Our brain – part 2 – Enrichment

Developed nations have created a sedentary, inactive society with a deteriorated vascular system and consequent decline in physical and mental health. Nearly half of young people ages 12 to 21, do not participate in vigorous physical activity on a regular basis. Fewer than one-in-four children report getting at least half an hour of any type of daily physical activity and do not attend any school physical education classes. In June 2001, ABC News reported that school children spend 4.8 hours per day on the computer, watching TV, or playing video games. Adults are in the same boat. So perk up your brain with these approaches.

Challenge your brain

When we are young, the world seems filled with curious surprises, wonderful discoveries, and overwhelming challenges. Our brains are taking in limitless bits of information and we are developing lifetime skills. This burst of learning is like the brain Olympics of our human journey. Yet unlike the Olympic athletes who have a limited time to demonstrate their peak performance, the human brain can continue to grow and improve with exercise.
It is important to challenge your brain to learn new and unique tasks, especially processes that you’ve never done before. Examples include dancing, chess, kung fu, yoga, or even playing a musical instrument. Working with modeling clay or play dough is an especially good way for children to grow new connections. It helps develop agility and hand-brain coordination.

Travel

Traveling is another good way to stimulate your brain. It worked for our ancestors, the early Homo sapiens. Their nomadic lifestyle provided a tremendous stimulation for their brains that led to the development of superior tools and survival skills. In comparison, the now-extinct Neanderthal was a species that for thousands of years apparently did not venture too far from their homes. (Maybe they were simply content with their lives – in contrast to the seldom-satisfied Homo sapiens.)
Early humans gained a crucial evolutionary edge from the flexibility and innovation required by their strategic lifestyle, which also led to a more diverse diet that allowed their brains to rapidly evolve.

Flex your brain

Regard your brain as a muscle, and find opportunities to exercise it. “Read, read, read,” says Dr. Amir Soas of Case Western Reserve University Medical School in Cleveland. Do puzzles, play Scrabble, start a new hobby or learn to speak a foreign language. “Anything that stimulates the brain to think.” Also, watch less television, because “your brain goes into neutral,” he said.
Challenging the brain early in life is crucial to building up more “cognitive reserve” to counter brain-damaging disease, according to Dr. David Bennett of Chicago’s Rush University. And, reading-habits prior to age 18 are a key predictor of later cognitive function.
A cognitive psychologist in England found that when elderly people regularly played bingo, it helped minimize their memory loss and strengthened their hand-eye coordination. Bingo seemed to help players of all ages remain mentally sharp.

Grow your brain

Research on the physical results of thinking has shown that just using the brain actually increases the number of dendritic branches that interconnect brain cells. The more we think, the better our brains function – regardless of age. The renowned brain researcher Dr. Marian Diamond says, “The nervous system possesses not just a ‘morning’ of plasticity, but an ‘afternoon’ and an ‘evening’ as well.”
Dr. Diamond found that whether we are young or old, we can continue to learn. The brain can change at any age. A dendrite grows much like a tree, from trunk to branches to twigs, in an array of ever finer complexity.
In fact, older brains may have an advantage. She discovered that more highly developed neurons respond even better to intellectual enrichment than less developed ones do. The greatest increase in dendritic length occurred in the outermost dendritic branches, as a reaction to new information.

As she poetically describes it: “We began with a nerve cell, which starts in the embryo as just a sort of sphere. It sends its first branch out to overcome ignorance. As it reaches out, it is gathering knowledge and it is becoming creative. Then we become a little more idealistic, generous, and altruistic; but it is our six-sided dendrites which give us wisdom.”

Mental exercise

Contrary to popular myth, we do not lose mass quantities of brains cells as you get older. “There isn’t much difference between a 25-year old brain and a 75-year old brain,” says Dr. Monte S. Buchsbaum, who has scanned a lot of brains as director of the Neuroscience PET Laboratory at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Cognitive decline is not inevitable. When 6,000 older people were given mental tests throughout a ten-year period, almost 70% continued to maintain their brain power as they aged. Certain areas of the brain, however, are more prone to damage and deterioration over time. One is the hippocampus , which transfers new memories to long-term storage elsewhere in the brain. Another vulnerable area is the basal ganglia, which coordinates commands to move muscles. Research indicates that mental exercise can improve these areas and positively affect memory and physical coordination.
Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation discovered that a muscle can be strengthened just by thinking about exercising it.
For 12 weeks (five minutes a day, five days per week) a team of 30 healthy young adults imagined either using the muscle of their little finger or of their elbow flexor. Dr. Vinoth Ranganathan and his team asked the participants to think as strongly as they could about moving the muscle being tested, to make the imaginary movement as real as they could.
Compared to a control group – that did no imaginary exercises and showed no strength gains – the little-finger group increased their pinky muscle strength by 35%. The other group increased elbow strength by 13.4%.

Surround yourself in a stimulating environment

Animal studies show that intellectual enrichment can even compensate for some forms of physical brain damage. For example, a mentally stimulating environment helped protect rats from the potentially damaging effects of lead poisoning.
Neuroscientists at Jefferson Medical College compared groups of rats given lead-laced water for several weeks in two different environments. Rats living in a stimulating environment showed a better ability to learn compared to the animals that were isolated. “Behaviorally, being in an enriched environment seemed to help protect their brains,” says Jay Schneider, Ph.D., professor of pathology, neurology, anatomy and cell biology.
“The magnitude of the protective effect surprised me,” he says. “This might lead to an early educational intervention for at-risk populations.” It suggests a way to diminish the damage that lead does to kids: by manipulating their socio-behavioral environment.

Keep a healthy brain with physical exercise

We all know that physical exercise is good for our general health, but did you know that physical exercise is also good for your brain? If you think you’re going to get smarter sitting in front of your computer or watching television, think again.

Exercise is beneficial for your brain, because it increases blood circulation and the oxygen and glucose that reach your brain. Walking can be especially advantageous as it is not strenuous, so your leg muscles don’t take up extra oxygen and glucose like they do during other forms of exercise. As you walk, you effectively oxygenate your brain. Maybe this is why walking can “clear your head” and helps you to think better.
Ongoing animal studies at The Salk Institute show that running can boost brain cell survival in mice that have a neurodegenerative disease with properties similar to Alzheimer’s.
When these mice are sedentary, “it appears that most newly born brain cells die. We don’t understand that fully, but it probably has something to do with an inability to cope with oxidative stress,” said Carrolee Barlow, a Salk assistant professor and lead author of the study. “Running appears to ‘rescue’ many of these cells that would otherwise die.”
Furthermore, the miles logged correlated directly with the numbers of increased cells, she said. “It’s almost as if they were wearing pedometers, and those that ran more grew more cells.”

Protecting your brain as it ages

Physical exercise has a protective effect on the brain and its mental processes, and may even help prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Based on exercise and health data from nearly 5,000 men and women over 65 years of age, those who exercised were less likely to lose their mental abilities or develop dementia, including Alzheimer’s.
Furthermore, the five-year study at the Laval University in Sainte-Foy, Quebec suggests that the more a person exercises the greater the protective benefits for the brain, particularly in women. Inactive individuals were twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s, compared to those with the highest levels of activity (exercised vigorously at least three times a week). But even light or moderate exercisers cut their risk significantly for Alzheimer’s and mental decline.

Our brain-part 1- A closer look

Our brain is a thinking organ that learns and grows by interacting with the world through perception and action. Mental stimulus improves brain function and actually protects against cognitive decline, as the same with physical exercise.

The human brain is constantly adapting and rewiring itself. Even in old age, the brain can still grow new neurons. Severe mental decline is usually caused by disease, whereas most age-related losses in memory or motor skills simply result from inactivity and a lack of mental exercise and stimulation. Simply put: use it or lose it.

In the beginning

Commencing in the womb and throughout life this immense network continues to expand, adapt, and learn. The primary need for a nervous system was to coordinate movement, so an organism could go find food, instead of waiting for the food to come to it. Jellyfish and sea anemone were the first animals to create nerve cells, they had a great advantage over the sponges that waited brainlessly for food to arrive. After millions of generations of trail and error, nervous systems evolved some remarkable ways of going out to eat. But behind all the numerous forms of life today, the primary directive remains. Movement is in fact a good measure of aging. Inflexibility signals weakness, sickness or death, while a flexible body and fluid mind are the characteristics of youth.
Before birth, the brain creates neurons and the brain cells that communicate with each other at the rate of 15 million firings per hour. When the baby is born, about 100 billion neurons were in position to organize themselves in response to the new environment, no matter the culture, climate, language, or lifestyle.

During infancy, billions of these remarkable cells intertwined into the extensive networks that integrated the nervous system. By the time a person reaches four or five years old, fundamental cerebral architecture will be complete. Until the age of early teens, it is considered the window of opportunity, as this is the time where the brain absorbs the most. Easily to learn language and writing, math and music, as well as the coordinated movements used in sports and dance. But, at any age we can and should continue to build our brain and expand our mind.

Neural network

Throughout life, neural networks reorganize and reinforce themselves in response to new stimuli and learning experiences. This body-mind interaction is what stimulates brain cells to grow and connect with each other in complex ways. They do so by extending branches of intricate nerve fibers called dendrites (from the Latin word for “tree”). These are the antennas through which neurons receive communication from each other.
A healthy, well-functioning neuron can be directly linked to tens of thousands of other neurons, creating a totality of more than a hundred trillion connections, each capable of performing 200 calculations per second. This is the structural basis of your brain’s memory capacity and thinking ability.

Neuroscientists believe that learning and memory involve changes at the neuron-to-neuron synapses. Such changes are called long-term potentiation (LTP), making it easier for connected neurons to communicate with each other and therefore to form memories. LTP involves patterns of synaptic strengthening and weakening that can last for weeks. Because receptor aggregation may contribute to LTP and scattering may be a factor to the reverse scenario, such as long-term depression. The discovery that receptors can scurry in and out of synapses strengthens the synaptic hypothesis of learning.

A study by neuroscientists at Brown University provided further evidence that learning uses long-term potentiation LTP to produce changes in the synaptic connections between brain cells that are necessary to acquire and store new information. When the researchers taught rats a new motor skill, scientists found that the animals’ brains had also changed. The strength of synapses between neurons in the motor cortex of their brains had increased through a process consistent with the use of LTP. Previously, “the link between LTP, synaptic modification and learning was tentative,” said senior author John Donoghue, professor of neuroscience. “This latest study provides strong evidence that learning itself engages LTP in the cerebral cortex as a way to strengthen synaptic connections.”

Mind and body relationship

Brain chemistry reveals a crucial unity of mind and body. Neurons not only contact other neurons, they also connect with skeletal muscles, at a specialized structure called the neuromuscular junction. There the brain uses acetylcholine where its primary chemical neurotransmitter for memory and attention is to communicate with muscles. Another of the brain’s key chemical messengers, dopamine, helps regulate fine motor movement.

The role of these neurotransmitters in regulating movement underscores the close relation between body and mind, muscle and memory. In fact, many masseuses find that deep massage can trigger the release and awareness of powerful, long-held emotional memories.

When acetylcholine is released at a neuromuscular junction, it crosses the tiny space (synapse) that separates the nerve from the muscle. It then binds to acetylcholine receptor molecules on the muscle fiber’s surface. This initiates a chain of events that lead to muscle contraction.

Scientists have shown that muscle fiber contains a scaffold made of special proteins that hold these acetylcholine receptors in place. Research led by Jeff W. Lichtman, M.D., Ph.D., at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, indicates that a loss of nerve signals due to inactivity actually separates this scaffold and causes a loss of acetylcholine receptors. When the muscle becomes active again, however, the scaffold tightens its grip and grasps any receptors that come by.
“So muscle activity is a cue to keep a synapse stable, and synaptic inactivity is a cue to disassemble a synapse,” says Lichtman, a professor of neurobiology. “So if you lose activity, you lose receptors. But if you regain activity, you get those receptors back.”

Meditation for stress control

Dealing with stress the wrong way

When we are placed in situations of pressure or stress, our body responds in very negative ways. Such outcomes are mental fatigue, anxiety attacks, anger, frustration and all these can lead to other problems of the physical body. Many people tend to deal with such ‘problems’ with listen to music, resorting to drugs or alcohol, physical exercise and many others. But the solution is not to turn away from it but be able to control, reduce and on a higher level not be affected by it at all.

Now a team of researchers from China and the University of Oregon have developed an approach for neuroscientists to study how meditation might provide improvements in a person’s attention and response to stress. The study, done in China, randomly assigned college undergraduate students to 40-person experimental or control groups. The experimental group received five days of meditation training using a technique called the integrative body-mind training (IBMT). The control group got five days of relaxation training. Before and after training both groups took tests involving attention and reaction to mental stress.
The experimental group showed greater improvement than the control in an attention test designed to measure the subjects’ abilities to resolve conflict among stimuli. Stress was induced by mental arithmetic. Both groups initially showed elevated release of the stress hormone cortisol following the math task, but after training the experimental group showed less cortisol release, indicating a greater improvement stress regulation. The experimental group also showed lower levels of anxiety, depression, anger and fatigue than was the case in the control group.
“This study improves the prospect for examining brain mechanisms involved in the changes in attention and self-regulation that occur following meditation training,” said co-author Michael I. Posner, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Oregon. “The study took only five days, so it was possible to randomly assign the subjects and do a thorough before-and-after analysis of the training effects.”

Integrative body-mind training

The IBMT approach was developed in the 1990s. Its effects have been studied in China since 1995. The technique avoids struggles to control thought, relying instead on a state of restful alertness, allowing for a high degree of body-mind awareness while receiving instructions from a coach, who provides breath-adjustment guidance and mental imagery while soothing music plays in the background. Thought control is achieved gradually through posture, relaxation, body-mind harmony and balanced breathing. The authors noted in the study that IBMT may be effective during short-term application because of its integrative use of these components.

IBMT has been found to improve emotional and cognitive performance, as well as social behavior, in people, said lead author Yi-Yuan Tang, a professor in the Institute of Neuroinformatics and Laboratory for Body and Mind at Dalian University of Technology in Dalian, China. Tang currently is a visiting scholar at the University of Oregon, where he is working with Posner on a new and larger study to be conducted in the United States.

The current study did not include direct measures of brain changes, although previous studies have suggested alterations have occurred in brain networks. Posner said the planned studies in the United States will include functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine any brain network changes induced by training.
In summary, the 11-member team wrote: “IBMT is an easy, effective way for improvement in self-regulation in cognition, emotion and social behavior. Our study is consistent with the idea that attention, affective processes and the quality of moment-to-moment awareness are flexible skills that can be trained.”
At this point, the findings suggest a measurable benefit that people could achieve through body-mind meditation, especially involving an effective training regimen, but larger studies are needed to fully test the findings of this small, short-term study, Posner said.

Introduction to brain frequencies

At any one moment, the human brain contains thousands of different brainwaves which are produced by the electrical signals transmitted between the billions of neurons from which the brain is constructed. Through the use of specialized equipment, such as an EEG (electroencephalography) it is possible to see and record all brainwave activity, which then allows for the brainwaves to be analysed and monitored. EEG recordings show that brainwaves change depending upon the activity of the monitored individual.

History

First discovered by biophysicist Gerald Oster at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, Brainwave Therapy sends pure, precisely tuned sound waves of different frequencies to your brain via stereo headphones. In his EEG research, Oster discovered that when different vibrations, or sound frequencies, are delivered to the brain separately through each ear (as with stereo headphones), the two hemispheres of the brain function together to “hear” not the external sound signals, but a third phantom signal. This signal is called a binaural beat, and it pulses at the exact mathematical difference between the two actual tones. For example, a signal of 100 Hz delivered to the left ear and a signal of 107 Hz delivered to the right creates a binaural beat of 7 Hz which in this case falls into the Alpha range.

Brainwave groups

There are many forms of brainwaves, but in essence they can be grouped into four distinct categories, each of which represents a different mental state. The four most recognized groups of brainwaves are; Alpha, Beta, Theta and Delta.
Alpha frequency
Alpha brainwaves are generated by the brain when in a relaxed but alert state. As discussed in another article here, each group carries a particular frequency, the alpha range is 8hz to 14hz. Alpha is generally a very desired frequency, and has many uses in terms of brain entrainment. It is a target frequency for many meditators, and is also very effective in reducing stress, anxiety and nervousness.
Beta frequency
At a frequency between 14hz and 30hz, beta brainwaves are the most dominant during times of high mental and physical activity. Stimulating beta brainwaves can lead to higher levels of concentration, improving learning ability and attention. Research into ADD and ADHD has also confirmed that increasing beta levels can be of benefit to those with that condition.
Theta frequency
Found during periods of dreaming, trance and hypnosis, theta brainwaves operate at a frequency of 4hz to 8hz. Theta is also used during entrainment to induce high levels of relaxation, and deep meditations. At low theta levels, the pineal gland can become stimulated which in turn can bring on mild visions, as well as enhance intuition and imagination.
Delta frequency
Associated with deep sleep, delta brainwaves are found between the frequencies of 0.5hz and 4hz. Delta entrainment is most regularly used to induce sleep and is actually a recognized aid for helping with insomnia. Individuals who are exceptionally skilled with meditation can sometimes attain delta brainwaves whilst remaining awake.

If you’ve never listened to any binaural beats or are just trying out brainwave programs which allow you to choose different frequencies, it’s a good idea to slowly reduce the frequency a little at a time, from Beta to Alpha and so on.
Don’t be too ambitious and immediately set a binaural beat of 4Hz, down from your normal Beta brainwave frequency of 14 plus Hz. If you do, you’re going to find it extremely uncomfortable.
It’ll be difficult for your mind to process all that energy without even having gone through Alpha state (7-14 Hz). What’s happening here is that each time you entrain your brain waves to a new lower frequency, your mind is building new neural pathways through your brain.
Each time you listen to a frequency, the neural pathways are strengthened as your mind and body physically adjust itself to the lower frequency.
It’s like training for a race. If you’re not fit enough to run a 100-yards race, it’s not likely that you’ll be able to immediately run a marathon.