A Talented Mind

Power Your Brain and Life By Managing Your Body Clock

Before humans created formal ways to keep time, we relied on our natural body clock located in the brain’s hypothalamus.  Our internal clock is roughly a 24 hour cycle in humans, called the circadian rhythm, that guides our sleep and wakefulness, and is influenced by how the body reacts hormonally to light. Your internal body clock affects your mental and physical performance throughout the day.  In order to create a healthy cognitive lifestyle, you need to manage and take advantage of your own natural body rhythms, here is why:

• A study by Rockefeller University of mice found that throwing off their natural circadian rhythms (day and night cycle) over the long term seriously disturbed their body and brain, causing weight gain, impulsivity, slower thinking, and other physiological and behavioral changes. It is similar to what people experience with shift work or jet lag.

• Your body rhythms influence your core body temperature. Research at the University of Colorado found that a number of performance measures improved when body temperature was elevated, including working memory, subjective alertness, visual attention, and reaction time.

As you have probably experienced in your life, you need to maintain the proper balance of sleep and awake time to effectively keep your body clock in balance. Furthermore, according to Dr. Noboru Kobayashi’s summary of the article Rhythms of Mental Performance in the journal Mind, Brain, and Education, “mental performance is influenced by three factors that include sleep rhythm, time awake, and core body temperature.” Based on the article’s authors, people can take the following actions to control these three factors in their daily lives in order to promote good mental performance:

• Enhance Your Performance Condition: By having a well-lit and quiet environment, you can improve mental performance for activities such as studying and planning. When adjusting the lighting, take into consideration the added reflection off paper, books, furniture, and computer screens.

• Pace Difficult Tasks: When performing tasks that require very focused concentration on complex information, you can avoid fatigue by taking frequent breaks or alternating between tasks or subjects.

• Select The Best Time of Day: You can choose the best times during the day to perform different tasks. For mental tasks, the morning or the first part of the day is the best time because mental performance declines with time awake. Physical and artistic activities are best performed towards the end of the day.

• Assure Proper Sleep Quality: The preparation of your internal body clock to help you perform mentally and physically throughout the day can be established by getting adequate sleep. You may be able to compensate for a lack of sleep by napping just after lunch, and by eating breakfast to compensate for hypoglycemia from fasting overnight.

How you manage your internal body clock and rhythms impact your mental and physical performance throughout the day. We all have a natural day and night cycle. The goal is to first determine if your normal body clock has been disturbed and is out of balance. If not, you can then notice your different body rhythms day and night, and experiment with ways to work best within them. By doing so, you can take a step towards creating a healthy cognitive lifestyle.

Sources:

Complex Functions of the Central Nervous System, Sleep and Locomotion: Kenneth P. Wright, Jr., Joseph T. Hull, and Charles A. Czeisler, Relationship between alertness, performance, and body temperature in humans, Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol December 1, 2002283:(6) R1370-R1377; published ahead of print August 15, 2002, doi:10.1152/ajpregu.00205.2002

Kobayashi, Noboru, M.D., Mental Performance and Circadian Rhythm, Child Research Net

Society for Neuroscience (2009, October 26). Disruption Of Circadian Rhythms Affects Both Brain And Body, Mouse Study Finds. ScienceDaily

Seeing Red: Using Red In Your Cognitive Lifestyle

Take one minute of your day and count how many different shades of color you see in your environment. The total number may surprise you. What’s even more surprising is how all of those colors and shades have a direct effect on your mind. To create a healthy lifestyle for your brain’s development, you need to use the right colors for the task at hand or mood you want to create. Let’s take a close look at the color red.

Red unconsciously effects the mind and causes people’s reactions to become faster and forceful.  According to researchers at the University of Rochester and University of British Columbia, red is a signal to the brain that danger is lurking. It makes us more attentive and motivates us to focus on small details.  

According to Juliet Zhu, Ph.D., the author of the UBC study in the journal Science, “Thanks to stop signs, emergency vehicles and teachers’ red pens, we associate red with danger, mistakes and caution. “The avoidance motivation, or heightened state, that red activates makes us vigilant and thus helps us perform tasks where careful attention is required to produce a right or wrong answer.” 

Red can also have a negative effect. Exposure to red can trigger your nervous system to set in motion feelings of worry that distract your attention and drain your mental energy. In some cases, the color red can work against you and cause a stressful response. For example, I was in a cardiologist’s office getting a stress test for my heart. The office walls were painted in soft blue and green colors with only one very large painting on the wall. Every image in that painting was red and I found myself uneasy looking at it. I am sure that “uneasiness” is the last feeling the cardiologist wanted her patients to experience in an office that treats heart issues. She was obviously unaware of the emotional reaction red can trigger in the mind and body.

When you look at your environment, pay close attention to how you use the color red. Do you use it in ways that motivate you to pay special attention such as writing with red ink on a calendar the most important appointments you must attend? Are you using red in ways that unnecessarily cause you to have an stressful reaction? 

You should find ways to use the color red to help your mind focus, and avoid red when it would make you feel uneasy and distract your attention. By doing so, you will be taking a small step in your journey to a healthy cognitive lifestyle.

Sources:

University of British Columbia (2009, February 5). Effect Of Colors: Blue Boosts Creativity, While Red Enhances Attention To Detail.ScienceDaily. Retrieved January 14, 2012, from ScienceDaily

University of Rochester (2011, June 2). Color red increases the speed and strength of reactions. ScienceDaily. Retrieved January 14, 2012, from ScienceDaily

Give Your Brain a Hammer

When you praise children the right way, you give them a mental hammer they can use to solve problems and overcome challenges. A healthy cognitive lifestyle needs to include praising children for effort rather than smartness in order to raise kids who have the mental tools to feel in control of challenges, problems, and setbacks.

Parents have been taught that praising children for being smart or innately talented develops self-esteem that children can rely on when the going gets tough. Unfortunately, research has shown the opposite to be true. Children who are praised only for their intelligence versus effort may believe that a negative outcome really means that they are not smart. They can become frustrated and less confident.

Research Of Praise

Carol Dweck, Martin Seligman, and other researchers have studied the types of praise that develop resilient minds in animals and humans. Specifically, the following summarizes Dweck’s research of fifth graders as described in Gabrielle Principe’s wonderful book Your Brain On Childhood:

• Dweck first gave fifth-grade children puzzles that were easy for all of the kids to solve. 

• After the test, the children were told their score and then heard a single line of praise. Some were praised for their intelligence and told, “You must be smart at this.” Others were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

• Then, the children were given a similar test, but this time it was rigged so that none of them would succeed. 

• The children who had been praised for their effort earlier reasoned that they simply hadn’t tried hard enough on the second round, and generally enjoyed the challenge. The children who had been praised earlier for being intelligent reasoned that their failure was evidence that they weren’t really smart at all, and had a miserable time with the test.

• Dweck then gave the children a final series of puzzles that were as easy as the first set. The children who were initially praised for their effort did better than the first time around and raised their score by about 30 percent. But those who had been told they were smart performed worse than they did on the first test by about 20 percent and were less confident taking the test. So after a failure, those children who were praised for their smarts developed trouble with tasks they had solved just moments earlier.

What This All Means For Children’s Mental Development

As a Developmental Psychologist, Gabrielle Principe explains the conclusions drawn from the research of Dweck and others, “Telling children they are smart sends the message that they are naturally endowed. The problem is, this “fixed mind-set” praise takes the control out of children’s hands and leaves them with no formula for responding to failure. When faced with failure, the “smart” children didn’t seem to realize or were unable to respond to the fact that their environment had become controllable. Emphasizing effort, however, gave children a variable they could control. These children felt as if their success was in their control and, therefore, they weren’t thwarted by failure. In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that children who believe that innate intelligence is the key to success discount the importance of the effort. These children reason, “I am smart, so I don’t need to put out the effort.” For these children, effort is stigmatized as public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural endowments.

Study Debunks Myth About Gender and Math Performance

From Science Daily

A major study of recent international data on school mathematics performance casts doubt on some common assumptions about gender and math achievement — in particular, the idea that girls and women have less ability due to a difference in biology.

“We tested some recently proposed hypotheses that try to explain a supposed gender gap in math performance and found they were not supported by the data,” says Janet Mertz, senior author of the study and a professor of oncology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Instead, the Wisconsin researchers linked differences in math performance to social and cultural factors.

The new study, by Mertz and Jonathan Kane, a professor of mathematical and computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, was published on Dec. 12, 2011 in Notices of the American Mathematical Society. The study looked at data from 86 countries, which the authors used to test the “greater male variability hypothesis” famously expounded in 2005 by Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, as the primary reason for the scarcity of outstanding women mathematicians.

That hypothesis holds that males diverge more from the mean at both ends of the spectrum and, hence, are more represented in the highest-performing sector. But, using the international data, the Wisconsin authors observed that greater male variation in math achievement is not present in some countries, and is mostly due to boys with low scores in some other countries, indicating that it relates much more to culture than to biology.

The new study relied on data from the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the 2009 Programme in International Student Assessment.

“People have looked at international data sets for many years,” Mertz says. “What has changed is that many more non-Western countries are now participating in these studies, enabling much better cross-cultural analysis.”

The Wisconsin study also debunked the idea proposed by Steven Levitt of “Freakonomics” fame that gender inequity does not hamper girls’ math performance in Muslim countries, where most students attend single-sex schools. Levitt claimed to have disproved a prior conclusion of others that gender inequity limits girls’ mathematics performance. He suggested, instead, that Muslim culture or single-sex classrooms benefit girls’ ability to learn mathematics.

By examining the data in detail, the Wisconsin authors noted other factors at work. “The girls living in some Middle Eastern countries, such as Bahrain and Oman, had, in fact, not scored very well, but their boys had scored even worse, a result found to be unrelated to either Muslim culture or schooling in single-gender classrooms,” says Kane.

He suggests that Bahraini boys may have low average math scores because some attend religious schools whose curricula include little mathematics. Also, some low-performing girls drop out of school, making the tested sample of eighth graders unrepresentative of the whole population.

“For these reasons, we believe it is much more reasonable to attribute differences in math performance primarily to country-specific social factors,” Kane says.

To measure the status of females relative to males within each country, the authors relied on a gender-gap index, which compares the genders in terms of income, education, health and political participation. Relating these indices to math scores, they concluded that math achievement at the low, average and high end for both boys and girls tends to be higher in countries where gender equity is better. In addition, in wealthier countries, women’s participation and salary in the paid labor force was the main factor linked to higher math scores for both genders.

“We found that boys — as well as girls — tend to do better in math when raised in countries where females have better equality, and that’s new and important,” says Kane. “It makes sense that when women are well-educated and earn a good income, the math scores of their children of both genders benefit.”

Mertz adds, “Many folks believe gender equity is a win-lose zero-sum game: If females are given more, males end up with less. Our results indicate that, at least for math achievement, gender equity is a win-win situation.”

U.S. students ranked only 31st on the 2009 Programme in International Student Assessment, below most Western and East-Asian countries. One proposed solution, creating single-sex classrooms, is not supported by the data. Instead, Mertz and Kane recommend increasing the number of math-certified teachers in middle and high schools, decreasing the number of children living in poverty and ensuring gender equality.

“These changes would help give all children an optimal chance to succeed,” says Mertz. “This is not a matter of biology: None of our findings suggest that an innate biological difference between the sexes is the primary reason for a gender gap in math performance at any level. Rather, these major international studies strongly suggest that the math-gender gap, where it occurs, is due to sociocultural factors that differ among countries, and that these factors can be changed.”

New Film Tells Story of Torres’s Struggles With ADHD

By Andrew Keh, New York Times, December 17, 2011

“I’ve been around pro sports,” said Chang, who also owns D.C. United of Major League Soccer. “And there are lots of wonderful people, and there are a number of people who aren’t that wonderful. But Andres was one of the most charismatic and caring individuals I’d come across.”

Chang’s initial fondness for Torres grew when he read of his struggle with A.D.H.D. Chang, 55, long suspected that he, too, had the disorder because he was continually in trouble at school and with his parents.

“It struck a chord with me,” Chang said of Torres’s life story. “He struggled and struggled and struggled and finally found success.”

For years, though, success seemed beyond Torres’s grasp.

Born in Paterson, N.J., and raised in Aguada, P.R., Torres signed with the Detroit Tigers in 1998 as a 20-year-old full of promise. But promise took him nowhere.

In 2007, after nine middling seasons with four teams, Torres, just shy of 30, found himself back in the Tigers organization, still toiling in Class AA.

He began that year hitless in his first 30 at-bats and accepted that something would have to change. At the urging of Gene Roof, a minor league coordinator, Torres agreed to confront the diagnosis he had tried to ignore. Torres learned he had A.D.H.D. in 2002, but he used his prescribed medication for just a few days.

When Torres acquiesced to Roof’s advice, the difference in his play was stark. He finished the 2007 season with a .292 average. The next year, he batted .306 for the Chicago Cubs’ Class AAA team. And the year after that, when he signed with the Giants, he finally became, at 31, a regular in the major leagues.

Over three seasons with the Giants, he batted .252 with a .332 on-base percentage.

“With the medication, everything started clicking,” said Torres, who was traded to the Mets this month. “From then on, it changed.”

The narrative of the late bloomer is one Anthony Haney-Jardine, the director of the film, is eager to tell.

Haney-Jardine, who is known as Chusy, was recruited for the project in the winter of 2010 and approached Torres, as he does any other subject, with a measure of skepticism. He did not know much about Torres or the disorder. At the same time, he said, he was aware that certain medications were used recreationally and had read of athletes’ use of performance-enhancing drugs.

Baseball bans medications that treat A.D.H.D., like Adderall and Ritalin, but it grants therapeutic-use exemptions for players with specific problems. During the 2011 season, 111 exemptions were granted to major leaguers, 105 of which were for attention deficit disorder.

After viewing Torres’s struggles up close, Haney-Jardine was quickly convinced of his authenticity. He came to view Torres as a friend and was sure he had found a compelling subject.

“He’s not constructing an artifice,” Haney-Jardine said. “He’s terribly flawed, and the movie will show that. But he is trying to do good.”

A small film crew followed Torres for a year, compiling hundreds of hours of video. Haney-Jardine also used actors to recreate moments from Torres’s childhood, plucking everyday people from Torres’s old neighborhood to play key roles.

Having the disorder, Torres said, “is like being in your own world.” Haney-Jardine aimed to capture that.

Chang and Haney-Jardine each said he was struck by how often people came up to Torres to thank him for inspiring them. Such interactions often reduced Torres to tears.

Their hope is that the movie, which they plan to release sometime next year, will embolden even more people with the disorder, while educating a wider audience.

“It’s a story of a human being who happens to be a baseball player, who happens to have won a World Series ring, who happens to have A.D.H.D.,” Haney-Jardine said. “I don’t know how else to say this, but he is beautiful to watch.”

What’s a Problem? Don’t Let Your Mind Sugar-Coat the Word

A simple way to define the word ‘problem’ is: a situation that needs attention. Wikipedia authors describe one as “…any situation that invites resolution.”

That’s a nice way to put it – ‘invites resolution.’

A lot of folks are afraid of the word “problem.” To simply use the word – in relation to you or your business – is considered declaration of some sort of failure.

So, we sugar-coat the situation, re-phrasing it as a ‘challenge’ or ‘opportunity.’

While I support optimism, over-sweetening a situation can prevent people from realizing how bitter the problem may be.

No, don’t cry over spilled milk, instead figure out what knocked it over, and how to avoid spills in the future. Addressing a problem’s root cause – not ignoring it – will allow you to find the solution.

Source: Idea Sandbox

Image Source: Little People Blog

Athletic Performance and the Monthly Cycle

By Gretchen Reynolds, NYT

What makes a female athlete different from a male athlete? Watching Abby Wambach leap above defenders in a World Cup soccer game to head the ball decisively into the net, or seeing her teammate Megan Rapinoe streak a pass down the pitch, the answer might seem to be: not much. As a group, female athletes, like their male counterparts, display coordination, strength, grace, speed, stamina and a bracing competitiveness.

But there is a signal difference between adult men and women, on the field and off. Women menstruate. And menstruation, with its accompanying fluctuating levels of the female sex hormone estrogen, can have a considerable effect on how a woman’s body responds to the demands of exercise and competition, as a range of provocative new science makes clear.

Consider the results of a series of experiments published last month involving female rowers in Europe. Some of the women were competitive athletes, others hobbyists. Some were using oral contraceptives, which lower production of the body’s own estrogen while maintaining consistent levels of a synthetic variety; others were not. All of the women came into the lab multiple times throughout the month, including on days when their estrogen levels were at their peak and ebb, to complete a fitness test on a computerized rowing machine. Each time, their heart rates, oxygen consumption, power output, blood lactate levels and other measures of endurance, strength and general fitness were measured.

Those measurements, as it turned out, never varied, no matter where a woman was in her menstrual cycle. She could row just as long and powerfully whether her estrogen levels were high, low or in between; whether she used contraceptives; and whether she was an experienced, competitive athlete or a rowing duffer.

These findings are important, because many people, including coaches and athletes, have long contended that women’s endurance and overall performance may flag at certain times during the month — although there is disagreement about when those times are. And many female athletes have been told, or have chosen, to start or discontinue using birth control pills to manipulate their hormone levels.

But “endurance performance was not influenced by the phase of the normal menstrual cycle” or “the synthetic menstrual cycle” of those on oral contraceptives, the authors of these new studies write. Consequently, women “should not be concerned about the timing of the menstrual cycle with regard to optimized, sport-specific endurance performance.”

There may, however, still be reasons a woman to consider her period when planning training. A study published this year by scientists at the University of Melbourne in Australia, for instance, found that when women’s estrogen levels were at their highest, around the time of ovulation, they landed subtly differently while hopping than at other times of the month. Their feet splayed, the arch collapsing just a little bit more than it did when their estrogen levels were lower. The women also seemed, to a small degree, wobblier. “We contend that the changes in foot biomechanics may be due to the effects of estrogen on soft tissue and/or the brain,” said Adam Leigh Bryant, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne and lead author of the study.

But whether such small bodily changes actually affect injury risk is not clear. Other researchers have examined injury patterns in female athletes and found little consistent evidence that injuries, including the dreaded A.C.L. tear in the knee, are more common at any particular point during the menstrual cycle.

Still, said Dr. Bryant, active women probably “should be careful during the ovulatory phase of their menstrual cycles,” particularly if they play sports that involve hopping, landing and cutting, like soccer, basketball and, for those of us who are regrettably clumsy at striding off of curbs, jogging.

None of which, though, should suggest that female athletes are in some indefinable way more fragile than their male counterparts. Quite the reverse may in fact be true, according to some reverberant new research into athleticism and the menstrual cycle. In a series of experiments at the University of Denmark, scientists found that during exercise training, women’s tendons and ligaments didn’t grow as thick and powerful as men’s did, which had been expected. But after they reduced or stopped their workouts, women did not, in subsequent studies, lose their training benefits as quickly as men did.

Estrogen, the researchers concluded, had maintained the women’s hard-won strength and fitness gains better than men’s bodies had held on to theirs, for a simple evolutionary reason. It was protecting the women “against fast muscle and collagen loss when she is inactive,” as during pregnancy, the study’s lead author, Mette Hansen, a researcher at the Institute of Sports Medicine in Copenhagen, told me in an e-mail. Estrogen makes women stronger in adverse conditions, Dr. Hansen concluded, a lesson that the fine, battle-hardened United States women’s soccer team can take solace in going forward.

The Limits of Learning From Success

What’s the Latest Development?

We naturally think that by repeating successful behavior, more success will follow, e.g. if studying a lot led to a high exam score, studying a lot for the next one will produce a similar result. But a new study of professional basketball players calls into question our ability to correctly infer the consequences of our actions. The study found that if an NBA or WNBA player made a three-point shot, they were more likely to take another. However, after making the first shot, they were statistically less likely to make the second. 

What’s the Big Idea?

Our understanding of how positive reinforcement drives behavior comes mostly from laboratories where rats and monkeys receive a reward for behavior ‘X’ and will repeat behavior ‘X’ believing they will receive another reward. But those simple conditions do not mirror the natural world where variables are myriad. “Although people can’t help but learn from the reinforcement signals of the world—that’s just the way the mind is designed—we need to remember that these signals come with stark limitations…”

Source: Big Think