Slashdot Mirror
Keep Fit Program For The Brain
merryprankster writes "New Scientist is running a
feature on 11 steps
to a better brain. While becoming a nun might be an extreme way to avoid
senility, there are lots of other tricks, techniques and habits, as well as
changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey
matter and get the best out of your brain cells." From the article: "First, go to the top of the class by eating breakfast. The brain is best fuelled by a steady supply of glucose, and many studies have shown that skipping breakfast reduces people's performance at school and at work. But it isn't simply a matter of getting some calories down. According to research published in 2003, kids breakfasting on fizzy drinks and sugary snacks performed at the level of an average 70-year-old in tests of memory and attention."
i recommend a game of "Go" a day
"It's official: playing go really does keep your mind sharp. Researchers have just released a comprehensive study of the benefits of challenging intellectual activity among the elderly and found that exercising the mind through board games, social activities and education offers powerful protection against mental deterioration and disease.
'Those who played board games had a 74 percent lower risk and those who played an instrument had a 69 percent lower risk. Doing crossword puzzles cut the risk by 38 percent,' reported Shankar Vedantam in the June 19 Washington Post. The report found that seniors who regularly engaged in mentally challenging pastimes reduced their chances of developing Alzheimer's disease and other dementias by as much as 75 percent, compared with those who didn't exercise their minds."
More info on Go, the game that exercises both sides of your brain!
I seriously doubt anyone considers Pop Tarts to be a part of a nutritious breakfast. It's a convenience food, not a health food.
Did anybody try http://mybraintrainer.com/? It has 8 online excersises which when performed daily seem to improve I.Q. by few points. Personally,I did feel sharper (for that day only :-)) whenever I did these excersises. However, the downside is that it might get boring after few days.
This Slate article http://slate.com/id/2111758// compares several IQ boosting products and finds that the Mybraintrainer is one of the most effective ones. Give it a try !
You obviously don't remember what number was painted on the General Lee.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Perhaps the problem is as much what people eat as how much time they are willing to invest in eating it.
/. regulars that would be noon for breakfast, 4:0pm for lunch and 10:00 pm for the evening snack before bed).
Something like a pop tart or nutrigrain bar is it's ready right away.
Sugar is a simple carbohydrate and is readily absorbed into the bloodstream. There's a nasty spike of sugar in the blood and the body produces a whole lot of insulin to get rid of it by converting it into fat. Whole wheat toast is an example of a complex carbohydrate which has long chains of carbohydrates. The body has to expend a fair bit of energy just to break it down so it ends up taking far longer to work into the bloodstream.
While there are convenient foods like toast or fruit that provide the complex carbohydrates, leftover spaghetti or rice from the night before would also do the trick and would give you the staying power that a piece of fruit might not give.
The body also starts to slow its metabolic rate down several hours before you go to bed and in north america, we (foolishly) eat our biggest meal then. From a weight loss point of view it makes the most sense to eat a modest meal when we get up to kickstart the metabolism, to eat the largest meal at noon so we have the energy to do all our work throughout the day, and a light snack at 6pm to tide us over through the night (for
as a graduate student in psychology I am upset by the frequent unscientific articles posted on slashdot relating to my field. Here are a couple of points that I think need to be made:
.000001% increase in IQ but in 10,0000) people. I can assure most of the results reported in this article are based on studies that are closer to the later method than the former. Furthermore this .00001% increase (is in the previous example) is an AVERAGE. That it is, for you in particular eating breakfast may even decrease your IQ. That is, infering something is true about an individual from the group that individual belongs to is a fallacy. There's even a name for this fallacy (the ecological fallacy).
1. All of you probably know this but I'll just emphasize the point: "correlation is not causation."
2. All these "facts" are based on very questionable statistical techniques. I won't go into these techniques here but the idea in these experiments is that you want to make sure the effect of some manipulated variable is above chance (statistical significance). There are two ways to do this: have a large effect (e.g. eating breakfast causes a 10% increase in IQ) or just get lots of people so that even a small effect is not very likely by chance (e.g. eating breakfast causes a
3. Finding a brain area that is "activated" (fMRI) during a certain cognitive task is about as unexciting as learning that people use their hands to perform a physical task. OF COURSE, there is some area (or mostly likely areas) of the brain that is used in cognitive task just as of course there are areas of the body that perform "physical" tasks. Furthermore, it's unclear if "activation" should mean anything at all. Activation is defined as some small change in blood flow (which is correlated with neural activity) as measured via the oxygen levels picked up by a fMRI machine. Again, these difference results just need to be statistically significant to get published so that who knows what that meeds for individuals.
Little offtopic but shoddy science is the bane of all true geeks damn it.
No, dude. Breakfast is the FIRST meal of the day by literal definnition. You are BREAKING your FAST from the night without food.
The real impact of this on diet and weight is less clear. Some have taken this new research as compelling evidence that carbohydrates are bad and should be avoided. Other nutritionists are skeptical of this position. The truth probably lies somewhere in between--North Americans probably eat too many carbohydrates, and too many of the ones we eat are of the kind that is rapidly processed into blood sugar (e.g. white bread instead of whole wheat).
Your understanding of exercise is wrong. If you must eat breakfast alone to do a workout in the morning, eat breakfast alone. Completing a workout after eating 7-10 hours earlier is not healthy, and will mostly break down muscle. If you want to loose some fat and gain some power (why not?) make sure your metabolic state is correct first.
The principle of eating before your workout is universal and doesn't need any source. In case you dont believe me, here's an article about nutrition and swimmers. http://www.bcst.com/uploads/876.htm
Swimming not your thing? Talk to one of the real health experts at your friendly neighborhood gym.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14