Coffee Makes You Smarter

Brain scans have confirmed what many coffee drinkers already know caffeine perks them up mentally.

The caffeine found in coffee, tea, soft drinks, and even chocolate, stimulates areas of the brain governing short-term memory and attention, say Austrian researchers.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging scans performed on the brains of 15 subjects who had just consumed caffeine equal to that found in two cups of coffee showed increased activity in the frontal lobe where the working memory is located, and in the anterior cingulum that controls attention.

We are able to see that caffeine exerts increases in neuronal activity in distinct parts of the brain going along with changes in behavior, said Dr. Florian Koppelstatter of the Medical University Innsbruck.

Participants who were subjected to a 12-hour period without caffeine and a four-hour period without nicotine, another recognized stimulant found in cigarettes, were better able to remember a sequence of letters after consuming 100 milligrams of caffeine. Reaction times on short-term memory tests also improved.

Caffeine is the world’s most widely used stimulant, according to the research presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. Global daily consumption of caffeine averages 1-1/2 cups of coffee. In the United States, the average consumption is 4-1/2 cups of java.

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Does Stress Really Kill Brain Cells?

Wonder what’s happening in your brain when you’re stressed?

Here are some facts you need to know:

PROBLEM 1: Loss of Brain Tissue from Stress
Stress kills brain cells. UCSF researchers report that stress causes a serious loss of brain tissue from brain cell death. Washington University School of Medicine researchers report that even mild flare-ups of psychological stress damage memory and brain functions.

A major National Institute of Health’s study shows that even mild stress releases a brain enzyme linked to bipolar manic-depressive disorder. This explains why stress leads to disturbed thinking, impaired judgment, impulsivity, and distractibility.

SOLUTION TO STRESS:

Over 40 years of research and clinical studies have proven that brainwave training can immediately reduce your stress, repair the damage, and train your brain how to avoid future stress-related damage. It is the ultimate stress management tool.

PROBLEM 2: Physical Brain Shrinkage
Many researchers have found that certain thinking patterns damage thinking and memory, and even result in physical brain shrinkage.

Dr Lupien of Montreal’s McGill University studied brains scans of 92 people over 15 years. The brains of those with low self-esteem had shrunk to 20% smaller than those who felt optimistic and good about themselves. The low self-esteem individuals also performed far worse in memory and learning tests.

SOLUTION:
Research has proven your brain is capable of full recovery. It is actually plastic, and with the correct stimulation can continue to grow even into advanced age.

Researchers Siegfried and Othmer report that frequent brainwave training yields a 23% increase in IQ plus substantial increases in self-esteem, motivation and energy.

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posted by Jill Ammon-Wexler
Amazing Success

Why Time Can Move in Slow Motion

Why does time seem to move in slow motion when we are in danger?  Scientists once assumed such time warps were caused by a release of adrenaline. But an entirely new explanation hais now being offered.  

To determine why a sense of danger makes people experience time in slow motion, scientists at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine tried scaring volunteers by dropping them from great heights. The scientists had volunteers dive backward with no ropes attached, into a special net that broke their fall. They reached 70 mph during the roughly three-second, 150-foot drop.

It’s the scariest thing I have ever done, said neuroscientist David Eagleman. The researcher felt it might be the perfect way to make people feel a danger-related time warp. He was right. The volunteers estimated their own fall lasted about a third longer than the dive actually took.

To determine if people in danger could actually see and perceive more like a video camera in slow motion, Eagleman developed  a perceptual chronometer they strapped onto volunteers’ wrists. This watch-like device flickered numbers on its screen. The scientists could adjust the speed at which numbers appeared until they were too fast to see.

If the brain sped up when in danger, the researchers theorized numbers on the perceptual chronometers would appear slow enough to read while volunteers fell. Instead, the scientists found that volunteers could not read the numbers at faster-than-normal speeds.

They concluded that such time warping seems to be a trick played by one’s memory. When a person is frightened, a brain area called the amygdala becomes more active, laying down an extra set of memories that supplement  those normally laid down by the brain.

In this way, frightening events are associated with richer and denser memories, Eagleman explained. And, he theorizes, the more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took.

He feels this illusion is related to the phenomenon that time seems to speed up as you grow older. When you’re a child, you lay down rich memories for all your experiences;. But when you’re older, you’ve seen it all before and lay down fewer memories. Therefore, when a child looks back at the end of a summer, it seems to have lasted forever, while adults think it zoomed by.

What do YOU think about his theory?

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