Category: Boost Brain Power

Certain foods could damage the ability to think on your feet.

A high-fat, high-sugar diet causes significant damage to cognitive flexibility, a new study finds.

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adjust and adapt to changing situations.

The high-sugar diet was most damaging, the research on mice found.

This caused impairments in both long- and short-term memory.

This is just the latest in a line of studies showing the potentially dramatic effects of diet on mental performance.

Professor Kathy Magnusson, who co-led the study, said:

“The impairment of cognitive flexibility in this study was pretty strong.

Think about driving home on a route that’s very familiar to you, something you’re used to doing.

Then one day that road is closed and you suddenly have to find a new way home.”

With lower cognitive flexibility, adapting to these kinds of changes would be more difficult.

Professor Magnusson said it wasn’t yet clear how these damaging effects were caused:

“It’s increasingly clear that our gut bacteria, or microbiota, can communicate with the human brain.

Bacteria can release compounds that act as neurotransmitters, stimulate sensory nerves or the immune system, and affect a wide range of biological functions.

We’re not sure just what messages are being sent, but we are tracking down the pathways and the effects.”

The research was carried out on laboratory mice.

They were given either a normal diet, a high-fat diet or a high-sugar diet.

After four weeks the mental and physical performance of mice on the high-fat or high-sugar diet began to suffer.

Professor Magnusson said:

“We’ve known for a while that too much fat and sugar are not good for you.

This work suggests that fat and sugar are altering your healthy bacterial systems, and that’s one of the reasons those foods aren’t good for you.

It’s not just the food that could be influencing your brain, but an interaction between the food and microbial changes.”

The ‘Western diet’ that many consume daily is high in sugar, fat and simple carbohydrates.

The study was published in the journal Neuroscience (Magnusson et al., 2015).

Confused woman image from Shutterstock

The tasty food that boosts attention and potentially lowers blood pressure.

Dark chocolate can improve attention and a new formula may also lower blood pressure, a study shows.

Professor Larry Stevens, who conducted the study, said:

“Chocolate is indeed a stimulant and it activates the brain in a really special way.

It can increase brain characteristics of attention, and it also significantly affects blood pressure levels.”

The study measured the effects of eating 60% cacao chocolate (commonly called dark chocolate) on the brain waves of 122 participants.

They found that chocolate boosted attention and people were more alert for a period — although their blood pressure increased.

Professor Stevens said:

“A lot of us in the afternoon get a little fuzzy and can’t pay attention, particularly students, so we could have a higher cacao content chocolate bar and it would increase attention”

The researchers also tried chocolate containing a substance called L-theanine.

L-theanine is a relaxant that is found in green tea.

Professor Stevens explained:

“L-theanine is a really fascinating product that lowers blood pressure and produces what we call alpha waves in the brain that are very calm and peaceful.

We thought that if chocolate acutely elevates blood pressure, and L-theanine lowers blood pressure, then maybe the L-theanine would counteract the short-term hypertensive effects of chocolate.”

The study found that participants who consumed this got the boost from the chocolate but the L-theanine reduced their blood pressure.

Although chocolate with L-theanine is not commercially available, Professor Stevens thinks there is potential:

“It’s remarkable.

The potential here is for a heart healthy chocolate confection that contains a high level of cacao with L-theanine that is good for your heart, lowers blood pressure and helps you pay attention.”

The study was published in the journal NeuroRegulation (Montopoli et al., 2015).

Yum Yum image from Shutterstock

This trick makes you feel closer to your future self so that you start four times sooner.

Thinking about upcoming goals in terms of days rather than months or years motivates action, new research finds.

Even counting months rather than years has a beneficial effect, psychologists have revealed.

Professor Daphna Oyserman of the University of Southern California, who led the study, thinks the tip…

“…may be useful to anyone needing to save for retirement or their children’s college, to start working on a term paper or dissertation, pretty much anyone with long-term goals or wanting to support someone who has such goals.”

Over 1,000 participants took part in four different studies to examine the phenomenon.

People were encouraged to think about goals in terms of different time scales.

For example, they either thought about saving for a college fund in 18 years or in 6,570 days.

Or, they thought about saving for retirement either in 30 years or in 10,950 days.

Thinking in days made people feel more connected to their future selves, which in turn was a greater motivator to action.

People said they would start working towards their goal four times sooner when the time was expressed in days than when it was expressed in years.

The research was published in the journal Psychological Science (Lewis & Oyserman, 2015).

Procrastination image from Shutterstock

Out-of-body illusion created in the lab reveals how we know where we are.

Neuroscientists have created an illusion of an out-of-body experience in the lab, a new study reports.

With people placed inside a brain scanner, they were virtually ‘teleported’ around the room.

At the same time their brains were scanned to see how we locate ourselves in space.

To create the illusion for the study, published in the journal Current Biology, neuroscientists put head-mounted displays on 15 people (Guterstam et al., 2015).

They were then virtually teleported by having the display’s perspective moved around the room (see below).

To complete the illusion, the person’s body was touched at exactly the same time and place as the body they could see — and were led to believe was their own.

Arvid Guterstam, the study’s lead author, explained the effect:

“In a matter of seconds, the brain merges the sensation of touch and visual input from the new perspective, resulting in the illusion of owning the stranger’s body and being located in that body’s position in the room, outside the participant’s physical body.”

The scans revealed that the brain locates itself in space using specific areas in the temporal and parietal lobes.

Mr Guterstam continued:

“The sense of being a body located somewhere in space is essential for our interactions with the outside world and constitutes a fundamental aspect of human self-consciousness.

Our results are important because they represent the first characterization of the brain areas that are involved in shaping the perceptual experience of the bodily self in space.”

One of the regions the study found is important in locating the self in space is the hippocampus.

Nobel Prize winning research has already shown that cells in the hippocampus of a rat’s brain (known as ‘place cells’) provide a kind of GPS system for self-location.

Professor Henrik Ehrsson, the study’s principal investigator, said:

“This finding is particularly interesting because it indicates that place cells are not only involved in navigation and memory encoding, but are also important for generating the conscious experience of one’s body in space.”

Eyes closed image from Shutterstock and lab image from Arvid Guterstam

Do people really think better on their feet?

Students using ‘standing desks’ pay more attention in class than those who are seated, a new study finds.

Standing rather than sitting while learning led to students paying an extra 7 minutes of attention in each hour to their studies.

Dr Mark Benden, one of the study’s authors and associate professor at the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health, said:

“Standing workstations reduce disruptive behavior problems and increase students’ attention or academic behavioral engagement by providing students with a different method for completing academic tasks (like standing) that breaks up the monotony of seated work.

Considerable research indicates that academic behavioral engagement is the most important contributor to student achievement.

Simply put, we think better on our feet than in our seat.”

For the study 282 children between about 7- and 10-years-old were followed over the academic year.

Some classes had regular desks, while others had standing desks.

Students were not forced to stand all day as the special desk also has a stool on which they can sit (below).

The desk was originally designed to help combat obesity and stress on the spine from sitting.

Indeed, previous research suggests they can also increase calorie consumption by 15% (and 25% amongst obese children).

This is the first study to look at the effects on students’ engagement.

The results showed that those using the standing desk were more likely to:

• Raise their hand.
• Play a part in classroom discussions.
• Answer a question.
• Avoid talking out of turn.

The research is published in the  International Journal of Health Promotion and Education (Dornhecker et al., 2015).

Sitting man image from Shutterstock and ‘standing desk’ image from Texas A&M Health Science Center

How to turn that frown upside down.

Wearing sunglasses makes people less likely to express anger on a sunny day, a recent psychology study finds.

The findings are based on the idea of embodied cognition: that our facial expressions and bodily actions, whatever their cause, feed back into how we feel.

The slightly bizarre study, published in the journal Cognition & Emotion, had researchers walking up and down a beach on a sunny day (Marzoli et al., 2013).

People were randomly approached who were either wearing sunglasses or not, and who were either walking into the sun or away from it.

They were then asked to complete a test in which they could express both anger and bitterness.

The results showed that people walking into the sun without sunglasses were more likely to express anger than people who had the sun behind them, or who were wearing sunglasses and walking into the sun.

There was no difference, though, on a measure of bitterness, suggesting that people walking into the sun weren’t just in a generalised bad mood.

And it didn’t matter how long they had been walking into the sun, so wearing sunglasses, or not, likely has a very quick effect.

This was despite the fact that most people reported the sun wasn’t bothering them.

Embodied cognition

The reason that this works is that when people are walking into the sun without sunglasses, they usually frown to shield their eyes.

It just so happens, though, that frowning uses some of the same facial muscles as expressing anger.

And frowning, even when there’s nothing to be angry about, makes anger more likely to come to the fore.

It’s the same effect that means that if you force yourself to smile, even when you’re in a bad mood, it can make you feel a little better.

Psychologists call it embodied cognition.

It’s not just our mind that causes our facial expressions: our facial expressions (and posture) also feed back directly to the mind.

Botox for depression

The same effect has been observed in people who have botox injections between their eyebrows to stop them frowning.

One study has shown that people suffering from moderate or severe depression experienced a 50% reduction in symptoms, on average, from botox injections (Finzi & Rosenthal, 2014).

Image credit: Daniela Vladimirova

Self-control can be boosted using tiny electrical pulses from electrodes, a new study finds.

Neuroscientists have successfully used a new type of brain stimulation to act on a mental braking system located in the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain above the eyes.

The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, gave participants a simple test of self-control (Wessel et al., 2013).

This involved them trying to stop themselves from routinely pressing a button when suddenly given an unexpected auditory command.

Participants had electrodes attached to their heads to deliver the electrical stimulation to the precise area of their brain which has an inhibitory effect on behaviour.

The electrical current passing through the brain was relatively small, and so imperceptible to participants.

The part of the brain targeted, in the prefrontal cortex, is a crucial component in the network that slows down and stops some behaviour.

Sometimes participants were given help to inhibit the button pressing behaviours by having the electrical current delivered.

The results showed that the electrical stimulation helped inhibit their button pressing.

One of the study’s authors, Nitin Tandon, M.D., explained:

“There is a circuit in the brain for inhibiting or braking responses. We believe we are the first to show that we can enhance this braking system with brain stimulation.”

Although the research is a long way from being able to improve human self-control at a general level, it does show that it is possible to affect the brain’s braking system with the application of electrical currents in certain circumstances.

It’s particularly interesting because usually electrical brain stimulation disrupts brain activity.

In this case, though, the stimulation had a coherent, positive effect on behaviour.

And this from such low electrical currents that participants in the study could not feel it.

Image credit: Krischan Schallenberger

Stories leave their mark on the mind both psychologically and neurologically.

A new study in which participants’ brains were scanned before, during and five days after reading a novel has found persistent neurological changes (Berns et al., 2013).

The book–Robert Harris’ Pompeii–was given to 19 people to read.

They were scanned every day, over 19 consecutive days, to assess the brain’s resting state: in other words, what it’s doing when it’s doing nothing in particular.

The results, published in the journal Brain Connectivity, showed that there were changes in the brain’s resting state that persisted after participants had finished reading the novel.

The lead author, Gregory Berns, explained:

“Even though the participants were not actually reading the novel while they were in the scanner, they retained this heightened connectivity. We call that a ‘shadow activity,’ almost like a muscle memory.”

The heightened connectivity was seen in the areas of the brain associated with receptivity to language: the left temporal cortex. However, these changes in resting brain state were relatively short-lived.

The scans also revealed greater activity in the area of the brain responsible for the sense of touch and embodiment, the somatosensory cortex.

The changes here persisted for five days after participants had finished reading the novel.

Berns commented:

“The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist. We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.”

So, while reading a good novel can leave its mark psychologically in the mind, it can also leave its mark biologically on the brain. And, as William Styron said:

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”

He was right: both metaphorically and literally.

Image credit: Liz Poage