RU losing your mind?

(Image via Wikipedia)

People often used to say a mind is a terrible thing to waste, and it would seem as if nature agrees in a sense. You get what you use and you lose what you don't. Just like the rest of our body, our mind works on the design principles of probability and potential in servitude to our instinct to survive and our will to thrive.

In some of the more encouraging scientific discoveries from recent years it's suggested that our mental ability could be saved from the rising incidence of senility by using it!

At first it seemed as if certain mental activities worked better than others, but as research continued we found that our brain adapt to just about anything we put our mind to, even if it means rewiring a part of the brain, as is commonly found in people learning to use cellphones for the first time.

I suppose it is easy to see how our morbid fear of getting old turned fact into the general belief that the brain is a like a muscle that can be exercised to save ourself from the permanent loss of faculty and reason, or even worse to drifting off slowly to the land forgot and in to the obscurity of Alzheimer's disease...

Easy too to understand the all too eager helping hand of those who saw a market gap, and before you could say snap had just the remedy to guarantee a mental clarity and agility you last had as a teen. It's an assumption that has spawned the multi-million-dollar computer-game industry of electronic brainteasers and memory game. But according to the research findings of a recently published paper it seems that the assumption could be wrong. According to the article in TIME:

 in the largest study of these games to date, a team of British researchers has found that healthy adults who undertake computer-based "brain training" do not improve their mental fitness in any significant way.

As you may expect, the research was immediately met with a barrage of doubt and disbelief, particularly from companies that make a lot of money with all kinds of mind enhancing schemes.

It remains to be seen who will win the battle for our sanity, but to me it seems a review of the facts on hand suffice what we have always known as true, not only of our mind, but nature all around.

Use it, or lose it

But that's just me I guess. If you have a different point of view I'd love to hear from you. 

Babies need tummy time!

It seems that every time we interfere with the way nature intend, we discover something new that we didn't know before we tried to improve on the way things are, and most of the time we end up doing much more harm than good.

Take the recent findings on the relation between tummy time and developmental milestones as a good example (According to research, the time that babies spend playing around on their tummies is pivotal to a whole range of skills), or the discovery of below average executive functions when babies are turned on their back when they sleep.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. With crib deaths were on the rise, and statistical evidence backing up the apparent common sense that babies sleeping on their tummy are at risk, it wasn't long before Pediatric Specialists all over the world were urging mothers to turn their toddlers in the interest of preventing crib death.

And so began a growing trend of babies that are slower than tummy toddlers who have higher IQ's at 8, higher reading comprehension by the age of 26, and according to the recent finding of a long term follow-up and comparison study, by the time they hit their 30's tummy toddlers have a higher level of education and generally score better in executive functions such as categorization than babies raised on their back.

You can find the original article with links to the scientific research by following the link below:

Why babies need more tummy time than they're getting. - By Brian Mossop - Slate Magazine

Human brain - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

Teilhard de Chardin

(French Geologist, Priest, Philosopher and Mystic, 1881-1955)

The dominant feature of the human brain is corticalization. The cerebral cortex in humans is so large that it overshadows every other part of the brain. A few subcortical structures show alterations reflecting this trend. The cerebellum, for example, has a medial zone connected mainly to subcortical motor areas, and a lateral zone connected primarily to the cortex. In humans the lateral zone takes up a much larger fraction of the cerebellum than in most other mammalian species.

Wikipedia