Complex tasks like juggling produce significant changes to the structure of the brain, according to scientists at Oxford University.

In the journal, Nature Neuroscience, the scientists say they saw a 5% increase in white matter – the cabling network of the brain.

The people who took part in the study were trained for six weeks and had brain scans before and after.

Long term it could aid treatments for diseases like multiple sclerosis.

The team at Oxford’s Department of Clinical Neurology used a diffusion MRI which is able to measure the movement of water molecules in the tissues of the brain.

The signal changes according to how many bundles of nerve fibres there are and how tightly packed they are.

Changes in grey matter, where the processing and computation in the brain happens, have been shown before, but enhancements in the white matter have not previously been demonstrated.

The scientists studied a group of 24 healthy young adults, none of whom could juggle.
They divided them into two groups.

One of the groups was given weekly training sessions in juggling for six weeks and was asked to practice 30 minutes every day the other 12 continued as normal.

After training, the 12 jugglers could perform at least two continuous cycles of the classic three ball cascade.

Both groups were scanned using diffusion MRI before and after the training.

At the six week point, a 5% increase in white matter was shown in a rear section of the brain called the intraparietal sulcus for the jugglers.

This area has been shown to contain nerves that react to us reaching and grasping for objects in our peripheral vision.

There was a great variation in the ability of the volunteers to juggle but all of them showed changes in white matter.

The Oxford team said this must be down to the time spent training and practising rather than the level of skill attained.

Dr Heidi Johansen-Berg, who led the team, said: “MRI is an indirect way to measure brain structure and so we cannot be sure exactly what is changing when these people learn.

“Future work should test whether these results reflect changes in the shape or number of nerve fibres, or growth of the insulating myelin sheath surrounding the fibres.

“Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone should go out and start juggling to improve their brains.

“We chose juggling purely as a complex new skill for people to learn.”

Dr Johansen-Berg said there were clinical applications for this work but there were a long way off.

She said: “Knowing that pathways in the brain can be enhanced may be significant in the long run in coming up with new treatments for neurological diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, where these pathways become degraded.”

Professor Cathy Price, of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, said: “It’s extremely exciting to see evidence that training changes human white matter connections.

“This compliments other work showing grey matter changes with training and motivates further work to understand the cellular mechanisms underlying these effects.”

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Myfitbrain brain games

Various studies involving brain scans found that every thought that passes through your mind affects your brain just like an action would. For example, when you practice a certain skill over a period of time, your brain will learn and thus you will master the skill. But a scientific study showed that mental practice alone can yield the same result. This sort of visualizations, thus stimulates the brain. Stimulation encourages neurogenesis. Scientists have always observed how people who think positively tend to live a healthier life – now they know why.

You don’t use, you lose. This is the first principle that governs the way your brain works. I mentioned previously how practice makes perfect. This is because as you practice, your brain grow new brain cells, called neurons, and creates synapses between those neurons.  Synapses allow the brain to work more efficiently by creating cause-and-effect relationships between neurons. Neurons that fire together, wire together through these synapses so that they’ll always fire together.

But these synapses break down if the neurons no longer fire together. Thus if you spend most of your time sitting down, or if you live an extremely sedentary life, it is inevitable for you to lose your ability to balance yourself on your legs as the synapses in you motor cortex breaks down.  This can be seen in people who were in a serious accident and had their legs in a cast for months on end. Though physiologically we should not have any problem walking, they often couldn’t because they need to relearn it.  Thus frequent exercise, something as simple as a slow walk, could prevent you from losing your independence later in old age. The same applies to your memory and your learning ability. If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.

Neurogenesis require energy to be carried out. Most of the energy that you possess, you acquire from your diet. Thus by consuming a healthy diet is crucial to a health brain. Stimulation alone will not be sufficient if your brain do not have the building block for neurogenesis.

Generally speaking, any food beneficial for your body will be beneficial for your brain. The first change you should make to your diet is to consume more leafy green vegetables. This is because they contain large amount of anti-oxidants, which combat the process of oxidation. As you might have known, oxidation kills cells – including brain cells.

But there’s one particular vitamin that I want to single out here in this article. Vitamin B12, is crucial for normal cognitive function but unfortunately, it cannot be found in any plant source. Beef and eggs are excellent sources of B12 but if you’re a vegan, be sure to supplement your diet with this vitamin.  Extreme cases of B12 deficiency can cause psychosis and mania.

You can get most brain stimulation from your daily life. But if you want to reverse a particular condition – say memory loss or even Alzheimer’s – or if you want to improve a particular function of your brain, I would recommend that you perform specially designed brain exercises.   There are various brain exercises, ranging from those that stimulate auditory processing to those that stimulates visual processing. Because these exercises are specially designed, they are generally more effective at correcting a specific problem than general techniques that you can do yourself.

Brain exercises that targets the auditory processing, for example, increases your ability to make out sounds and thus allows you to remember verbal stimulus better (things that you hear). Those that targets visual processing, on the other hand, allows you react faster and remember visual stimulus better (such as the written word and facial recognition).

Thus it is a mistake to assume that brain exercises benefits only the older generation. Fact is, everyone could use a little brain exercises to improve mental functions.

Living with a partner at midlife may lower the risk for Alzheimer’s disease later in life, a new study shows. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that staying socially connected is vital for a healthy and intact brain late in life.

Several studies have shown that lifestyle factors may help to ward off cognitive decline later in life. Education, regular exercise and activity, a mentally challenging job and intellectual activities that might include regularly doing crossword puzzles and word games, have been linked to a sharp memory. Being married and having lots of friends has also been linked to keeping the mind sharp.

In the current study, Scandinavian researchers looked at about 1,500 men and women from Finland at midlife, then again some 20 years later. They found that those who were living with a partner at midlife, around age 50, were least likely to show memory and thinking problems when they were in their late 60s or 70s.

Men and women who were widowed or divorced at midlife and who remained so as seniors were the most likely to have be diagnosed with a condition like Alzheimer’s late in life. The risk was especially high for those who had been widowed and who carried the APOE-E4 gene, a gene that increases the odds of developing Alzheimer’s. Those who were single at midlife were also at increased risk of developing memory problems as seniors compared to those who had been married or partnered in their middle years.

The findings appeared in the British medical journal BMJ. In an editorial that accompanied the findings, a doctor suggests that his colleagues in primary care practice might target unmarried — and especially widowed — people and encourage them “to increase their social engagement” as a means of possible warding off Alzheimer’s disease.

The research is consistent with other evidence showing that staying socially connected with spouses, family and friends helps to preserve memory and keep the brain young. Marriage and partnership is thought to provide social as well as intellectual stimulation that may help to keep the brain working well into old age. The researchers did not look at such factors as the quality of the marriage or the effects of children on outcome. But, they plan to continue their research into this provocative area.

Social interaction may be good for those who care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s, too. Dr. Mary Mittelman and colleagues at New York University have shown that maintaining a close network of family and friends who can be called on for emotional support may be critical for easing the stress of caregiving.

See the original article Marriage May Be Good for the Brain

The effects of video-game playing on your brain have been studied for a quarter-century, but the latest research reveals that there are still deep puzzles yet to be solved.

One of the earliest and most noted studies in the field was conducted back in 1992 by neuroscientist Richard Haier at the University of California at Irvine, who looked at how frequent sessions with the Tetris video game changed the players’ brains. The game requires players to fit colorful puzzle pieces together at a quickening pace as they fall from the top of the screen.

Back then, Haier used brain scans to discover that some parts of the brain actually used less glucose as the players became more skilled at the game. The “Tetris effect” illustrated how video-game training could make brains work more efficiently – an idea that eventually led to a whole host of brain-training games.

Now Haier serves as a consultant to Blue Planet Software, the company that markets Tetris, and he was asked to follow up on his 17-year-old research using the new tools available to neuroscientists.

Haier recruited three colleagues – Sherif Karama from the Montreal Neurological Institute, Leonard Leyba from the New Mexico-based Mind Research Network and Rex Jung, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of New Mexico. They came up with an experiment that budgeted out at “under $100,000,” with the expense picked by Blue Planet, Haier said.

The company had no say in how the experiment was conducted – and it didn’t get an advance look at the resulting research, which was published online today in BMC Research Notes, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal. “This was kind of a labor of love,” Haier told me.

The researchers recruited 26 girls, aged 12 to 15. Adolescents were selected because their developing brains were more likely to reflect changes, and girls were selected because they tend to have less experience with video games than boys. Fifteen of the girls were given the task of playing the video game for an average of 90 minutes a week over the course of three months. The others were told to avoid playing video games.

Both groups were monitored for changes in brain function as well as brain structure. Earlier research conducted in Germany had shown that juggling practice led to a thickening in areas of the cerebral cortex, so Haier and his colleagues were pretty sure they’d find a link between what they saw in the functional MRI (about more efficient brain function) and in the structural MRI (about cortex thickening).

And that’s where the brain puzzle threw them for a new loop.

“In science, everyone makes a very big deal about having a hypothesis before you go on a fishing expedition,” Haier said. “Never once in 20 years has my hypothesis worked out the way I thought it would. The brain is always a surprise.”

The researchers analyzed the brain changes in the game-playing group compared with the control group, and they found that the Tetris players’ brain function became more efficient in areas linked to critical thinking, reasoning, language and information processing – just as Haier found in 1992. They also discovered that the cortex became thicker – just as the German researchers had discovered. The only problem was … they weren’t the same areas.

“We all were surprised when we put the images together and saw that there was no overlap,” Haier said. The cortex became thicker in areas of the brain linked to the planning of complex movements as well as the coordination of sensory information.

Haier had hoped that he and his colleagues would come up with a mechanism to explain in physiological terms how the brain became more efficient through game-playing. “The obvious thing would be if you get more brain tissue, you have more neurons to work on a problem, so therefore that area of the brain doesn’t have to work as hard,” he said.

Now he realizes the problem isn’t as simple as he thought. “What this study does, really, is lay the groundwork for a whole series of studies to untangle all this,” he said.

In a news release, the University of New Mexico’s Jung said he’d like to see what happens to game-playing brains over time.

“We hope to continue this work with larger, more diverse samples to investigate whether the brain changes we measured revert back when the subjects stop playing Tetris,” Jung said. “Similarly, we are interested if the skills learned in Tetris, and the associated brain changes, transfer to other cognitive areas such as working memory, processing speed, or spatial reasoning.”

Haier would love to figure out how the different areas of the brain interact during mental training, on a time scale of milliseconds. But that job may be beyond the capability of functional MRI scans, which can monitor changes only on the scale of seconds. “If we’re interested in information flow in the millisecond range, by the time fMRI can see it, it’s too late,” Haier said.

So Haier is setting his sights on yet another new technology, and it’s a real mouthful. Magnetoencephalography, or MEG, monitors the faint magnetic fields produced by the brain’s electrical activity. Haier thinks MEG scans could reveal how the parts of the brain that become more efficient interact with the parts that develop thicker tissue.

“The time resolution of this technology is a millisecond, so you can see changes in the brain millisecond by millisecond,” he said.

As Haier talked about how he’d design those future experiments in game-playing, which would have to be conducted within a magnetically shielded environment, I could tell he was already trying to fit the puzzle pieces together in his mind.

“I want to know what the heck is going on in those brains,” he said.

Brain games can definitely fire up your neurons and help you learn new skills — at least as they relate to the games themselves. But psychologists and neurologists still have one big question: Does mastering any of these brain training games really improve a person’s thinking in real life? Can getting better at playing rock-paper-scissors, tracking birds on a screen or fielding rapid-fire math questions really help a person manage schedules, remember names and keep up with work? And can such mental gymnastics slow, or reverse, cognitive decline?

Many studies have found that staying mentally active throughout one’s life — via education, intellectually challenging work, a rich social life and demanding hobbies such as playing a musical instrument — can improve overall memory skills and create a buffer zone that protects the brain from age-related losses. But very few studies have looked at the effect of brain-training games, and none of those tracked real-life results, says Liz Zelinski, a professor of gerontology and psychology at USC.

“We don’t know if you improve anything beyond the activities that you practice,” she says.

Still, there’s new reason to think that at least one brain-training regimen might offer lasting and far-reaching benefits. Zelinski and a team of other researchers recently tested the Brain Fitness computer program on a group of nearly 500 mentally sharp seniors 65 and older. The study was partially funded by Posit Science, which sells Brain Fitness, but Zelinski says she has no financial ties to the company or the product. Half of the group used the program one hour a day, five days a week, for eight weeks. The other half spent an equal amount of time watching educational DVDs and answering quizzes about the shows.

As published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society in April, follow-up tests showed that the Brain Fitness group had better attention and memory than the DVD group, even on tasks that were completely different from their training. (Memorizing a list of written words, for example.) Although the researchers didn’t specifically look for real-world improvements, the subjects using the Brain Fitness program did say that memory, focus and overall thinking skills improved after eight weeks of training.

“That was encouraging,” says Glenn Smith, lead author of the study and a professor of psychology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn. And the results caught him by surprise.

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Researchers have found that a compound in grape seed extract reduces plaque formation and resulting cognitive impairment in an animal model of Alzheimer’s. The grape seed extract prevents amyloid beta accumulation in cells, suggesting that it may block the formation of plaques. In Alzheimer’s, amyloid beta accumulates to form toxic plaques that disrupt normal brain function.

The researchers fed Alzheimer’s mice a grape seed polyphenolic (polyphenols are chemical substances found in plants) extract product or placebo daily for five months. The daily dose of the polyphenolic extract was equivalent to the average amount of polyphenols consumed by a person on a daily basis.

After the five-month period, Alzheimer’s mice were at an age at which they normally develop signs of disease. However, the extract exposure reduced amyloid beta accumulation and plaque formation in brains of Alzheimer’s mice and also reduced cognitive decline. Compared to placebo, extract-exposed Alzheimer’s mice showed improved spatial memory. These data suggest that before symptoms begin, the grape seed extract may prevent or postpone plaque formation and slow cognitive deterioration associated with Alzheimer’s.

The researchers previously found that red wine reduced cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s mice, and have attempted to isolate which of the nearly 5,000 molecules contained in red wine are important in disease prevention in order to develop a highly tolerable, nontoxic, orally available treatment for the prevention and treatment of Alzeheimer’s.

Chemical analysis showed that the major polyphenol components in the study’s grape seed extract product are catechin and epicatechin, which are also abundant in tea and cocoa. These components differ from resveratrol, a polyphenol that has been reported to reduce amyloid beta secretion in cells and generally increase lifespan by mimicking calorie restriction. Resveratrol appears to be effective only at extremely high doses, which may limit its use in people. In contrast, the catechins in the extract product studied appear to be effective at much lower doses.

Although research of polyphenolics in the fight against Alzheimer’s is encouraging, further studies need to be completed before these findings translate to a human population. References:
1. Animal study indicates grape seed extract may reduce cognitive decline associated with alzheimer’s disease. Society for Neuroscience.

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Give a dog a treat, and she just might learn that new trick. Could the same concept also help a human recover from a brain injury, or become a violin virtuoso?

Rewards, especially in combination with drugs that enhance the neurotransmitter dopamine, may boost both cognitive and tactile learning, according to research published today in the journal PLoS Biology.

“We have known a lot about reward mechanisms,” says Burkhard Pleger of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and lead author on the study, “but it was not well known how rewards influence sensory processing.”

Researchers designed a game to elucidate this process. Prior to each set of four consecutive trials, Pleger and his colleagues showed participants how much reward could potentially be earned (incentives ranged from zero to 80 pennies). Subjects then attempted to distinguish which of two electric currents applied to their index fingers carried a higher frequency. If they were correct, the visual monetary reward was displayed.

The higher the reward, Pleger and his colleagues found, the more correct decisions were made on subsequent trials. Subjects appeared to be learning. “They always had the carrot in front of their eyes,” says Pleger. A feedback between the sensory and reward centers, he explains, “optimized brain functions to get the highest possible reward.”

Evidence of a “dopaminergic dependency” also arose in the experiment, Pleger said. Researchers randomly assigned each subject to one of three groups. Learning improved the most for those receiving a drug that raised dopamine levels, and less so for those on a placebo. Subjects who took a dopamine inhibitor showed the least improvement in sensory discrimination.

Potential applications of insights from these findings could range from music to medicine. “Let’s say you want to learn to play a string instrument,” says Pleger. “You don’t just need motor skills; you also need sensory skills. Such a drug could be of interest.” He cautions, however, that dopamine could be “quite dangerous” in “higher doses,” noting a link between raised levels of the neurotransmitter and mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

The most important use of this research, Pleger suggests, may be in brain trauma or stroke rehabilitation—as long as a doctor controls administration of the pharmaceuticals, of course. “You could use reward in combination with dopamine to boost therapeutic effects,” notes Pleger. “This could be really helpful.”

See original post from Scientific American here.