products and was a vocal opponent of the tobacco industry.  In fact he should get a lot of credit for the recent successful legislation that gives the FDA the responsibility to regulate tobacco products.

Kessler found that there’s a “bliss point” – a combination of sugar, fat and salt – that makes a food practically irresistible.

He says that those ingredients excessively activate the rewards circuits of the brain. They over-stimulate the rewards-circuitry of the brain.

Can you order healthy food in restaurants?

Kessler says “Much of what we eat in restaurants is fat on fat on sugar on fat with salt. Pick any dish in any mid-American restaurant. What is spinach dip? Fat on salt with green stuff. Look at the average salad we’re eating. If you look at the bacon, the croutons, the cheese – it’s fats, salts and a little lettuce.”

He warns that we are conditioned by the food, that it actually affects the motivational circuits in our brains. We get conditioned as kids when we eat tons of fat, salt and sugar all the time. Eventually the neuro-circuitry gets laid down and it stays with us for life.

Plus there are plenty of cues – visual cues, ads, fast food available everywhere. This stimulus activates your craving and you want food when you aren’t even hungry.

Some food industry executives admit that fat, salt and sugar are the key components of a successful food product.

So the food industry designs highly stimulating products, and consumers come back for more. Nothing sells as much as something that stimulates the rewards-circuitry of the brain. It’s all about selling product.

The solution for Dr. Kessler is not more regulation but changing the perception of bad food.  That’s what happened with cigarettes. Eventually people got turned off by the dangers of smoking. That can happen with the consumption of unhealthy food as well.

Remember the movie Super Size Me?

The director Morgan Spurlock described (after a few weeks of only eating at McDonald’s) how he felt after a McDonald’s meal. He thought it was a lot like how a junkie must feel after shooting heroin.

Right away you feel great as the fat, salt and sugar kicks in and your system goes into overdrive. Soon, after the stuff wears off, you fell like hell – tired, lethargic, cranky. Time for another fix.

There’s a good interview with Dr. Kessler in the Wall Street Journal here.

And a good interview on Minnesota Public Radio here.

Want to get your mind off of food? Try playing a casual game or two. We’ve got plenty at our web site – Brain Games Software. And none of our games contain any fat, salt or sugar.

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Sure why not.  We could all use some good news these days.

ice-cream-sundae

It seems that fat-rich foods can trigger long term memory.

I can attest to that.  I can remember the last gelato I had like it was minutes ago.  Well, actually it was.

In any case University of California at Irvine researchers have found that oleic acids from fat turn into a compound called (remember this for your spelling bee) oleoylethanolamide (OEA).

This OEA is great stuff.  First of all it sends a message to your brain that you are full so you don’t keep eating that entire gallon of chocolate mint chip ice cream.

Fat is a wonderful thing?

It can also reduce your appetite, produce weight loss and lower blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels. (Are we talking about fat here?)

Short-term to long-term memories

Best of all the researchers found that OEA can cause short-term memories to transform into long-term memories.  Pretty amazing stuff because it’s generally pretty hard to push those fleeting memories into the hard wired amygdala section of your brain.

The research team, lead by Daniele Piomelli, the Louise Turner Arnold Chair in Neurosciences, and Professor James McGaugh from UCI, reported that this was probably more important to our ancestors.

“Remembering the location and context of a fatty meal was probably an important survival mechanism for early humans,” Piomelli said.

Today that might not be as beneficial. While OEA contributes to feelings of fullness after a meal, it could also create long-term cravings for fatty foods which, we all know, can cause obesity.

Study results appear in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. You can read a brief article on the Science Daily web site.

Here’s some more good news.  Playing casual games can relieve stress, and they are not fattening.  We’ve got lots of games at our site, Brain Games Software.  Come by and visit.

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