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

Immoral Thoughts: How Does The Brain React?

Scientist discover that the left side of the brain reacts more to immoral stimuli

From The Guardian

When a person thinks about naughty things, does one side of the brain get more exercised than the other? Eight scientists studied that question. Their report, Hemispheric Asymmetries During Processing of Immoral Stimuli, appears in the journal Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience. The stated goal is to describe “the neural organisation of moral processing.”

Debra Lieberman, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Miami, Florida, acts as spokesperson for the team. Other members are based at Miami, and at the University of New Mexico and at Stanford University in California. Another, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, is at Duke University in North Carolina.

The study restricted itself to the simple question: how does immorality play out in the brain?

The scientists sought their answer by recruiting some test subjects. They confronted each volunteer with several levels of immorality, in the form of words and images.

The team used MRI machines to indirectly (via electromagnetic emissions) monitor where largish amounts of blood flowed in the brain as each volunteer confronted each example of immorality. In theory, anyway, blood flows most freely near whichever brain parts are actively thinking, or have just thought, or are just about to think, or are busily doing something else.

After all the immorality was seen, and the measurements made, the researchers calculated that the left side of the brain had been more involved than the right side. Thus, concludes the study: “There is a left-hemisphere bias for the processing of immoral stimuli across multiple domains.”

From Dartmouth News:

Two Dartmouth researchers are one step closer to defining exactly when human maturity sets in. In a study aimed at identifying how and when a person’s brain reaches adulthood, the scientists have learned that, anatomically, significant changes in brain structure continue after age 18.

The results indicate that significant changes took place in the brains of college freshman. The changes were localized to regions of the brain known to integrate emotion and cognition. Specifically, these are areas that take information from our current body state and apply it for use in navigating the world.

Learn more

Brain Tip: Eat the Right Foods For ADHD

Scientists finally agree with parents of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD) who have suspected a connection between the kinds of foods their children eat and their behavior and symptoms.

Two recent studies show a relationship between diet and ADD/ADHD symptoms. One, published in Pediatrics, concluded that pesticides, specifically organophosphates, found on fruits and vegetables may be linked to ADD/ADHD. The higher the levels of the compounds detected in a child’s urine, the more likely the chance of having ADD/ADHD. (Solution? Eat organic, suggest the study’s authors.) Another study, published in Journal of Attention Disorders, showed that a Western diet — processed meats, fast foods, high-fat dairy products, and sugary foods — doubled the risk of having an ADD/ADHD diagnosis, compared with eating a healthier diet.

Nutrition affects the ADD brain in three ways. Brain cells, like other cells in the body, need proper nutrition to carry out their functions; the myelin sheath, which covers the axons of brain cells, as insulation covers electrical wires, needs the right levels of nutrients to speed transmission of the electrical signals between brain cells; neurotransmitters — dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine — are dependent on diet for their production.

If the right nutrients aren’t accessible to the brain, its circuits misfire. The next blog post will be about Carbs and ADD/ADHD Brain Power

Excerpt from the Editors of ADDitude Magazine

This blog does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The information on this blog is provided for educational purposes only.

Brain Tip: Create a Brain-Healthy Lifestyle

“While there is no magic pill for dementia, or even ‘senior moments,’ scientists are converging on what makes a brain-healthy lifestyle.” A recent article in the Orlando Sentinel and the Dana Foundation’s Brain in the News outlines how your daily lifestyle can affect your mind, memory, and brain development. The following are some of the tips and findings explained in the article:

• Exercise creates a stronger, faster brain

• Stress kills brain neurons and prevents new ones from growing, and can lead to depression

• A depressed brain is fertile ground for Alzheimer’s

• The happier you are, the more you hold onto your memories

• Exercise and socialization can slow dementia

• Mental exercises and activities must be novel and challenging to create new bridges between brain cells, which strengthens memory

To learn more, you can READ the complete article by Marissa Cevallos. Then, start looking at your own lifestyle to determine how you can make changes that will help your mind grow and stay strong. What methods do you currently use in your life? Let us know.

Monday’s Brain Tip For Better Planning

Planning and organizing are complicated and advanced mental processes that are highly developed in humans compared to other animals. Monday is the day most people set aside to plan the week ahead of them. So, our Monday Brain Tip encourages you to schedule exercise into your and your family’s week. It can help improve your memory.

Studies over the years with adults and children have found that exercise can increase the size of your brain’s hippocampus. The hippocampus is important for memory and learning. A recent study at the University of Illinois found that 9 and 10 year old children who got regular exercise had higher scores on memory tests than non-exercisers. In addition to enhancing memory, aerobic exercise has been found to improve attention by enhancing important brain chemicals that regulate our attention levels.

So, it is important for your brain that you exercise regularly throughout the week, and schedule it with the same importance as other activities. 

How do you feel mentally after you exercise? Share your experiences with us.

Source of University of Illinois’ study: Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

Mind Item: Creative minds are slower

One study of 65 subjects suggests that creativity prefers to take a slower, more meandering path than intelligence. ‘The brain appears to be an efficient superhighway that gets you from Point A to Point B” when it comes to intelligence, Dr. (Rex) Jung explained. “But in the regions of the brain related to creativity, there appears to be lots of little side roads with interesting detours, and meandering little byways.’”

On studies of white matter integrity, the most creative subjects using tests of divergent thinking were the ones with the lowest white matter integrity (as assessed by fractional anisotropy) in the frontostriatal circuits.

For those of us who see highly creative children with school problems, this research comes as no great surprise. The classic picture is on the WISC-IV is very high verbal and perceptual reasoning and slow processing times (Coding and Symbol Search). These children often have passionate hobbies, rich fantasy lives and imagination, and poor classroom output compared to their intellectual potential.

If you’re thinking, hey this seems familiar, you’re right. This thinner prefrontal cortex pattern has also been seen in gifted kids (see The Blessings and Burdens of High IQ), ADHD, and Dyslexia.

The data are beginning to converge - is it possible that the emphasis on speed and work production in K-12 schooling runs completely counter to creativity development?

NYT: Charting Creativity
Creativity / Divergent Thinking and White Matter pdf

Reblogged from Eide Neorolearning Blog

Cognitive Routine: Conversational brainstorming

Through A Talented Mind’s Cognitive Lifestyle Therapy Program, parents and caregivers learn how to create routines for someone with a learning disability or brain injury that helps them strengthen a mental ability. Here is a simple, but yet effective, example of a daily, conversational routine:

“Many people with learning disabilities or brain injuries have trouble generating ideas when solving problems. This leads to poor decisions. Don’t give them the answer. Train their minds to develop ideas. Use brainstorming when speaking with them about a problem and be patient if they initially struggle coming up with ideas. They will get better as they practice.”

What Our Minds Create: Interpretation of images

It’s a big skull. No, wait, it’s two people under an arch. Hold on, it’s a skull again. Two very different images can be perceived in the trick picture Blossom and Decay (see above). Now we are one step closer to working out how the brain spontaneously flips between such views, with the discovery of what may be the relevant brain region.

The precise neural mechanism that provokes the brain to switch its view of a scene is unknown, but it is thought to play a major role in perception by acting as a sort of reality check, says Ryota Kanai of University College London. “We need a trigger to prompt possible different interpretations so that we don’t get stuck with a potentially incorrect interpretation of the world.”  Learn more about the possible trigger researchers have discovered.

From NewScientist