Is memory loss inevitable? Book says No.

From Our Memories, Our Selves.

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From the book:

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Coffee and Chocolate Make You Smarter

From Inc.com

There's no longer any controversy: Every healthy diet should include at least some caffeine.

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Neuroscience continues to uncover new ways that coffee and (to a lesser extent) tea and chocolate, tend to make brains healthier and more resilient. 2019 has already seen some amazing research breakthroughs that are definitely worth sharing.

First, a joint study from the National Institute on Aging and Johns Hopkins University, and published last January in Neurochemical Research magazine, discovered that a methylxanthines--a class of chemical found in coffee, tea and dark chocolate (cacao)

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"has clear effects on neuronal network activity, promotes sustained cognitive performance and can protect neurons against dysfunction and death in animal models of stroke, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease."

That same study also discovered that xanthine metabolites--a chemical released when your brain processes caffeine, "may also contribute to the beneficial effects of coffee, tea and cacao on brain health."

Second, a meta-analysis of 11 studies on the impact of coffee on brain health and published in World Journal of Surgical Oncology showed that both coffee and tea (and thus, by extension, cacao) doesn't just reduce the risk of alzheimer's disease but also reduces the risk of brain cancer.

Finally, a groundbreaking study at Okayama University

"indicated that intake of coffee components, CA and CGA, enhanced the antioxidative properties of glial cells and prevents rotenone-induced neurodegeneration in both the brain and myenteric plexus."

Translation: caffeine makes your brain more flexible and resilient.

The big takeaway: if you want to keep your brain healthy both today and in the future as you age, you should be consuming coffee, tea, or cacao.

How much?

Well, chances are you're not consuming enough. Studies have shown that the ideal daily dosage of coffee is about six to eight 8oz cups, ideally consumed prior to 2pm so that it doesn't disturb your sleep.

If that sounds like too much coffee, consider replacing a cup or two with an ounce of dark chocolate. It need hardly be said that, for other health reasons, you should be consuming coffee, tea and cacao without sugar or creamer.  But you still get the brain-boost, regardless.

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Health-care providers hold biases based on

sexual orientation, study says

Findings highlight need for more training of

providers in cultural sensitivity

University of Washington Health Sciences/UW Medicine

In the first study that looks at a variety of health-care providers and their implicit attitudes towards lesbian women and gay men, researchers found there is widespread implicit bias toward lesbian women and gay men. The study finds that moderate to strong implicit preferences for straight people over lesbian and gay people are widespread among heterosexual providers.

Learn about the unique stress and
traumas faced by LGBTQ youth.

Findings highlight need for more training of providers in cultural sensitivity

University of Washington Health Sciences/UW Medicine

In the first study that looks at a variety of health-care providers and their implicit attitudes towards lesbian women and gay men, researchers found there is widespread implicit bias toward lesbian women and gay men. The study finds that moderate to strong implicit preferences for straight people over lesbian and gay people are widespread among heterosexual providers.

In the first study that looks at a variety of healthcare providers and their implicit attitudes towards lesbian women and gay men, researchers found there is widespread implicit bias toward lesbian women and gay men.

The study, "Health care providers' implicit and explicit attitudes toward lesbian women and gay men," published in the American Journal of Public Health finds that moderate to strong implicit preferences for straight people over lesbian and gay people are widespread among heterosexual providers. Also lesbian and gay health providers expressed implicit and explicit preferences for lesbian and gay people over straight people. Bisexual providers were found to have mixed preferences, mental health providers held the weakest implicit bias for heterosexual people over lesbian and gay people and nurses held the strongest implicit bias for heterosexual people over lesbian and gay people.

In short, healthcare providers, similar to others in society, hold a bias for people who shared their own sexual identity.

Lead researcher, Janice Sabin, UW research associate professor in biomedical informatics and medical education, said that clinical care of the LGBT population is a somewhat neglected area in curriculum in nursing, medicine and other areas of healthcare education.

"We want all providers to be proficient in treating diverse populations, including the LGBT population," she said.

Rachel G. Riskind with the Department of Psychology at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., and Brian A. Nosek with the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, were co-authors on the study.

Researchers used results from the Sexuality Implicit Association Test developed to assess presence of implicit bias towards either heterosexual or homosexual individuals. The test captured demographic data and implicit association test results for more than 200,000 participants between May 2006 and December 2012. Test takers were asked to indicate their explicit preferences towards heterosexual, lesbian and gay people by endorsing statements ranging from "I strongly prefer straight people to gay people to "I strongly prefer gay people to straight people." The study categorized healthcare respondents by their profession ¬¬¬-- medical doctor, nurse, mental health provider, other treatment provider or non-provider --to assess attitudes specifically from healthcare providers.

Test takers voluntarily accessed the Sexuality Implicit Association Test on Project Implicit, a non-profit organization founded in 1998 by three scientists -- Tony Greenwald (University of Washington), Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University), and Brian Nosek (University of Virginia). Project Implicit provides a "virtual laboratory" for collecting data on the Internet in a mission to educate the public about hidden biases or thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness and control.

Sabin said, "training for healthcare providers about treating sexual minority patients is an area in great need of attention."

"For healthcare organizations that aim to serve these populations, these data suggest an opportunity to examine methods likely to mitigate implicit biases, such as eliminating discretion from decision-making, use of clinical guidelines, awareness of personal bias as self-caution, organizational policies that promote objective decision-making, and inclusion of counter-stereotypical experiences in educational programs," the authors conclude.

While this study found implicit bias among healthcare providers, Sabin said future research should examine how providers' implicit and explicit preferences toward sexual orientation affect delivery of care to members of sexual minority populations.

Learn about the unique stress and
traumas faced by LGBTQ youth.

How memories form and fade

Strong memories are encoded by teams of brain cells working together in synchrony

                  

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August 23, 2019:   

California Institute of Technology

Researchers have identified the neural processes that make some memories fade rapidly while other memories persist over time.

                               

                                       

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Memories in the brain concept (stock image).

Credit: © metamorworks / Adobe Stock

          

Why is it that you can remember the name of your childhood best friend that you haven't seen in years yet easily forget the name of a person you just met a moment ago? In other words, why are some memories stable over decades, while others fade within minutes?               

Using mouse models, Caltech researchers have now determined that strong, stable memories are encoded by "teams" of neurons all firing in synchrony, providing redundancy that enables these memories to persist over time. The research has implications for understanding how memory might be affected after brain damage, such as by strokes or Alzheimer's disease.

The work was done in the laboratory of Carlos Lois, research professor of biology, and is described in a paper that appears in the August 23 of the journal Science. Lois is also an affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech.

Led by postdoctoral scholar Walter Gonzalez, the team developed a test to examine mice's neural activity as they learn about and remember a new place. In the test, a mouse was placed in a straight enclosure, about 5 feet long with white walls. Unique symbols marked different locations along the walls -- for example, a bold plus sign near the right-most end and an angled slash near the center. Sugar water (a treat for mice) was placed at either end of the track. While the mouse explored, the researchers measured the activity of specific neurons in the mouse hippocampus (the region of the brain where new memories are formed) that are known to encode for places.

When an animal was initially placed in the track, it was unsure of what to do and wandered left and right until it came across the sugar water. In these cases, single neurons were activated when the mouse took notice of a symbol on the wall. But over multiple experiences with the track, the mouse became familiar with it and remembered the locations of the sugar. As the mouse became more familiar, more and more neurons were activated in synchrony by seeing each symbol on the wall. Essentially, the mouse was recognizing where it was with respect to each unique symbol.

To study how memories fade over time, the researchers then withheld the mice from the track for up to 20 days. Upon returning to the track after this break, mice that had formed strong memories encoded by higher numbers of neurons remembered the task quickly. Even though some neurons showed different activity, the mouse's memory of the track was clearly identifiable when analyzing the activity of large groups of neurons. In other words, using groups of neurons enables the brain to have redundancy and still recall memories even if some of the original neurons fall silent or are damaged.

Gonzalez explains: "Imagine you have a long and complicated story to tell. In order to preserve the story, you could tell it to five of your friends and then occasionally get together with all of them to re-tell the story and help each other fill in any gaps that an individual had forgotten. Additionally, each time you re-tell the story, you could bring new friends to learn and therefore help preserve it and strengthen the memory. In an analogous way, your own neurons help each other out to encode memories that will persist over time."

Memory is so fundamental to human behavior that any impairment to memory can severely impact our daily life. Memory loss that occurs as part of normal aging can be a significant handicap for senior citizens. Moreover, memory loss caused by several diseases, most notably Alzheimer's, has devastating consequences that can interfere with the most basic routines including recognizing relatives or remembering the way back home. This work suggests that memories might fade more rapidly as we age because a memory is encoded by fewer neurons, and if any of these neurons fail, the memory is lost. The study suggests that one day, designing treatments that could boost the recruitment of a higher number of neurons to encode a memory could help prevent memory loss.

"For years, people have known that the more you practice an action, the better chance that you will remember it later," says Lois. "We now think that this is likely, because the more you practice an action, the higher the number of neurons that are encoding the action. The conventional theories about memory storage postulate that making a memory more stable requires the strengthening of the connections to an individual neuron. Our results suggest that increasing the number of neurons that encode the same memory enables the memory to persist for longer."

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Short exercise boosts memory

Researchers discover a gene in mice that's activated by brief periods of exercise

Date: July 2, 2019

Source:

Oregon Health & Science University

Summary:

Neuroscientists, working with mice, have discovered that a short burst of exercise directly boosts the function of a gene that increases connections between neurons in the hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with learning and memory.

  

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Neuroscientists at OHSU in Portland, Oregon, working with mice, have discovered that a short burst of exercise directly boosts the function of a gene that increases connections between neurons in the hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with learning and memory.

The research is published online in the journal eLife.

"Exercise is cheap, and you don't necessarily need a fancy gym membership or have to run 10 miles a day," said co-senior author Gary Westbrook, M.D., senior scientist at the OHSU Vollum Institute and Dixon Professor of Neurology in the OHSU School of Medicine.

Previous research in animals and in people shows that regular exercise promotes general brain health. However, it's hard to untangle the overall benefits of exercise to the heart, liver and muscles from the specific effect on the brain. For example, a healthy heart oxygenates the whole body, including the brain.

"Previous studies of exercise almost all focus on sustained exercise," Westbrook said. "As neuroscientists, it's not that we don't care about the benefits on the heart and muscles but we wanted to know the brain-specific benefit of exercise."

So the scientists designed a study in mice that specifically measured the brain's response to single bouts of exercise in otherwise sedentary mice that were placed for short periods on running wheels. The mice ran a few kilometers in two hours.

The study found that short-term bursts of exercise -- the human equivalent of a weekly game of pickup basketball, or 4,000 steps -- promoted an increase in synapses in the hippocampus. Scientists made the key discovery by analyzing genes that were increased in single neurons activated during exercise.

Barbara Bush: Advocate for literacy and the brain

Former First Lady Barbara Bush, who died on Tuesday, was a strong advocate for reading and literacy. During her time at the White House, Mrs. Bush encouraged reading and writing among Americans. In 1989, she founded the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. The foundation started a new children’s program, “My Home Library,” last year, but campaigned to increase the literacy rate of adults as well. Reading is crucial to learning and educational achievement. Reading profoundly supports brain health, through all stages of life. To honor Mrs. Bush’s legacy, we present the following article, “The Reading Brain: How Your Brain Helps You Read, and Why it Matters.”

Adapted from The Reading Brain: How Your Brain Helps You Read, and Why it Matters
by Martha Burns, Ph.D

If you’re reading this, you’re probably an accomplished reader. In fact, you’ve most likely forgotten by now how much work it took you to learn to read in the first place. And you probably never think about what is happening in your brain when you’re reading that email from your boss or this month’s book club selection.

And yet, there’s nothing that plays a greater role in learning to read than a reading-ready brain.

As complex a task as reading is, thanks to developments in neuroscience and technology we are now able to target key learning centers in the brain and identify the areas and neural pathways the brain employs for reading. We not only understand why strong readers read well and struggling readers struggle, but we are also able to assist every kind of reader on the journey from early language acquisition to reading and comprehension—a journey that happens in the brain.

Read about your brain!

We begin to develop the language skills required for reading right from the first gurgles we make as babies. The sounds we encounter in our immediate environment as infants set language acquisition skills in motion, readying the brain for the structure of language-based communication, including reading.

Every time a baby hears speech, the brain is learning the rules of language that generalize, later, to reading.  Even a simple nursery rhyme can help a baby's brain begin to make sound differentiations and create phonemic awareness, an essential building block for reading readiness. By the time a child is ready to read effectively, the brain has done a lot of work coordinating sounds to language, and is fully prepared to coordinate language to reading, and reading to comprehension.

The reading brain can be likened to the real-time collaborative effort of a symphony orchestra, with various parts of the brain working together, like sections of instruments, to maximize our ability to decode the written text in front of us.
….
It’s never too early to set a child on the pathway to becoming a strong reader. And it’s never too late to help a struggling reader strengthen his or her brain to read more successfully and with greater enjoyment.