Mindframe

  If you’re looking to bring a change in your psychological state, the answer may be as simple as adjusting your eating habits. So, which diet are we promoting today? Any of them, basically. Dr Joseph Firth, an Honorary Research fellow at The University of Manchester and Research Fellow at NICM Health Research Institute at Western Sydney University, led a recent meta-study . It checked 16 randomized studies encompassing 45,826 people, most of whom had non-clinical depression. In other words, they were bummed out, but not in a way that had been diagnosed as medical. Each of the 16 studies examined the effects of making various positive dietary changes—less fat, more nutrients, and so on—combined with physical exercise. The surprising thing was that diet-wise, there was no clear winner. Each eating system resulted in improved mental health, even for people who weren’t starting out with diagnosed depression—and this held especially true for women. It’s heartening news, even ...

Let’s say you’re a sleep pro. You’ve learned the key role of REM cycles in encoding new memories, and the troubling statistics linking tired driving with automobile accidents. You’ve taken steps to log your 7 to 9 hours every night, and are enjoying the benefits of a healthier, more energetic you. But there is still a way that sleep-deprivation could be shaping—and harming—your day-to-day life. You may be sleeping enough. But what about your boss? What about your boss’s boss? After all, if it’s unwise to operate heavy machinery on a sleep debt, it’s surely a bad idea to operate an entire business, with millions of dollars—not to mention the careers of real-life human beings on the line. However, it seems to be all too common. In a recent survey of more than 180 business leaders, 43% reported getting insufficient sleep at least four nights a week . In other words, for four out of ten respondents at the top of the corporate ladder, those unrested nights are more common tha...

When you hear the term "spaced learning", you might think it has to do with learning that takes place while you're "spaced out.’   But spaced learning is the less-than-catchy phrase used to describe a scientific breakthrough in memory acquisition. Learning is fundamentally about sticking something into your memory for retrieval later. During a learning episode, information first moves into your short-term memory and creates a new neural pathway. If that pathway is repeatedly stimulated, it triggers the brain to transfer the information into your long-term memory. The neural pathway acts as both conduit and code for that information upload. Therefore, repetition is key to long-term learning. This process has been well known in the scientific community for some time. But what if there was a way to speed up learning, to learn an entire history module that would normally take a month, in about an hour? In his  Scientific American article " Making Memor...

Q: What did the Zen master say to the hotdog vendor? A: “Make me one with everything...” Central to the premise of this old joke is the Zen notion of reaching a higher level of consciousness, where one’s sense of self dissipates, becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the universe. This is pretty heady stuff for many raised in the western thought tradition, where metrics are king, and we’re taught from a young age that if it can't be measured, it doesn't exist. So what do jazz players and Zen masters have in common? I’m sure there’s a pun in here somewhere, but the truth is, they may share a lot, according to Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Dr. Charles Limb. Around 2008, Limb began doing experiments with jazz pianists , trying to understand what was happening in their brains during musical improvisation. Limb had them improvise music while lying in an fMRI; the tool of choice for many neuroscientists. It’s a machine that measures blood flow to a given brain area...

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had an extra hour in each day? Imagine how much more you could get done with another 60 minutes of free time. Unfortunately, the earth’s rotations never got the memo, and we’re stuck with our 24-hour system—and once you pull eight hours of sleep out of that, you’ve got just 16 waking hours left to make the proverbial donuts. Or do you? A study by the Council for Research Excellence suggests that on an average day, adults are exposed to 8.5 hours of screens—TV, computers, smartphones, and so on. Now most of us are committed to a certain amount of screen time; we can’t exactly tell our bosses we’re on strike from answering work emails or looking at spreadsheets. But even factoring out our work-related usage, it’s still likely that each of us is spending about three hours of our precious downtime on screen-related activity. When you think about how nice it would be to find some extra time in the day, you don’t generally think about this time as negot...

Taraxacum is not some newly found dinosaur. It is the scientific name for the pesky weed commonly called the dandelion. The dandelion industry is a billion dollar business—not growing them, eradicating them. This despite the fact that they are rich in vitamins, A, B, C, D and important minerals like zinc, potassium and iron. If that weren’t enough, a dandelion plant yields a beautiful bright yellow flower. Despite the battle waged by the chemical conglomerates, each spring the dandelion sprouts up defiantly, sunny little weedy disposition intact, as if to say, “I’m still here!” Which, of course, brings us to the weed in your brain commonly called procrastination. We all grow it. It’s estimated that 20% of us are habitual hardcore procrastinators. Procrastination can be broadly defined as putting off until tomorrow what you know you should be doing today. Countless books on time management give you instructions that usually include the following: Make a difficult task A1 on ...

  What do behavioral traits and infectious diseases have in common? According to researchers James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, quite a bit.  Let’s suppose that in your thirties, you become obese. We might assume that your jelly donuts and lack of exercise has finally caught up with you. Fair enough. What might surprise you is the contagious effect your new weight is having on your peer group. Your friends are 57% more likely to gain weight as a result of hanging out with you.  Not only that, but their friends, the ones not in your immediate circle, are 20% more likely to gain weight as well. The same contagious effect seems to be true about smoking. According to Massimo Pigliucci in Answers for Aristotle , quitting smoking means “your friends have a 67% chance of quitting too, and their friends a 36% chance; this is also true of alcoholism, depression, and the effect is even present for happiness (meaning subjective well-being) itself!” ‘Wait a minute,’ ...

By the time our ancestors were roaming the great savannas, alternating between chasing prey and being prey, their systems had already adapted to face the harsh environment, according to Rick Hanson PhD, author of Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom . Today, those ancient adaptations show up in the most peculiar ways as we constantly hijack a system built for times long ago. Getting cut off on the highway might not seem an awful lot like being chased by a lion, but to the brain’s subcortical structures, it’s pretty much the same deal. Hanson explains how it all works. As you feel yourself careening across a lane of traffic, your brain sounds the ancient ‘lion alarm,’ and begins to prepare for battle. First, stress hormones like Epinephrine kick your heart rate up and Norepinephrine increases blood flow to bring your largest muscles online faster.  Your pupils dilate to take in more light for enhanced visibility, and your bronchioles exp...

When you think of brainwashing, the name Patty Hearst might come to mind. Daughter of the late newspaper tycoon Randolph Hearst, in 1974, the then nineteen-year-old was kidnapped by a fringe terrorist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army. Several months later, she resurfaced, calling herself Tania and wielding a gun for the SLA during an attempted bank robbery. In September 1975, the local police and the FBI apprehended Hearst in an apartment in San Francisco, along with another SLA member. That January, she was tried for her involvement in the robbery. The Hearst family's legal team claimed Patty had been operating under a "classic case" of Stockholm Syndrome. They argued that after weeks of rape, torment, and imprisonment in a closet, she could no longer withstand an SLA indoctrinement. The prosecution argued that she had willfully decided to aid the SLA, given some circumstantial evidence and her refusal to name names or turn anyone else in. The jury ...

It's hard to overestimate the power of whole-brain thinking. Sometimes defined as "systems thinking", it occurs when your creative right brain is in balance with your analytical left-brain. Leonardo Da Vinci is a classic whole-brain thinker. He was able to dream up fantastical flying machines but also to follow it through with detailed schematics. He studied math and engineering along with sculpting and painting, and his careful research of anatomy gave him a huge advantage in bringing his grand visions to life. Da Vinci was an artist and a scientist. It's one of the things that made him, well, Da Vinci. Imagine if all of us could achieve this balance. Of course, it’s not that simple. First, your left and right brain are not strictly compartmentalized—there is a certain amount of overlap and redundancy. And to the extent that the two differ, most of us veer strongly towards one side, either focusing on emotions and big ideas (right brain), or logic and detail...