Ideas, just ideas......

The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind

 
 by Barbara Strauch. Viking, 2010

Brains, like certain French cheeses, get better with age. That’s the message of The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain, which takes a detailed look at an avalanche of new research showing that human brains hit their prime when their owners are between their early 40s and late 60s—much later than previously thought.

In accessible and entertaining prose, journalist Barbara Strauch explains how and why our brain’s performance—as opposed to that of the rest of our body—actually improves as we move through middle age. Sure, we may get a little more forgetful, say when it comes to remembering names or where we left our keys, but the middle-aged brain is unsurpassed in handling the important stuff, Strauch says. A recent study of 118 pilots aged 40 to 69 showed, for example, that the older participants outperformed their younger colleagues when avoiding traffic collisions using simulators. One reason Strauch gives is that we begin to use a larger portion of our brain as we age.

For example, studies in which volunteers learned pairs of words revealed that younger adults used only their right frontal lobes when recalling the twosome while older adults used both the left and right side. This is “much like using two arms instead of one to pick up a heavy chair,” Strauch says. The study’s results fly in the face of the long-held view that as time goes on people use a smaller portion of their brain. But that’s not all. Researchers have also found that the amount of myelin, the fatty substance that insulates nerve fibers, continues to increase well into middle age, boosting brain cells’ processing capacity.

Strauch’s book paints a radically new picture of the brain that goes far beyond making those entering middle age feel better. Instead the newly gained insights into the adult brain should cause us to rethink how we structure our lives, Strauch says. Right now we “tell people to get out of the way at sixty-two—too old to teach, too old to be a doctor, too old to be a lawyer,” even though that’s when the brain’s performance reaches its peak. So, rather than treating the middle-aged brain as “diminished, declining, and depressed,” we should embrace it for what it actually is: “ripe, ready, and whole.”

How to be Happy everyday.

By GEORGIA WITKIN
Grandparents.com

 
 

If you are very lucky, you were born happy. Many people are. Their brain biochemistry is set on "optimistic" and they naturally see every glass as half-full. But the rest of us can still learn to think happy. We can train ourselves to choose behaviors that create happiness opportunities, and consciously decide to think happy thoughts. And when we act and think happy, we feel happy, too. If you want happiness to be a major part of your new year, you must wake up every morning knowing that it has potential to bring you happiness if you find or create the opportunities to feel it. Now read on to start your training!

LAUGH. EVERY DAY.

Happiness training starts with laughter. Young children laugh about 400 times a day; we adults laugh only 15 to 100 times a day, according to research conducted at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Laughing is vital to your health and your mind. Just 100 laughs a day provide an aerobic workout equal to 10 minutes on a rowing machine; an increase in pain-killing endorphins; enhanced respiration; a relaxation of tension; better functioning of your immune systems; and the burning of calories, though science doesn't know yet exactly how many. So open those e-mail jokes from friends and grandkids, go to funny movies and never forget to laugh at yourself.

CHOOSE HAPPY FRIENDS

Happiness is contagious. Unfortunately, so are doom and gloom. Stick with friends who spread happiness. Someone else's happiness is a powerful cue for us. When friends talk about a happy moment, we automatically scan our memories for similar happy moments. Isn't that better than scanning for painful or depressing moments from our past to sympathize with those who are always complaining? And happy friends offer another benefit - they're great role models. Next time you have a hard time finding any happiness in your day, look at your day through your friend's eyes, and her positive perspective might become yours, too.

PLAY, PLAY, PLAY

Believe it or not, there is a "happy zone" in your brain, and games can stimulate it. Card games, board games  guessing games, they all work, as long as you enjoy them. Physical play also lights up the "happy zone" in the brain, so grab a grandchild and go run around outside. And if you like sports, don't just watch, participate, because the fine-motor components involved in just about any sport increase happiness, too; apparently the rhythmic movement gives you a sense of mastery and control which increases your level of happiness. But don't think you have to play high-impact tennis or basketball to boost your mood - mini-golf, ping-pong, and even cooking and gardening work, too.

SET GOALS AND REACH THEM

More than 225 studies reviewed in the American Psychological Association journals found that happy people set more goals; persist longer in achieving them; and are more confident, energetic, likable, and sociable as a result. So setting goals is a fundamental part of happiness training. When the left frontal lobe of your brain is focused on a goal, your sense of control over your world, and your perceived happiness, increase. Your goals can be modest (losing one pound a month for a year); personal (meeting two new people); private (finding more things in common with your daughter-in-law); or tangible (learning a new language, or how to play Wii Rock Band). But if you want to keep feeling young and happy, never stop setting new goals.

PUT A SMILE ON YOUR FACE

People who smile, even when they're not especially happy, can actually change their brain chemistry to mimic happiness. And when the brain shifts to its "happy mode," it blocks sadness, and we feel happy. Look at it this way: It's impossible to feel a negative and positive emotion at the exact same time, so you can block the bad feelings by thinking about, or creating a good one instead. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have proven that voluntarily producing smiles moves brain activity "in the direction of spontaneous happiness." Give it a try. I put a smiley-face on my mirror to remind me to smile. It works.

KEEP A HAPPINESS DIARY

Record every "Up" moment in a diary so it doesn't slip away. They don't have to be big moments; small happy events count, too, like the first e-mail from a grandchild, a thumbs-up from your yoga teacher, or a thank-you from the mother of four you helped in the supermarket. Happiness diaries work on multiple levels: They help you realize how many moments of happiness are already in your daily life; they help you notice when those moments drop off or fade; and they motivate you to discover more such moments.

Grandparents.com is the place for today's new generation of active, involved grandparents to find everything they need to get more fun, more smiles and more memories out of the time they spend with their grandchildren.

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2010/06/16/2826521/how-to-be-happy-every-day.html#ixzz0r3Cu1Hn7

The Cannabis Papers..... The role of cannabinoids in Life, liberty and pursuit of Happiness.

 Maybe this sounds a little bit "different" that we are used to hear about all the potential applications of the weed, basically now the debate is gravitating in the form of Medical Marijuana, this shift on the opinion is quite interesting, states like California now allow the creation of dispensaries which allows to buy Medical Marijuana in a legal way ( only patients with Medical prescription)  but in  the federal level, marijuana stills illegal; but President Obama now relax the previous tendencies of former Bush and Clinton administrations, so now the Law is going to punish those who sell illegally this plant and not to those who need it;  Medical Marijuana. Why? Because Medical Marijuana works, and works good; so good that a synthetic pill was created and has the name of Marinol and is use as treatment for people that suffers AIDS, chemotherapy, Parkinson Disease and many more ailments.

The recreational use of this plant stills heavy surrounded with miss information, lack of information, and taboo. 

Well, now we got this group of people that wrote a series of essays that explore the role of cannabis in your life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, the name of this group is Publius.  

They have this new point of view that can enrich the debate of cannabis, they describe the idea that Cannabinoids are necessary to life.  

That's a new one, if you want to know more about this, please click here

What you think about it? Does this new approach changes your point of view ?

How to Live: Follow Your Heart, Risk Be Damned

I found this opinion really interesting, I hope you can enjoy it .... Jay.....

 
 

(CBS)  As the college class of 2010 heads out into the world, take a moment to hear the advice of our contributor Ben Stein: 

It is graduation time for you young people. That means time to make some decisions and take some action about your lives. I would like to offer you some deep thoughts at this season. 

A few days ago, I asked my shrink, a super-smart guy, how he would generally divide up the people who were happy in life from those who were not. 

He answered like a shot. 

The unhappy ones, he said, are people who let their parents or their family talk them into doing something for a career that wasn't really them. They are people who wanted to be writers or performers, and decided instead to take the cautious route and go to accountancy school or law school or dental school. 

Now, he said, they are well into their middle age and they make a decent living, but they just don't like what they do. 

What they do, you might say, is not them. It is not who they are or who they wanted to be. It's too late for most of them to try to change, and they haven't built up a lifetime of experience and contacts in the field they want to be in. 

So, he said, "they just come in to my office and complain." 

"And what about the happy ones?" I asked him. "What did they do?" 

My shrink answered that, again, like a shot. 

"They made a decision to live," he said, and those were his exact words. 

They decided to do what their hearts told them to do, to do what was in them to do. They took risks and they took chances, and they tried a lot of different things until they got to where they wanted to be. 

This very often means working incredibly hard and living on the edge. But it gets you to where you can look back on your life and say it wasn't wasted. 

I left the doctor's office with my brain on fire. His advice is spectacular. 

Unless you are born rich - or even if you are - you have to earn your keep, that is for sure. But to decide to live - that makes a lot of difference in this difficult world. 

That's it. Choose to live a life you want to live, not one that's safe or what someone else thinks you should do. 

Decide to live. 

Pot and iPod for iPad ..... ( iPot?)

Ahhh.... dear iPad, no doubt that you are one of the most hot gadgets in the market, with more than 2 million units sold in less that two months ( almost one iPad per second) and many apple stores running out of this fantastic device, more than one is frustrated with not having you in their hands, as well that many americans are going thru one of the worst recessions since de Great Depression in the 1920's and maybe, just maybe that's  why Jacob Walker; from Gilbert, Arizona was in a tight situation and he came to a great idea of put in craigslist.org an ad, to be able to get his iPad and make someone happy at the same time. 

Jacob Walker was offering iPod and Weed. 

Jacob, Jacob, Jacob ....... 

First Let me tell you that in the United States is ILEGAL to sell or exchange marijuana ( only when is medical dispensary, with strict regulations and some states only ) and second, if you are gonna do something like this, well; do not use internet to post this info, am telling you this because someone reported the ad to the police, an undercover detective contacted Mr. Walker and made an arrangement to the exchange, and then he got arrested with the weed in his hands. 

Use some common sense, I mean.... whom possibly want to exchange an iPad ( $499) for an used Ipod    ( $299) ? ...... 

The weed is gonna be gone in no time , the iPad instead, stays for ever ........

Video gamers actually control their dreams.....

 
 

Looks like playing games before going to bed, can give you a level of awareness while you sleep and then control your dream, giving the ability when fighting nightmares or even mental traumas. 

What?, no seriously......what ?

Jayne Gackenbach,  a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada has shown that dreams and videogames represent alternate realities, the first one are a biological function  from the human mind while video games are an achievement driven by computers and gaming consoles, artificial. 

"spending hours a day in a virtual reality, gamers are used to controlling their game environments so that can translate into dreams" Jayne Gackenbach said in her study. 

In the 80's, Mrs. Gackenbach was studying Lucid Dreams, which is the phenomena of people being aware when they are in a sleep, later then this focus was shifted to video games when, in one christmas her son repeatedly kissed a new Nintendo gaming console on the way home from a "Toys r Us" store. Something that makes perfect sense to any gamer seemed strange to an outsider, and so she shifted her studies to incorporate gaming, perhaps as a way to cope with her son kissing cardboard boxes. 

Daydreaming?

There are some parallels between Lucid Dreamers and  Videogamers, first that their spatial skills are better than non-gamers and both groups where prone for not showing motion sickness, second that both groups have high levels of concentration, honed through lucidity-training activities like meditation; same results where showed when participants of the study where playing against virtual enemies to reach the next level in a video game. 

A first study suggests that people playing frequently video games are more likely to report Lucid Dreams ( observers that dream they can see outside their bodies) and Dream Control that allowed people to actively influence or change their dream world ( like in the video games). 

The second study found out that gamers often have Lucid Dreams prior playing videogames, and they have the ability to view within the body and outside the body ( first person and third person-View). 

 I am the DREAM WARRIOR!!!!

Well, is a good thing to know that gamer have some degree of control on their dreams, but how this finding can benefit us in a way ( if there is a benefit at all worthy to study or apply?)

The Psychologist Atni Revonsuo proposed a theory named " Threat Simulation" that basically suggests that dreams might mimic threatening situations from real life, except in the safe environment of dream world. Such nightmares would help organism hone their avoidance skills in a protective environment, and ideally prepare it for real-life situation.

Based on this, Gackenbach tested this theory in a research made with 35 males and 63 females, used and independent assessments that can coded threat levels in after-dreams reports, She found that gamers experienced less or even reversed threat simulation, meaning that a scary nightmare turned to something "Fun" for the gamer. 

These results inspired Mrs Gackenbach to pursue a new study with Athabasca university in Canada. If the act of gaming can act as a semi-protective function against nightmares, maybe it could help war veterans who experience post-traumatic stress disorder ( PTSD). One of the symptoms of of these disorder is nightmares ( almost 96% or PSTD patients experience this) and only 3 to 5 % of civilians report the same level of nightmares. 

Maybe Videogames can help to minor or even cure Nightmare- PTSD related. 

If you know any military or veterans interested in the Athabasca University study on the military and gaming, you can email [email protected] to find out how you can participate in this research.  

More info, check this out