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:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

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.

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:

• 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.