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."
...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!
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.
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! --
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.
Friggin' spinach and crossword puzzles aren't going to help you figure out which satellites Major League Baseball is using to spy on you, hippie.
mitch
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.
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.