Smoking May Lead to Cognitive Decline, Study Finds
Michael Cerreto, MS, CSC, LDR, Edu-K
A new study published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry found that “Compared with never smoking, middle-aged male smokers experienced faster cognitive decline in global cognition and executive function.” The study also found that “Smoking is a possible risk factor for dementia, although its impact may have been underestimated in elderly populations because of the shorter life span of smokers.”
To create a healthy lifestyle for your mind, you need to avoid substances such as tobacco that negatively impact your mind and body now and in the future. This study is one of the first to link smoking with cognitive decline and possibly dementia. Dementia is a significant problem for elderly worldwide, estimated at 36 million cases in 2010 and is projected to double every 20 years, as explained by the study’s authors.
To conduct this study, Séverine Sabia, Ph.D., of University College London, and colleagues examined the association between smoking history and cognitive decline in the transition from midlife to old age. Data were obtained from 5,099 men and 2,137 women, with an average age of 56 years at the first cognitive assessment. Researchers analyzed data using six assessments of smoking status over 25 years and three cognitive assessments over ten years.
The authors identified three key findings. Men who were smokers at the time of the first cognitive test had more rapid cognitive decline than nonsmokers, and men who had only quit smoking in the past ten years also showed greater cognitive decline. Men who stopped smoking more than ten years ago, did not show more rapid cognitive decline than non-smokers.
The researchers caution, however, that the study could not be used to determine whether men displaying a more rapid cognitive decline would ultimately progress to dementia.
There is better news for women who smoke. The results showed no link between smoking and cognitive decline in women. The researchers believe that this difference may be due to the fact that men in the study tended to smoke more tobacco than women did.
If you currently smoke, this study should be a wake up call to quit or potentially suffer cognitive decline starting in your early old age. A healthy cognitive lifestyle requires that you be conscious of the long-term consequences of your lifestyle choices. While quitting smoking is difficult, there are wonderful support systems in place to assist you in this important goal and lifestyle choice. Based on the University College London study, we now know that this lifestyle choice can make a big difference in the mental quality of life you have as you age.
Source:
Sabia, S., et al., Impact of Smoking on Cognitive Decline in Early Old Age: The Whitehall II Cohort Study. Archives of General Psychiatry. Published online February 6, 2012.
National Institute on Aging online, Smoking in middle age is associated with increased rate of cognitive decline in men, March 22, 2012
Sports Team Conflicts: Success Strategies
Michael Cerreto, MS, CSC, LDR, Edu-K
Interpersonal conflict is inherent in team sports. The athletes’ different personalities, control needs, expectations of each other, and sports pressure can be a recipe for debilitating conflict or great cohesion.
Most interpersonal conflicts cause people to feel uncomfortable and often avoid confronting it until tempers heat up. At that point, the solutions often involve anger and frustration instead of understanding, listening, and searching for common ground. Some coaches fuel conflict by playing one athlete against another to use the strategy of internal competition to elevate their performance. Conflict in team sports is natural and can make teams stronger if it is handled effectively by teammates and coaches.
A recent study of female athletes in team sports (average age of 21) by the University of Alberta published in the journal The Sport Psychologist found that “conflict was a prevalent feature of playing on their teams.” The most significant conflicts identified were about performance and relationships. While the athletes acknowledged that conflict is a natural part of their teams, they also shared strategies that can create the best conditions for managing conflict, such as:
The study found that the athletes required personal conflict resolution skills. These personal skills would enable them to resolve conflicts early instead of involving other teammates to fight their battles for them, take sides, and have the conflict spill onto the playing field. When athletes who have conflicts with each other involve teammates to resolve the conflict for them, they are acting like victims. Direct personal responsibility is needed instead. While it can be helpful to ask other people for guidance about how to address a conflict with someone, do not have others resolve the conflict for you. You are responsible for resolving your own conflicts.
The implication of these findings and other studies emphasize the importance of teams and coaches establishing concrete methods for athletes to better understand each other, communicate, avoid blaming, and manage conflicts early and directly. By having team norms and rules for conflict management, teams can turn conflict into experiences that strengthen their collective capacity to trust each other when under pressure. Ultimately, trust and team unity can be a competitive weapon on the playing field but they start off the field of play.
Source:
Holt, Nicholas L., Knight, Camilla J., Zukiwski, Peter, Female Athletes’ Perceptions of Teammate Conflict in Sport: Implications for Sport Psychology Consultants, The Sport Psychologist, Volume 26, Issue 1, March 2012
Sharper Brains Wander More
People with wandering minds might have sharper brains, research suggests
Michael Cerreto, MS, CSC, LDR, Edu-K
We often associate day dreaming and mental wandering as weaknesses that need to be corrected. However, having a healthy cognitive life naturally includes mental journeys away from boring, simple tasks. They enable us to plan dinner while we scan through our emails or while we sit in boring lectures and meetings. In fact, studies have found that our minds are wandering half the time on thoughts unrelated to what we’re doing. The true story about your mental wandering doesn’t end there.
A study recently published in the journal Psychological Science found that people who are constantly distracted have more “working memory.” This gives them the ability to hold a lot of information in their heads and manipulate it mentally. Holding information in working memory while we do something else is critical to learning, multitasking, and problem solving. Working memory capacity is also linked to general intelligence such as higher reading comprehension and IQ scores.
The study had participants perform one of two simple tasks during which researchers checked to ask if the participants’ minds were wandering. They used tasks that would not require them to use their full attention. At the end, participants’ working memory capacity was measured.
Dr. Daniel Levinson, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the study’s authors, said that those with higher working memory capacity reported “more mind wandering during these simple tasks,” but their performance did not suffer.
Dr Jonathan Smallwood, at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science, explains, “What this study seems to suggest is that, when circumstances for the task aren’t very difficult, people who have additional working memory resources deploy them to think about things other than what they’re doing. Their brains are trying to allocate resources to the most pressing problems.”
So, if the task you are working on is simple and not using all of your attention, mental wandering may be a natural way your mind stays productive. If you have stronger working memory, your mental wanderings are a normal part of your brain power.
Sources:
D. B. Levinson, J. Smallwood, R. J. Davidson. The Persistence of Thought: Evidence for a Role of Working Memory in the Maintenance of Task-Unrelated Thinking. Psychological Science, 2012
University of Wisconsin-Madison (2012, March 15). A wandering mind reveals mental processes and priorities. ScienceDaily.
Children Whose Minds Wander ‘Have Sharper Brains’, The Telegraph online edition, March 19, 2012
Importance of Safeguarding Your Brain
By Michael Cerreto, MS, CSC, LDR, Edu-K
A healthy lifestyle for your brain requires you to safeguard it from injury. While this strategy may seem obvious, people are still slow in taking basic safety measures. For instance, as published in the February 2009 edition of Consumer Reports, 58 percent of Americans don’t wear helmets while cycling, and 92 percent of riders killed while cycling in 2007 were not wearing helmets. Ignoring helmet safety is only one critical area of risky behavior that can put the brain in danger. There are many more risks such as driving significantly over the speed limit, talking on a cell phone while driving, excessive drug and alcohol use, and playing sports in ways that result in repeated head contact.
The more brain scientists explore the effects that mild traumatic brain injuries can have on people’s attention, memory and thinking, the more they discover the long lasting impact that can go undetected. A study recently published in the Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology by Lana Ozen and Myra Fernandes of the University of Waterloo found that “Long-term persistent attention and memory difficulties following a mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) often go undetected on standard neuropsychological tests, despite complaints by mild TBI individuals.”
The study involved 26 undergraduate students with a self-report of one mild TBI that had occurred at least six months prior and a 31 non-head-injured control group. Of the mild TBI group, 17 had sustained their brain injury five years ago or longer. Both groups were administered working memory tests. The mild TBI group had accuracy scores that were equal to the control group on simple exercises and did better on complex exercises. However, there was one major difference. The mild TBI group processed information more slowly.
According to the authors, “Results suggest that long after a mild TBI, high-functioning young adults invoke a strategy of delaying their identification of targets in order to maintain, and facilitate, accuracy on cognitively demanding tasks.” These findings suggest that the slowing of processing speed of mild TBI participants are long lasting after their brain injury.
This study highlights the importance of looking at different aspects of your life to determine how to safeguard your brain from contact and injury. It requires you to be proactive and consistent because even a mild brain injury can have a long lasting effect on your attention, memory, and thinking. To maintain a healthy cognitive lifestyle, think about aspects of your family’s life and ask yourself, “Where and when are we putting our brains at risk of injury, and how can we take measures to protect ourselves?” Be proactive, and take this question seriously to keep your brain healthy long-term.
Living True to Yourself Helps Your Mind
By Michael Cerreto, MS, CSC, LDR, Edu-K
Reflecting on your life is an important ability driven by your mind’s executive function and other mental processes that some people are good at and others are not. This ability helps you learn from past experiences and make adjustments to improve the quality of your life or performance. People who have minds that are inefficient at self-reflection continually make the same mistakes and lack the ability to anticipate the consequences of their behaviors and decisions. The ability to continually self-reflect on your life and make adjustments is important to living a healthy cognitive lifestyle.
People at the end of their lives typically have deeper and more honest reflections and regrets because they do not have as strong a need to rationalize past behaviors. They also have the advantage of reflecting on the totality of their decisions and experiences than people who are in the middle of living. In her book The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware shares the five regrets people at the end of life express the most:
The first regret is very important to your well-being because, as humans, we are significantly influenced by our different social environments and the expectations of others. Social influences impact how our minds develop because the brain is always creating patterns that help us interpret and act appropriately. We naturally struggle between living up to our own expectations and living within the expectations of others. When this balance is off, our mind may interpret it as a risk to survival and elevate anxiety.
According to Paul Gilbert, Ph.D.in his article Evolution and Social Anxiety, “…humans have evolved to compete for attractiveness to make good impressions because these are related to eliciting important social resources and investments from others.” This natural process helps us feel safe, included, and enables us to maintain good mental and physical equilibrium.
So, as part of your cognitive health, keep asking yourself “How can I better live life true to myself?” The answers will enable you to counterbalance your natural drive and need to live up to other’s expectations.
Sources:
DePaulo, B. (2012). 5 Biggest Regrets of People Who Are Dying. Psych Central.
Gilbert, P., Evolution and social anxiety. The role of attraction, social competition, and social hierarchies.Psychiatr Clin North Am. 2001 Dec;24(4):723-51.
Not Watching Your Waistline May Increase Risk of Memory Loss
By Michael Cerreto, MS, CSC, LDR, Edu-K
Does the amount of calories you eat each day affect memory loss?
While many older adults experience some form of memory loss, or mild cognitive impairment (MCI), for remembering new information, it doesn’t generally have too serious an impact on their daily lives. Seniors with MCI, however, are at a higher risk of developing dementia. So brain scientists are researching what factors in people’s lifestyle, such as diet, can increase the risk of MCI.
A recent study that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 2012 annual meeting suggests that older adults (age 70 and older) who ate between 2,100 and 6,000 calories each day were twice as likely to develop mild cognitive impairment or memory loss. “The higher the amount of calories consumed each day, the higher the risk of MCI,” said study author Yonas E. Geda, MD, MSc, with the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona and a member of the American Academy of Neurology.
These results are consistent with the findings of other researchers such as David Loewenstein, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. “More and more research has shown that anything that is good for the heart is good for the brain, and when people overeat, there are complications including risk for diabetes, stroke, and memory problems,” said Loewenstein.
However, not all medical experts agree. In an interview with WebMD, Marc Gordon, MD said that the new study can’t tell us whether eating too much causes memory problems. It may be that memory problems cause us to eat too much. “To say that we should advocate calorie restriction is not warranted.” He is the chief of neurology at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y., and an Alzheimer’s researcher at The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research.
While there are conflicting opinions about the extent overeating affects memory loss, the research of Geda and others highlight the importance of older adults working closely with their physician to plan and monitor diet and nutrition. Creating a healthy cognitive lifestyle needs to include the proper fueling of your mind and body to support the demands of your day.
As people age throughout the entire lifespan, their dietary needs change but people are sometimes slow to change how they eat. So, think ahead and consult your doctor to plan a diet that is best for your mind and body as you age. Don’t leave this area of your cognitive lifestyle up to dietary routines that no longer fit your mental and physical needs.
Sources:
American Academy of Neurology (AAN) (2012, February 13). Overeating may double risk of memory loss. ScienceDaily.
Denise Mann and Louise Chang, MD, Overeating May Raise Rish for Memory Problems, WebMD, February 12, 2012.
Yonas Geda, MD, MSc, Marion Ragossnig, Lewis K. Roberts, Rosebud Roberts, MD, Vernon Pankratz, Teresa Christianson, Michelle Mielke, Bradley Boeve, MD, Eric Tangalos and Ronald Petersen, PhD, MD., Caloric Intake, Aging, and Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Population-Based Study, American Academy of Neurology’s 64th Annual Meeting, April 2012.
Sports Practice In Unexpected Ways Enhances Motor Skills
By Michael Cerreto, MS, CSC, LDR, Edu-K
The minds of athletes are always creating mental and motor patterns based on practice. This process helps movements and techniques become automatic and less conscious to perform. Consequently, their minds are freed up to better focus on new information, tasks, and movements that require conscious, non-automatic effort.
When designing practices, coaches and athletes need to take into consideration the automatic and non-automatic ways the brain processes motor skills. According to Scott Grafton, M.D., mixing up a practice schedule in unexpected ways (non-automatic) can enhance outcomes and mastery of new motor skills by leveraging the phenomenon called “contextual interference.”
Grafton’s research found that, when people practiced motor skills in unexpected ways, they performed those skills initially worse than groups who practiced the same skills in routine, predictable ways. However, a day later, the people who practiced skills in unexpected ways performed them better than the routine group.
For example: “Imagine hitting against a pitching machine that is throwing curves, fastballs, or sliders. By the end of practice, you will be much better at hitting each of these types of pitches if you take them in groups (all the curves, then all the fastballs, then all the sliders) than if they are mixed up so you don’t know what you will get on any given pitch. Hitting unknown types of pitches takes much more concentration and effort and performance is rarely as good initially. However, by the next day, a curious thing happens. The player who looked so good when the pitches were grouped did worse than the player who got unexpected pitches each time.”
The research of Grafton and others illustrate that motor memories take time to become fixed patterns in the brain, even after training has ended. Sleep is important to the acquisition of motor memories because it’s a time when the brain consolidates them to create fixed patterns. Practicing in unexpected ways increases the activity of the brain’s motor area to develop motor skills at higher levels over the long-term. Now that’s practicing smart.
Sources:
Gordon, Dan, Your Brain On Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans, Dana Press, New York, New York, 2008
Education Keeps Brain Sharp Later In Life, Studies Find
By Michael Cerreto, MS, CSC, LDR, Edu-K
As you age, your mind constantly changes based on your life experiences in order to help you adapt, learn, and grow. With advanced age comes mental decline in memory and reaction time for most people as they journey through their 50s and older. However, other mental abilities can actually improve in later years such as reasoning about relationships, morals, and politics, according to a University of Michigan study.
While brain power ebbs and flows as we age, how can we create a lifestyle that keeps our minds strong well into our senior years? Based on a longitudinal study by the University of Wisconsin, one answer is through education.
According to one of the study’s principle investigators, Margie Lachman, Ph.D., “Education seems to be an elixir that can bring us a healthy body and mind throughout adulthood and even a longer life. People with college degrees performed on complex tasks similar to less-educated individuals who were 10 years younger.” As Patricia Cohen of the New York Times further explains about this study, “For those in midlife and beyond, a college degree appears to slow the brain’s aging process by up to a decade.”
If education slows mental decline later in life, how can people who do not have much formal education get the same results? Dr. Lachmann found that people with less education who challenged their minds throughout life showed better test scores in their ability to reason quickly and think abstractly later in life than people who did not have mental challenges.
So important ingredients to include in your cognitive lifestyle that have long-term benefits include the following: continue education; pursue learning throughout life; challenge your mind through hobbies, interests and work; debate ideas with friends; and develop curiosity and a love for learning.
Sources:
Cohen, Patricia, A Sharper Mind, Middle Age and Beyond, New York Times, January 19, 2012 New York, New York
Grossmann, Igor, Na, Jinkyung, Varnum Michael E. W., Park, Denise C., Kitayama, Shinobu, and Nisbett, Robert E., Reasoning about social conflicts improves into old age, PNAS 2010 107 (16) 7246-7250; published ahead of print April 5, 2010
Lachmann, Margie, Midlife in the United States, A Longitudinal Study of Health and Well-Being, University of Wisconsin, Madison Institute of Aging, Madison, Wisconsin, 2009
Power Your Brain and Life By Managing Your Body Clock
By Michael Cerreto, MS, CSC, LDR, Edu-K
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:
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:
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
By Michael Cerreto, MS, CSC, LDR, Edu-K
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
By Michael Cerreto, MS, CSC, LDR, Edu-K
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:
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.
