Could Your Brain Be Starving?

It’s easy to forget that your brain is a physical organ.

And it has certain physical requirements that must be met, if it is to function well.  If your brain doesn’t get the water and food it needs, it will NOT operate efficiently.

Not only will you not be as smart as you could be, your memory and judgment will also suffer. The results can vary from mildly irritating to truly disastrous.

For example, your 3-pound brain uses as much as 25% of the water you consume. Scientific studies have clearly shown that only 10% dehydration can reduce your measurable intelligence as much as 50%.

One glass of water may stand between you and 50% of your potential brain power.

Your brain also has a great need for fuel, just like your muscles and your bones. Your brain’s most basic food is glucose. If you eat a well-rounded diet not fast-food, chances are you’re providing your brain with a good supply of its basic fuel.

BUT… if you suffer from chronic stress, most of that fuel is going elsewhere. Stress literally starves your brain, kills brain cells, and reduces your potential brain power.

The stress response releases a natural biochemical called cortisol. Cortisol grabs your brain’s glucose then uses it to adapt your body to whatever is causing your stress it physically prepares your body to either fight or run.

That’s why it’s so hard to think clearly when you’re stressed. Ever run in circles trying to find your car keys when you’re in a big hurry?

Chronic stress, in turn, leads to the very real physical sensation of brain exhaustion.

Take the following steps to optimize your brain:

1. Make a commitment to eat properly. Provide your brain with a steady supply of healthy foods.

2. Drink adequate water: Coffee, tea and soda do NOT count. Eight glasses a day is truly the minimum. Remember, your brain needs 25% of that water just for itself.

3. Manage your stress: Find some way to take control of any chronic stress. Don’t kid yourself about this. Stress KILLS brain cells. Take a break every hour or so, and let your brain do some recovery work.

4. Take good vitamins or brain supplements: There are many valuable natural brain supplements available today. Add one to your daily diet for a mental boost and faster recovery from mental and physical stress.

posted by Jill Ammon-Wexler
Amazing Success

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Are You a Time Traveler?

What are you doing when you aren’t doing anything at all? If you said nothing, then you have just passed a test in logic… BUT flunked a test in modern neuroscience.

When people perform mental tasks–adding numbers, comparing shapes, identifying faces–different areas of their brains become active. But researchers have recently discovered that when these areas of our brains light up, other areas go dark. This dark network (which comprises regions in the frontal, parietal and medial temporal lobes) is off when we seem to be on, and on when we seem to be off.

If you climbed into an MRI machine and lay there waiting for instructions from a technician, the dark network would be as active as a beehive. But the moment your task began, the bees would freeze and the network would fall silent. When we appear to be doing nothing, we are clearly doing something. But what?

The answer, it seems, is time travel.

The human body moves forward in time at the rate of one second per second whether we like it or not. But the human mind can move through time in any direction, and at any speed it chooses.

Our ability to close our eyes and imagine the pleasures of Super Bowl Sunday or remember the excesses of New Year’s Eve is a fairly recent evolutionary development, and our talent for doing this is unparalleled in the animal kingdom.

We are a race of time travelers, unfettered by chronology and capable of visiting the future or revisiting the past whenever we wish. If our neural time machines are damaged by illness, age or accident, we may become trapped in the present. Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, specifically attacks the dark network, stranding many of its victims in an endless now, unable to remember their yesterdays or envision their tomorrows.

Why did evolution design our brains to go wandering in time? Perhaps it’s because an experience is a terrible thing to waste. Moving around in the world exposes organisms to danger, so as a rule they should have as few experiences as possible and learn as much from each as they can.

Although some of life’s lessons are learned in the moment (“Don’t touch a hot stove”), others become apparent only after the fact (Now I see why she was upset. I should have said something about her new dress).

Time travel allows us to pay for an experience once and then have it again and again at no additional charge, learning new lessons with each repetition. When we are busy having experiences–herding children, signing checks, battling traffic–the dark network is silent, but as soon as those experiences are over, the network is awakened, and we begin moving across the landscape of our history to see what we can learn–for free.

Animals learn by trial and error, and the smarter they are, the fewer trials they need. Traveling backward buys us many trials for the price of one, but traveling forward allows us to dispense with trials entirely.

Just as pilots practice flying in flight simulators, the rest of us practice living in life simulators, and our ability to simulate future courses of action and preview their consequences enables us to learn from mistakes without making them.

We don’t need to bake a liver cupcake to find out that it is a stunningly bad idea; simply imagining it is punishment enough. The same is true for insulting the boss and misplacing the children. We may not heed the warnings that prospection provides, but at least we aren’t surprised when we wake up with a hangover or when our waists and our inseams swap sizes.

The dark network allows us to visit the future, but not just any future. When we contemplate futures that don’t include us–Will the NASDAQ be up next week? Will Hillary run in 2012?–the dark network is quiet. Only when we move ourselves through time does it come alive.

Perhaps the most startling fact about the dark network isn’t what it does but how often it does it. Neuroscientists refer to it as the brain’s default mode, which is to say that we spend more of our time away from the present than in it.

People typically overestimate how often they are in the moment because they rarely take notice when they take leave. It is only when the environment demands our attention–a dog barks, a child cries, a telephone rings–that our mental time machines switch themselves off and deposit us with a bump in the here and now. We stay just long enough to take a message and then we slip off again to the land of Elsewhen, our dark networks awash in light.

Like to PERSONALLY EXPERIENCE the more complex aspects of your own brain?

 

By Daniel Gilbert & Randy Buckner
Excerpt from Time Magazine

What Love Does to Your Brain

How Love Lights You Up
When you’re in love your eyes light up, your face lights up and so do four tiny portions of your brain.

Neurobiologists Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki of University College in London used MRI brain scans to peer into the brains of college students in the throes of that crazed, can’t-think-of-anything-else stage of early romantic love.

When the subjects were shown photographs of their sweet hearts, the MRI images showed that four parts of their brains lit up.

The researchers compared the MRI images to brain scans taken from people in different emotional states, including se.xual arousal, feelings of happiness and coc.aine-induced euphoria.

But the pattern for romantic love was unique. Interestingly, looking at a picture of their loved one also reduced activity in three portions of the brain active when one is upset or depressed.

Is Love Addictive?
When you fall in love your skin flushes, you breathe heavy, and your palms tend to sweat.

Why? Because your brain is experiencing a biochemical rush of dopamine, norepinephrine and phenylethylamine close chemical cousins to amphetamines.

But it’s easy to build up a tolerance to these stimulating bio-chemicals. Then, as with any other tolerance, it takes more of the substance to get that special feeling of infatuation.

Some neuroscientists theorize that folks who jump from one relationship to another are hooked on the intoxication of falling in love.

But interestingly, in the case of enduring romance, simply the presence of one’s partner stimulates the production of endorphins. Endorphins are the feel good biochemicals also behind the experience of runner’s high, and are natural pain-killers.

The Biology of Romance
Recent research suggests that romantic attraction is actually a primitive, biologically based drive just like hunger or thirst.

The biology of romance helps account for why we might travel cross-country for a single ki.ss, and plunge into hopeless despair if our beloved turns from us. It’s the drive for romance that enables us to focus on one particular person, although we often can’t explain why.

What we’re seeing here is the biological drive to choose a mate, to focus on one person to the exclusion of all others, claims Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University.

Research has proven that romantic attraction activates portions of the brain with high concentrations of receptors for dopamine, Fisher explains. And dopamine is the chemical messenger also tied to states of euphoria, craving and addiction.

Other scientific studies have linked high levels of dopamine and a related agent, norepinephrine to heightened attention and short-term memory, hyperactivity, sleeplessness and goal-oriented behavior.

Sound like love?

When they first fall in love, Fisher explains, couples often show the signs of surging dopamine: Increased energy, less need for sleep or food, and highly focused attention.

The Psychology of Love
Poets and song writers have long claimed that the power of the biochemical state we call romantic love is enough to blind one’s judgment.

We all know how new lovers tend to idealize their partner magnifying their virtues, and explaining away their flaws.

But though love may be blind, take hope.

Pamela Regan, a Cal State LA researcher, believes such idealization may be crucial to a long-term relationship. If you don’t sweep away the person’s flaws to some extent, you’re just as likely to end a relationship, she claims.

This at least gives you a chance, Regan feels. If you think of romantic attraction as a kind of drug that alters how you think, then in this case it’s allowing you to take some risks you wouldn’t otherwise take.

Not a bad thing.

But if passionate romance is like a drug, as the MRI images suggest, then it’s bound to lose its kick. But perhaps viewing romance as a biologically based, drug-like state can at least provide some balm for a broken heart.

Healthy Romanticizing
In a 1996 experiment, psychologists at the State University of New York at Buffalo followed a group of 121 dating couples. Every few months the couples answered questionnaires to find out how much they idealized their partner, and how well their relationship was doing.

The researchers discovered that the couples who idealized each other the most were closest one year later.

The Issue of Self-Love
How does the love of one’s self  also known as a positive self concept or good self-esteem fit into this picture?

Recent research indicates that depressed people who feel ‘unloved’ are 50% more likely to get cancer.

Negativity, fear, anger and depression are not just in your head. They are biochemical states. Remember neuroscience has proven beyond a doubt that we can consciously create the biochemical states known as joy, happiness, motivation, and even ecstasy.

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