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What are the best brain foods?

Blogs constantly bombard us with ways to lose weight over the holidays. Some of those suggestions include news you will see is the same old basic list of second hand tips. For instance do not show up starving to a party, choose your indulgences wisely, and be mindful that alcohol has calories. Most of these tips you could have guessed on your own. The rest of them you only needed to hear once. If it really did work, holiday weight gain would not be such an issue! Instead of dressing up the same information with a new picture, this post looks at what the research actually says about how brain food can make you smarter.

Getting to the point. Scientists have often suspected that specific nutrients from food can affect cognitive processes and emotions. These effects of food on cognition help us to determine how best to manipulate our diet in order to promote mental fitness. Diet and other aspects of our daily routine, such as exercise, improve mental function. We now know that particular nutrients found in foods influence cognition by acting on cellular processes that are vital for maintaining cognitive function.

Therefore dietary manipulations is a viable strategy for enhancing cognitive abilities.  Researchers have uncovered some of the basic principles that are involved in the actions of certain foods and nutrients on the brain. Incorporating this knowledge into your daily meal planning will improve your cognitive ability or thinking power. Following are a list of nutrients and foods essential for brainpower for this holiday season and beyond.

  • Omega-3 fatty acids – amelioration of cognitive decline and useful in the treatment of patients with mood disorders. This nutrient is available in salmon, flax seeds, krill, chia, kiwi fruit, butternuts, and walnuts.
  • Flavonoids – improvement of cognitive function. This nutrient is found in cocoa, green tea, Ginkgo tree, citrus fruits, wine (higher in red wine), and dark chocolate.
  • B vitamins – Supplementation with vitamin B6, vitamin B12 or folate has positive effects on memory performance in women. There are various natural sources for this nutrient.
  • Vitamin D – Important for preserving cognition. Fish liver, fatty fish, mushrooms, milk, soymilk, and cereal grains all provide this nutrient.
  • Vitamin E – reduces cognitive decay. Asparagus, avocado, nuts, peanuts, olives, red palm oil, seeds, spinach, vegetable oils, and wheat germ all are viable sources for this vitamin E.
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The stress free way to overcome math anxiety

 

Mathematics anxiety is often defined as a state of discomfort concerning the performance of mathematical tasks. Researches posit that such circumstances cause stress and have a negative impact on academics (Hubbard & Byler, 2006). This is important because being overstressed inhibits one’s use of their working memory (WM) and attention. As you will recall WM is theorized to have limited capacity. It holds information before we commit it to long-term memory. In this scenario WM holds the symbols, operators, and variables that we manipulate to solve mathematical problems. Attention pertains to one’s ability to block out irrelevant feelings such fear and worry that hinder the storage and retrieval of information that creates knowledge.

The good news is that ordinary people have successfully used stress management techniques to perform well under stressful conditions. You can too. These techniques lessen the formerly mentioned WM and attentional challenges. Scientists have demonstrated the effectiveness of these techniques in various academic settings. The use of progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) has demonstrated significant positive results in controlling stress and anxiety regarding math performance. PMR is a technique that involves tensing and relaxing specific muscle groups in a specific order to decrease the physiological aspects of anxiety while distracting people from their awareness of anxious feelings.

The results of several studies suggest that PMR improves a person’s ability to focus their attention on a central task and execute its required operation while inhibiting unrelated info. PMR training is an effective technique for the reduction of tension, anxiety, and physiological arousal that are associated with math anxiety. The next time you feel anxious about performing a math task try PMR to improve your performance. Here is a sample PMR script for your review.

 

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How to win friends and influence others

Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to an individual’s awareness of their emotions, the emotions of others, and the ability to manage them and act appropriately. These abilities are important for individuals that work in helping professions, sales, and public relations. These skills are also important to individuals needing to maintain or improve personal relationships such as students, teachers, parents, and pastors. In other words everyone needs EI. Researchers commonly assumed that EI has five components. They are:

Self-awareness. The ability to recognize and understand personal dispositions and emotions and drives, as well as their effect on others.

Self-regulation. The capability to governor or redirect troublesome impulses and moods, and the tendency to suspend judgment and to think before acting.

Internal motivation. A desire to perform for intrinsic reasons that go beyond income and fame -which are external rewards, – such as, a joy in doing something or curiosity in learning.

Empathy. The ability to understand the emotional nature of other people and responding to their their emotional reactions.

Social skills. The knack for managing relationships and building networks of people by finding common ground and rapport.

Many successful people have these skills and the good news is that with training you can improve their your EI. Abe et al. (2013) demonstrated this point in a pilot intervention for medical students. The results of their study indicate that skills training can make an immediate and long-term impact on the emotional awareness of individuals. It is important to note that the skills training focused on building skills needed for self-awareness and empathy. The primary activities in the intervention involved expressing one feelings and listening to others.

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Problem Solving: why you need to take a nap

In a previous post, we indicated that taking a nap has many benefits regarding your cognition. Cognition is the mental process of attaining knowledge and understanding through your thoughts, experiences, and senses. It is important to note that a growing body of work indicates that sleep has these positive effects because it increases activation. Activation is the process of associating similar concepts within our memories. This type of processing facilitates the restructuring of information that is a key part of problem solving.

Sio et al. (2012)’s work adds to this body of work. Specifically participants in the sleep group in their experiments demonstrated that performance on problem solving improves after a period of sleep. The sleep group out performed participants who remained awake while they slept. The sleep group solved a greater number of difficult problems than did the other groups. The researchers concluded that sleep facilitates problem solving, most likely via spreading activation. This effect was not remarkable for easy problems.

This means that taking a nap will likely increase your performance with problem solving at school or work. Of course, sometimes we do not have the option of taking a nap and must employ other strategies to solve our problems. Collaborative problem solving, which is working with others to solve your problems, is a viable option in circumstances like these.

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Learn the theory of how to get smarter

Intelligence has an innate basis. Yet, a number of scientists indicate how smart you become is dependent on your environment (Sternberg, 2009).  To put it another way, you can shape and even increase your intelligence through various types of programs and interventions. According to Sternberg’s theory of intelligence, intelligence has three dimensions. These concern a person’s a) information processing, b) management of their living environment, and c) personal experience.

Information processing comprises three different types of components used to plan, monitor, and evaluate problems that require solving. Second are performance processes that one uses to implement planning, monitoring, and evaluation components. The final component of information processing is knowledge acquisition and people use these processes to gather resources to solve problems that they face. Examples of these components include goal setting for planning activities, self-evaluation as a form of monitoring, and seeking help as a method for obtaining additional resources to succeed.

Sternberg’s theory of intelligence assumes that we apply our intelligence in three ways to manage our environment. First, we must adapt ourselves to our existing environments. Second, we must shape our existing environment to create new sustainable environments. Third, we must select new environments as necessary to achieve our goals. For instance when you first start a new job, you probably try to figure out the implicit and explicit rules of your corporate culture. You then try to use these rules to succeed in your new company. You can also shape your new company by creating a social club or users group for after work activities. Finally, if you are unable to adapt yourself or shape your new work environment to suit you needs, you might consider selecting a new job where you can better achieve your goals.

Our level of experience affects how well we perform each task that we perform. Each of us faces tasks in conditions with which we have varying levels of experience. As tasks become progressively more familiar, many parts of the tasks may become automatic. They need little conscious effort for determining what steps to take next and how to accomplish the next step.  New and unfamiliar tasks can make demands on intelligence that are different from those of tasks from which one has developed automatic procedures.

In the end your goal should be to increase your familiarly with the skills required in each of the three dimensions of intelligence. For example these skills include problem solving, planning, logic, and word comprehension among others. Continue to read this blog for more information on how to get smarter.

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Learn how to get smarter with naps

When it comes to the topic of napping most of us will agree that taking a nap feels good. According to Sara Mednick, Ph.D. talking a nap will actually make you smarter. In her book, Take a Nap! Change your life. Mednick maintains that napping has a number of scientifically proven benefits. They are:

  • Increasing your alertness. This is an important factor for many people for example astronauts, stock-car drivers, bus drivers, telemarketers, healthcare workers and others interacting with public. NASA space studies have demonstrated that alertness increases by as much as 100% after a nap.
  • Improving your accuracy. Making mistakes costs us time, money, and energy. Making a mistake can sometimes destroy people’s lives. While working with greater speed usually causes more errors, napping offers a valuable exception. So whether you throw pitches or darts, play chess or checkers, cut grass or precious stones, a nap helps you get it right.
  • Helping you better decisions. Where are you going to eat dinner? Should you propose today or wait a while. What car should you buy? Should you sell your car? Every second, every minute, every day, we make decisions both trivial and small. Research indicates that pilots who took a nap in the cockpit made fewer judgment errors on take-off and landings and those who did not.
  • Improving your perception. We depend upon our eyes, our ears and, to a lesser extent taste, touch and smell to live a successful life. Science has demonstrated that we can enhance our driving, cooking, appreciating art forms, reading, quality control and even bird-watching after a nap.
  • Boosts your creativity. Many of history’s great artists and inventors, for example Mozart and Einstein, have said that napping allows the brain to create associations necessary for creative insight and opens the way for new ideas.
  • Helps your memory. Our memory consolidation, bringing information together to form knowledge, cannot occur in any significant way without sleep. We can improve everything from learning a new programming language to remembering human anatomy by taking a short nap between study periods.

Mednick’s book demonstrates that taking a nap has many selling points. It also helps you plan the optimum nap: when to take it, how long to sleep, and how not to wake up groggy. Taking a nap is a way to improve many of the thinking abilities that make you smarter.take-a-nap2