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!
What happened to the 12th step?
Oh, wait...
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
The obvious stuff that has been known for millenia -- eat healthy, exercise (your body and your brain), don't abuse yourself.
Sad that this is so forgotten that it is news.
...Profit!
"While becoming a nun might be an extreme way to avoid senility, there are lots of other tricks, techniques and habits..."
There are non-nun habits?
Well intentioned parents buy their kids crap like Pop Tarts or NutriGrain bars thinking they are healthy. Well read the ingredients and the nutrition label. Practically no fiber, and corn syrup and hydrogenated fat dominate.
Most of the breakfast convenience foods are just candy packaged differently. It's better to eat a piece of fruit (low glycemic index) or whole wheat toast, which, suprise suprise, are just as convenient!
12. Ignore everything you read on Slashdot!
Okay!
Um...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
It requires a bit of self-control as you have to ignore your hunger but as your body gets used to the idea that it will eat later anyways, you won't notice it much.
This energizes me quite a lot, and the work day just goes by faster, and problems are much easier to tackle.
Mostly random stuff.
Alcohol kills brain cells, it's true. But it kills the weakest and most poorly adapted ones, just like Darwin says. That leaves your good brain cells unencumbered by the dead weight cells and they can function at full capacity.
That's why you get so much smarter when you drink.
Stolen and paraphrased from someone much funnier than I am.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
I start the day off with a brisk walk.
For breakfast, I have two eggs, fried in olive oil, with chives or onions.
Then I work a while on my bicycle. It has a fork for extra spice, and a three cheeses for more gondola.
I remember putting together my Heathkit computer, with the round things and the keyboard. We didn't have mice back then, except in the basement. Now they come in everywhere, and I can't seem to trap them.
I think I'll lay down a while.
sigs, as if you care.
YOUR brain is the greediest organ in your body,...
I'm not quite sure if that is correct.....
I for one welcome our new [insert main topic] overlords.
I have been experimenting with the breakfast part For years, I had been skipping breakfast. A month ago, I decided to start eating a daily breakfast high in protein and complex carbs. Subjectively, I feel a lot better. I have more energy throughout the day, I'm less stressed, and my memory has improved. Being a geek, I decided to do some benchmarking. Before starting the diet, I purchase a book of crossword puzzles. I completed half of the puzzles over a period of a few weeks (one a day). I timed how long it took me to finish each puzzle. Two weeks ago I started attempting the puzzles again. My times have improved by more than 20 percent.
I'm 28 years old. I believe in taking care of myself, and a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine. In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I'll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now. After I remove the ice pack, I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower, I use a water activated gel cleanser. Then a honey almond body scrub. And on the face, an exfoliating gel scrub. Then apply an herb mint facial mask, which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an aftershave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion. There is an idea of a Rude Turnip, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me. Only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our life styles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Two older couples are out for a walk. The men are walking behind the women.
Man 1: We ate at a great restaurant last night.
Man 2: Oh really? Which one.
Man 1: The name escapes me right now ... what's the name of that flower, you know, with the thorns?
Man 2: A rose?
Man 1: Yes, that's it. Rose, where did we eat last night?
sigs, as if you care.
1. Eat oatmeal for breakfast - if you must add sugars, make them complex, not processed (e.g. raw).
...
2. Get half an hour exercise each day, which basically means take the stairs or take the bus or if you drive don't park so close to work.
3. Get eight to nine hours sleep a night - this is the hard one for me. If you run a sleep deficit, sleep in Saturday morning, but wake up the usual time on Sunday.
4. For guys, drink one to two glasses of red wine with meals. For women, one-half to one, but depends on body mass.
5. Stop watching the news. All those car chases and crashes five states away just add to stress and you can't do anything about them. If you must watch, choose a less exciting program like PBS or such.
6. Ditch your watch and cellphone. Really.
7. Do crossword puzzles or something that engages your brain most every day. You meet a lot of cute girls that way
8. Don't be in such a rush. Biologically, we're not built to live like that.
9. Eat low on the food chain - how you do this is up to you, but avoid processed foods.
All the rest is commentary.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I see nothing in your quote or the tiny amount of text in the linked article that indicates this is nothing more than a correlation study. Did they actually take a random group of senior and somehow get half of them to play board games, and the other half to not play board games and then come back years later and see if there was and difference between the two? (How the hell you'd get the people to either play, or not play board games despite their preference I have no idea).
If not, it seems far more likely that people that have dementia don't want to play board games, instruments, etc because.. well they have dementia. That might make it a LOT harder to concentrate on something like a board game or an instrument.
AccountKiller
You are what you eat, and that includes your brain.
Are they suggesting that I eat my own brain to become really smart?!?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you take geek-ness to a whole new level.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Take it with you to work! Seriously, I used to skip breakfast, grab some fast food at lunch, and go out to dinner almost every night, and I felt sluggish, worn down, and found that my grasp over my mental faculties was slipping...so, around a year ago, I hit reset on my life and diet, and I've felt better - in every way - ever since.
By preparing all of my daily meals on my own with fresh ingredients (including making my own snacks), I've lost weight and body fat (I'm at a very trim 173lbs with 10% body fat...almost as good a condition as I was in when I played baseball and soccer year-round back in high school), I've had far more energy, and I've been sharper and more on the ball in my day to day doings at work and at play (hobbies and such). I also started an exercise regime that has further improved my conditioning and stamina and energy level, and have been a happier person for it.
My meals are all balanced to come out as close to what we're supposed to be taking in on a daily basis according to doctors recommendations (caloric intake, vitamins, minerals, etc, etc, etc). I snack exclusively on fruits and vegetables. My breakfast includes a variety of fruits and homemade granola mixed in with a serving of plain yogurt, and I'm able to take that with me to work to eat while I go over my start of day emails and voicemails. My lunches are good sized, but never too large, and the same goes with my dinners. I've cut back on the amount of red meat and pork that I take in, and have increased the amount of fish and chicken....like I said, I hit reset entirely.
I don't mean to sound like I'm preaching or whatever, but I really do believe that there is a lot to be said for eating well and taking care of yourself...I still smoke and have the odd pint of beer here and there, but even those bad habits have decreased nearly to the point of being non-existant.
In short, eat breakfast...you can still eat well, have it taste good, and be good for you if you 'wake up late' and are 'running behind'...hell, you'll find you might even sleep more soundly and wake up more readily if you change your diet.
note: As an aside, and this may or may not be something you would be interested in...a side-effect of my healthier living has been an increase in both my libido and in my performance...couple that with a healthier living sig-o, and you've got a pretty nifty little sex life going. Fruits and vegetables help a lot, from what I understand...in more areas than just performance and stamina. I'm just sayin', is all...
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
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.
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.
Maybe that's because they are being raised by the kind of parents that feed their kids cola and candy for breakfast?
You can't take the sky from me...
"Two weeks ago I started attempting the puzzles again. My times have improved by more than 20 percent."
;)
Yeah, they go a lot quicker if you've done them already.
"Derp de derp."
What is disturbing is that article talks about pills in the first bit. A sales pitch for drug pushing companies? Thanks but I'll stick to my diet and gym/kung-fu routine.