Brain Power News

I recently updated The Secrets Package e-books for 2012, and I added an e-book on beating the polygraph. There are six e-books total now. These cover all sorts of subjects, but the ones with the most brainpower-related content are probably Signs of Lying, and You Aren’t Supposed to Know. The latter has a chapter with 70 tips for increasing brainpower. I have included a couple of those further along in this post.

Some of the content which might interest you (in You Aren’t Supposed to Know) includes:

Chapter 1 – Subliminal Persuasion Techniques You Can Use Today

Chapter 2 – Read Minds and Influence the Opposite Sex

Chapter 3 – 70 Ways to Increase Your Brainpower

Chapter 8 – Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Chapter 9 – How to Quickly Motivate Yourself

Chapter 21 – How to Be More Creative

Chapter 22 – How to Develop Your Intuition

Chapter 23 – Secrets of Focused continue reading…

The research has been pretty consistent over the years, showing that there are real declines in many areas of cognitive function as we get older. Memory is perhaps the most obvious area of difficulty, but attention and speed of thought process suffer as well. So what can we do about this? We have known that exercise, better diet and lots of mental activity can help, but there is more good news. Recent research is showing that we already do something about the changes without conscious intention; we become more emotionally mature.

Our emotions can help us with decision making and in social situations. As we age we generally control our emotions better, and use them in more effective ways. Joseph A. Mikels, in a recent article for Scientific American, says;

When presented with emotionally charged situations, older individuals, for instance, use strategies that focus on the positive and minimize the negative.  Such a focus brings benefits in that older adults experience continue reading…

Previous studies have found that regular exercise helps people with insomnia sleep better. Better sleep generally leads to improvements in one’s ability to concentrate. Put the two facts together and it is safe to say that at least for insomniacs getting regular exercise can be good for brainpower.

A new study looks at exercise and its effects on the quality of sleep for people in general (whether or not they have any specific problems diagnosed). It turns out that getting those regular workouts not only improves sleep quality for most people, but it also reduces daytime sleepiness. The research was recently reported on Science Daily;

A nationally representative sample of more than 2,600 men and women, ages 18-85, found that 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity a week, which is the national guideline, provided a 65 percent improvement in sleep quality. People also said they felt less sleepy during the day, compared to those with less physical activity.

It’s estimated that up to 40% of the population in the US has continue reading…

Yes, some recent research has found a correlation between a big waist and a lower IQ. This is the kind of study that some people wish wasn’t done, but scientific knowledge can be useful even when it is uncomfortable. On the other hand, the study done has not yet been in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, so we will see if there were perhaps some flaws in the methodology or any other problems with the findings. Meanwhile, here is what was found according to an article on msn.com;

Swedish men who had the lowest IQs at about age 18 had higher waist-to-hip ratios at age 40 than their peers who scored higher on those IQ tests. It’s known that people with “apple-shaped” bodies, or more weight around the middle, are at higher risk for heart disease than those with “pear-shaped” bodies.

Exactly how or even if IQ during late adolescence affects waist size is not clearly understood, and U.S cardiologists caution that it is continue reading…

I have written about the short-term effects of consuming too many simple carbohydrates. You may have noticed the brain fog that can follow a piece of cake, for example. But consumption of sugars and simple carbohydrates in excess also leads to diabetes, and that can have long term effects on the brain. Consider the research reported in a recent article on ScienceDaily.com;

For the past five years, a team led by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) neurophysiologist Vera Novak, MD, PhD, has been studying the effects of diabetes on cognitive health in older individuals and has determined that memory loss, depression and other types of cognitive impairment are serious consequences of this widespread disease.

The article went on to describe the specific changes in the brain that occur, and how that affected decision-making, language, verbal memory and complex tasks. It was also noted that continue reading…

I have reported on body and mind connections many times here, on the website, and in the Brainpower Newsletter. In fact, I even suggested that if you sit up straight and breath deeply you might do better on a mental task. That last tip is based on my own experiences and those of others. But the science is catching up with our human experiences of what works. Consider the following excerpt from an article about the body and how it affects our minds, from Science Daily;

“Decision making, like other cognitive processes, is an integration of multiple sources of information — memory, visual imagery, and bodily information, like posture,” says Anita Eerland, a psychologist at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. In a new study, Eerland and colleagues Tulio Guadalupe and Rolf Zwaan found that surreptitiously manipulating the tilt of the body influences people’s estimates of quantities, such as sizes, numbers, or percentages. The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

Participants in the study were told to estimate certain things, like the height of a building or the percentage of alcohol in a given type of beverage. In another test they were asked to continue reading…

I have said it before and the research keeps coming in to show that yes, you can increase your intelligence. No, you probably can’t tack on 30 points to your IQ score, no matter what you try, but you can add a little to it. We don’t know how much, but there was some research from 2008 which suggests how. It was recently reported on in an article by Andrea Kuszewski from Scientific American;

“…a very exciting study was published, Improving Fluid Intelligence with Training on Working Memory, by Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, and Perrig. This study was pretty much a game-changer for those doing research on this topic. They showed for the first time, that it might actually be possible to increase your intelligence to a significant degree through training. What did they do different?

The subjects in Jaeggi’s study were trained on an intensive, multimodal (visual and auditory input) working memory task (the  dual-n-back) for continue reading…

Parents may want to pay attention to the latest research on immune system response and brain function. Staci Bilbo, an assistant professor in psychology & neuroscience at Duke University, has found that when rats have an infection at an early age they later have an aggressive immune response to subsequent infections. This, it turns out, harms learning and memory. As reported on Science Daily;

“In a study published in the Oct. 26 Journal of Neuroscience, Bilbo’s team identifies the source of the learning difficulties and traces it back to the immune system itself.

The researchers found that specialized immune system cells in the brain called microglia release a signaling molecule called Interleukin-1, or IL-1, in response to an infection. IL-1 is also crucial to normal learning and memory in the hippocampus region of the brain. But too much IL-1 can impair learning and continue reading…

Is it a matter of practice or natural ability that makes the difference between those who succeed as athletes, piano players, scientists and in other fields? In other words, are experts mostly born or created? That was the question addressed by a recent article on ScienceDaily.com;

“…Malcolm Gladwell stayed atop the bestseller lists by popularizing the “10,000-hour rule” of Florida State University psychologist K. Anders Ericsson. Using Ericsson’s pioneering work — but omitting equally prominent, contradictory, research — Gladwell’s book Outliers argued that given a certain level of intelligence and a bit of luck, virtually anybody can get to Carnegie Hall — provided they practice, practice, practice.”

I have read Outliers, and although Gladwell may have omitted contradictory research, I do not recall him arguing that it was only practice that mattered. As I recall, he argued that there is a tendency to see success occurring after about 10,000 hours of experience and/or practice in a given field. That does not suggest that anyone who puts in the hours will continue reading…

Is anger good for creativity? Apparently not in the long run, but it does seem to give a boost to people early on in the brainstorming process according to recent research.

Flickr photo by Allan Donque

As reported by Scientific American;

“This counterintuitive idea was pursued by researchers Matthijs Baas, Carsten De Dreu, and Bernard Nijstad in a series of studies  recently published in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. They found that angry people were more likely to be creative – though this advantage didn’t last for long, as the taxing nature of anger eventually leveled out creativity. This study joins several recent lines of research exploring the relative upside to anger – the ways in which anger is not only less harmful than typically assumed, but may even be helpful (though perhaps in small doses).

In an initial study, the researchers found that feeling angry was indeed associated with continue reading…