Manage Stress for Brain Fitness

Stress reorganizes brain circuits and can leave you even deeper in a rut. Worse, it may change how your brain is wired, and in a bad way. An article published in Science shows that stressed animals tend to make decisions based on habit rather than by taking outcomes into account.

Dias-Ferreira and his colleagues looked at what happens in the brains of rats subjected to stress and required to do a task in which they were reinforced for a specific outcome (something like running in a maze to get a piece of cheese).

Stressed animals didn’t change their behavior in relation to changes outcomes. So they tended to persist in a behavior even if the rewards changed.

Dias-Ferreira and his colleagues also looked at the rat’s brains. The stressed rats showed atrophy of the prefrontal cortex, and more nerve cells and connections in the striatum. That’s significant, because the prefrontal cortex is where many researchers believe that decisions are made. It’s where we can stop and think about where we’re going and decide to keep doing the same thing or try something different. The striatum, on the other hand, is the part of the brain that probably supports an habitual action (like running a specific direction in a maze).

While it’s always a jump from animal research to human behavior, the parallel between this study and what we see in humans are striking. When we’re stressed, we’re much less likely to try something new. This is true even if a situation is changing, and the same rewards aren’t likely to occur.

The study also shows why trying out new things  may be important for brain fitness. Trying out new behaviors, or learning something new, is more likely to activate the prefrontal cortex. That’s a good thing for brain fitness.

The moral to this story has two parts: (1) Manage your stress and (2) try new things to maintain your brain fitness.

Reference:

Dias-Ferreira et al (2009). Chronic stress causes frontostriatal reorganization and affects decision-making. Science, 325, 5940, 621-625.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 9:33 am and is filed under Brain Fitness, Memory, Stress, meditation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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  • Meditation as Brain Training
  • Brain Fitness and The Mind of a Monk
  • Brain Fitness Tip: Training Without a Computer

Mindfulness meditation as practiced over a long period by experts makes clear changes in someone’s brain function. But what about those of us who don’t have a few years to sit in a monastery in the Himalayas? A new study shows that even brief meditation practice can improve attention.

Researchers at Wake Forest University studied whether just four days of training (at just 20 minutes a day) could make a difference in participants’ mood, energy, and cognition. Undergraduate students (average age 22 years) either participated in the meditation sessions or spent a similar amount of time sitting quietly and listening to an audio book.

Participants in the meditation condition showed decreases in anxiety and improvements in several mental processing tasks compared to those in the audio book group. The meditators’ performance on one aspect of a working memory task (how many answers they got correct in a row) suggested that they may have improved their attention.

This is a small and very preliminary study that extends others’ work on meditation and the brain.It shows that even brief meditation practice can make a difference. you don’t have to be a Buddhist monk to learn to still your mind and pay better attention. Paying attention may be one of the most important things you can do to improve your brain’s functioning.

Reference:

Zeidan F et al.(in press) Mindfulness meditation improves cognition: Evidence of brief mental training. Consciousness and Cognition, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.03.014

I saw an interesting blog post yesterday evening on the site of the Huffington Post about the potential benefits of meditation – or at least about what one woman thinks might be the benefits. Priscilla Warner writes about the contrast between Tibetan monks’ apparent calm, evident even on brain scans, and her own anxiety disorder. Ms. Warner says that she suffers from panic disorder, a severe form of anxiety in which a person can have multiple anxiety attacks every day, even in the middle of the night. Her post is titled “I Want the Brain of a Monk” Although most people don’t suffer from anxiety this severe, many people have symptoms of anxiety. And research has consistently shown that higher levels of anxiety are related to more memory problems.

What’s the relation to brain fitness? In my brain fitness class, I often mention the usefulness of meditation in helping reduce stress and anxiety, both of which have negative effects on memory. You don’t have to go to Tibet to get the benefits of meditation. If you simply take 10 minutes several times a day to break in to the ongoing rush of getting things done, you’ve made a start. Use those 10 minutes to sit quietly, relax your muscles, and breathe deeply.

If you do that every day for two weeks, I think you’ll notice that you feel calmer and better able to focus. And if you’re better able to focus, you will be better able to pay attention and remember things.

Although many people are excited about the potential for using computers to train their brains, we shouldn’t forget that other techniques have been used to the train the brain for many centuries. I’m thinking about the large number of techniques for meditation. While free computer software still requires an investment in a computer, meditation only asks you to sit or lie quietly and focus your mind.

A recently-published study shows parts of the brain in long-term meditators are larger than the same parts of the brain in people who don’t meditate. The article by Eileen Luders and her colleagues appeared in a recent issue of the journal Neuroimage (Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 672-678, April 15, 2009). The study showed that portions of the orbitofrontal cortex and the hippocampus were larger in persons who had been regular meditators for 5 or more years. The study is interesting because the parts of the brain that were larger are often thought to be important in helping people keep themselves emotionally balanced.

A number of strategies are likely to be helpful for meditators. There has been a great deal of interest over the last several years in mindfulness meditation. Researchers have studied how it can be used in reducing anxiety and depression. Mindfulness is based on Buddhist meditation (for a brief article, click here) but you don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice meditation. In fact, one of the most important persons who has promoted mindfulness is Jon Kabat-Zinn, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts. You can see a video presentation by him on YouTube by clicking here.