Brain Rules

How many of you would like to achieve peak performance at home, school, and/or work? I will assume the answer is something like, “Well, Duh!” And parents probably want their children to achieve in school. Are you and/or your children achieving peak performance now? If not, what can you do?

John Medina, a molecular biologist/researcher, thinks he has the answers. He has gathered them together in his book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. The text of the book is a pretty easy, breezy read. But if reading seems like too much bother, Medina has included a DVD which is basically a video “Cliffs Notes” version of the text that is very amusing. Can’t (be bothered to) find a book? No worries. Medina also has a website [http://www.brainrules.net/] which provides the same material in yet other formats including tutorials and newsletters, among others. Medina wants to make sure you have no excuse for not getting the information on making the most of your brain.


For those of you who are unable to exert yourself beyond reading this blog, here are the 12 Rules as listed in the Table of Contents.  (With my comments.)

Exercise
Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power. (Whoops! Better get up and dash to the bookstore or library after all!)

Survival
Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too. (Our brain is the result of our ancestors who were better able to survive and reproduce than the others in their group.)

Wiring
Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently. (Individual life experiences result in individual brain wiring patterns.)

Attention
Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things. (SEX! DANGER! Not boring. Scary maybe. Emotionally charged for sure. Journal articles: not so much.)

Short-term Memory
Rule #5: Repeat to remember. (Looks like the advertisers have this rule down.)

Long-term Memory:
Rule #6: Remember to repeat. (Really short version: schools are doing it all wrong. Big surprise. What we are “teaching” students is that most “learning” is boring.  Dissection labs, on the other hand...)

Sleep
Rule #7: Sleep well, think well. (Your brain has tons of work to do while your body is sleeping. If it doesn’t get this off-hours work time, your on-hours efficiency and effectiveness plummet.)

Stress
Rule #8: Stressed brains don’t learn the same way. (Too much stress prevents memory formation and can even kill memory cells. Kids with stressful home lives can’t learn.)

Sensory Integration
Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses. (Multisensory environments lead to better, more creative learning and result in better, longer recall than does learning in a unisensory environment.)

Vision
Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses. (A picture is worth… Are all these photos working?  By the way, vision trumps because we are adapted to climbing and swinging from branches in trees where depth perception is critical.)

Gender
Rule #11: Male and female brains are different. (On average, men get the gist of a situation; women focus on details. Recognizing and working with these differences can give a fuller, better perspective to a situation.)

Exploration
Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers. (Hypothesis testing, problem solving, and risking failure are how we learn.)

In summary, Medina has provided much useful information in nice, bite-sized chunks. Explore Brain Rules in any of the diverse formats Medina has provided, and peak performance of your brain may be yours; if you make the effort.

Six Months in Sudan

I just finished reading Dr. James Maskalyk’s powerful, wonderful, disturbing, heart-rending book Six Months in Sudan. It took me only a day to read the book because I had trouble putting it down.

Dr. James Maskalyk is a Canadian physician who works with Medécins Sans Frontières (MSF or Doctors Without Borders). This book is based on the blog [http://www.sixmonthsinsudan.com/page/blog/]
he wrote while on his six-month tour of duty in Abyei, Sudan where he was the chief medical officer and sole physician for a small MSF-run hospital. The hospital had a dedicated staff, but minimal supplies, limited equipment, and a generator for electricity that could be used only a few hours each day.

Some of you may know of Sudan from the Darfur genocide. Abyei is not in Darfur, although it is near the far, southeastern corner of Southern Darfur. Abyei is in southcentral Sudan on the border between the warring factions of the North and South. While Dr. James (as he was known in Abyei) was in Sudan, Abyei was at an uneasy peace.

I think Canadians (and virtually any educated person from any country other than the United States) are geographically literate, so Dr. James did not spend a great deal of time “positioning” Sudan for the reader. However, in my experience, many, many people in the United States think of Africa as a country (even if they “know” it is a continent). This is the fault of the media and many educators who will say things such as: “Travel to China, India, and Africa is on the upswing.” But the more knowledgeable are aware that Africa is the second-largest landmass, a continent of 53 distinct countries where hundreds of different languages are spoken. Sudan is the largest African country at over 2.5 million square kilometers. It is larger in area than Alaska and Texas combined.

Arabic and English are the languages of education, government, and business. However, those living in towns and villages far from the capital of Khartoum or other major urban centers are more likely to speak one of the 400 or so local languages or dialects. This was certainly true in Abyei. Dr. James couldn’t speak Arabic let alone any of the local languages. This kept him at a distance from his patients that was in part bridged by interpreters, but more so by the fact that he so obviously cared about each patient.

And yet, Dr. James could do so little for so many of them. They arrived too late at the hospital. Or what they needed was unavailable. Or he lacked the equipment for a proper diagnosis. Or…

Healthcare should be a basic human right. Without it, the other rights hardly matter if you are too weak, too ill, starving, dying. The situation is even more dire in war zones, or those, like Abyei, where peace has only a tentative hold. It is the mission of MSF and doctors like Dr. James to take healthcare to where it is most needed. Without their efforts the forgotten areas of the world would be even harsher and grimmer places.

I strongly encourage you to read Six Months in Sudan. The beginning of a new year is a good time to learn something new, especially about one of the forgotten places of the world. Dr. James’ story will move you, perhaps to tears; I hope to action.

Focus on the Future

Welcome to a New Year and a New Decade! New beginnings mean we should think about the future. What are your goals, plans, desires, wishes, wants, needs? This is not the time to focus on what might have been. Nor is it the time to live only in today. The past provides guidance for the present, which allows us to plan for the future.

Thinking about the future means thinking about your health. If you don’t think about your health, your future may be Hobbesian: “poor, nasty, brutish, and short…”

Scientists tend to be future-oriented, even those such as paleontologists and archaeologists who study the past. They study the past to understand how the present was formed and to predict what the future might be. Failing to think about the future can have disastrous consequences, as the Maori of New Zealand discovered.

The Maori arrived in New Zealand around 800 - 1000 years ago to discover a land of wondrous and seemingly unending bounty. After a months-long voyage at sea, it must have seemed that they landed in paradise. Numerous species of flightless birds, the moa, some taller than 10 feet, lived in large colonies throughout the islands. The shores were home to large populations of seals. Having never encountered humans before, these animals had no fear and were thus easy prey.


The Maori probably brought with them the usual Polynesian domesticates such as pigs and chickens, but given such natural bounty, it appears no effort was made to retain them since there is no archaeological evidence of pigs and chickens in New Zealand prior to European settlement. Unfortunately, another animal that arrived with the Maori did make its presence felt: the rat. Within a few hundred years, the combined depredations of the Maori and the rat drove the moa, the seals, and most other large-to-medium-to-small-sized animals to extinction, or to bare survival in rat-and-human-free refugias. There was one other animal that arrived with the Maori, the dog. After the collapse of the ecosystem, dog and rat became the Maori’s primary dietary meat sources. The Maori also subsisted on tubers that were considered delicacies in New Zealand, but were starvation foods elsewhere. They were able to fish and collect shellfish, but life in New Zealand became nasty, brutish, and short. Paradise was lost.

There are those who believe that we should live only for today because we do not know what tomorrow brings. In the midst of bounty, planning and/or saving for the future probably seems foolish. I imagine it seemed that way to the original Maori. Who thinks about your children’s grandchildren and the life they will have? There is plenty now. Won’t there always be plenty in the future?

Most humans have difficulty thinking about and planning for the future. This is probably what makes the discussion of global climate change so fractious. The future-oriented scientists clearly see the problem and have plans of action to help ameliorate it. But those individuals who are not future-oriented see only that life is much the same as it was a few years ago, and so believe that there is no great need for concern. Let tomorrow take care of itself.

This same lack of concern for tomorrow also means that the non-future-oriented are more likely to put their health at risk. They say, “I feel fine today. What I am doing [sitting on the couch] and what I am eating [junk food] must be OK because I am able to do my job, pay my bills, and have fun. Life is good. I don’t need to change my life. Besides, change is difficult, and no fun.” Perhaps. But then type 2 diabetes and heart disease aren’t fun either. “Who cares? I don’t have those problems now. No one lives forever anyway.”

Those who live only in the present have a fatalistic outlook: the future is set and nothing can be done to change it. In contrast, the future-oriented individual believes that the future is full of possibilities and opportunities over which he or she has some control. Decisions made today will have repercussions for good or bad in the future.

It may be that whether or not one is future-oriented is an inborn personality trait. If so, it will indeed be difficult for those without this trait to plan and make the changes in their lives that will lead to a healthy life many years down the road. In that case, they may need to view the future as next month, or next week, or even tomorrow in order to begin to change.

You need to take care of yourself now so that you will be able to make the most of the opportunities the future brings. Start the New Year and the New Decade out right by deciding to make the changes that will result in this being your best year and best decade yet.

See you in a bright, wonderful future!

'Tis the Season

It’s that time of year when we start thinking about the health and well-being of ourselves and those we love. As one year ends and another begins, we think about what we’ve accomplished, what we still want to do, and what we need to change.

To help you achieve your goals, you may wish to purchase a PDF copy of my book Walking in Sunshine: LifeStyle Changes to Make for a Bright Healthy Future at this link:
http://www.anthrohealth.net/ahbook.htm

Learn how your individual biology, behavior, and the environment in which you live interact to affect your health and well being. Discover why: adaptations matter, walking is the best exercise, sunshine is necessary, proper diet = better health, natural parenting is effective parenting, and much more.

Walking in Sunshine includes the Flexibilities appendix: color photos and directions detailing each movement in the sequence of stretches that scientific research has shown will help you prevent heart attacks, strokes, and osteoarthritis. Feel and act younger, move more gracefully, lose the achiness. Get flexible and live longer. Flexibilities can also be purchased as a separate PDF copy at this link:
http://www.anthrohealth.net/ahflexbooklet.htm

Walking in Sunshine: LifeStyle Changes to Make for a Bright Healthy Future will help you and your loved ones improve your lives. In addition, a PDF copy is environmentally green. Better your lives while helping the environment.

‘Tis the Season! May you have a wonderful life full of health and well-being.

Gut Check

Over the past few weeks there has been a lot of media coverage on the new guidelines for mammograms and breast self exams. Analysis of scientific research indicates that mammograms can do more harm than good. This is not what anti-breast cancer crusaders like the Susan G. Komen Foundation want to hear. Women are worried and confused because they have been told that they must have mammograms to detect and prevent breast cancer. Now the scientists are saying that is not the case and that, in fact, they can be counter-productive.

For every women correctly diagnosed with cancer after a mammogram there are significantly more women who endure the trauma of a false positive reading. They have no disease but undergo what turn out to be needless breast biopsies where they run the risk of a lung puncture from a poorly-performed needle biopsy. Unless a woman has a family/genetic history of breast cancer, the odds of her getting it prior to age 70 are actually quite low.

No one wants to be the one to tell the average 40-year-old woman without a family history of breast cancer to stop getting mammograms and then find out 3 years later that she developed breast cancer. But, again, the odds of her developing it are low. The cancer foundations and some health professionals appear to be operating under the “better safe than sorry” mantra while ignoring the fact that false positives can also lead to a sorry situation.

In 2002, Gerd Gigerenzer, author of Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You, pointed out that the general public and many medical professionals do not really understand statistics. This lack of understanding leads them to judge inaccurately the actual risks and benefits of health screenings.

According to Gigerenzer, the vast majority of physicians who participated in the research described in his book cannot accurately determine risks and benefits when these are presented in the form of probabilities. (e.g. There is a 25% risk reduction in death from breast cancer with mammography.) Only when the results are presented in the form of natural frequencies do the risks and benefits become clear. (e.g. 1000 women got mammograms each year for 10 years and 1000 women did not. At the end of 10 years, 3 women in the first group and 4 women in the second group died of breast cancer.) If we and our physicians cannot accurately determine risks and benefits when they are presented as probabilities, we could be unnecessarily risking our health. How many of the 997 women who got mammograms each year for 10 years also had false positives during that time? How many experienced the trauma, pain, and potential negative outcomes of the additional testing required to rectify that false positive?

Rather than relying on mammograms (and other types of screenings) to safeguard their health, it would be better for women in their 40s and 50s to actively employ measures that we know can help prevent cancer. These measures include eating plenty of richly-colored fruits and vegetables; eliminating dairy and other saturated fats; getting plenty of exercise; sleeping around 8 hours each night; and taking a minimum supplement of 1000 IU/day of vitamin D3. More vitamin D supplementation may be required to get the blood levels of 25 OHD to the optimal level of 50 ng/mL.

By following these preventive measures all women, even those with a family history of breast cancer, will reduce their odds of developing the disease. And those without a family history will be able to ignore their guts and go with their brains in accepting the scientific data which states that we in the United States have been over-using mammograms. Look at the natural frequency data. Mammograms haven’t been as much help as we thought. Eat right, exercise, sleep well, and take vitamin D. That’s where the science is.

Eat for Health: A Review

Dr. Joel Fuhrman (Eat for Health) is one of the major proponents of a predominantly vegetarian diet he calls nutritarian. At first blush, his diet is very similar to that which I have long promoted: eat lots of fruits, vegetables, and tree nuts while eliminating dairy and grain-based foods. Dr. Fuhrman also allows very limited amounts of eggs, fish/shellfish, and poultry, but would essentially eliminate red meat. It is at the level of protein intake that Dr. Fuhrman and Dr. Fuller differ. Dr. Fuhrman wants proteins to be essentially vegetable-based, while Dr. Fuller knows that humans also need animal-based proteins.

Both of us recognize that humans are primates and that chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. Therefore, we both look to the chimpanzee diet for guidelines as to what our ancient ancestors ate. However, Dr. Fuhrman seems to conflate the diet of the gorilla with that of the chimpanzee. He also ignores a major difference we have with our fellow apes and the implication that has for human diets: our much larger brains.

Gorillas eat a lot of leafy vegetation; they are vegetarians. Chimps eat very little leafy vegetation. The major components of the chimp diet are fruits and nuts, but they also eat as much animal-based protein as they can find: ants, termites, eggs, monkeys, bush pigs, etc. Dr. Fuhrman combines the gorilla’s leafy diet with the chimp’s fruits and nuts and concludes that this is the proper diet for humans. In the wild, generally the only time chimps eat leaves is when they eat meat (except for certain unpalatable leaves eaten to remove intestinal parasites). Chimps and humans do not have the same ability that gorillas have to process large quantities of leafy vegetation through their guts.

Archaeological evidence shows that hominin (humans and their ancient ancestors) brains did not begin to enlarge until animal-based protein (primarily fish/shellfish and water fowl eggs) became a larger component of the diet. These foods are excellent sources of omega-3 fatty acids, necessary for proper brain growth, development, and function. Some plant-based foods such as tree nuts and flax seeds do provide omega-3 fatty acids, but research shows that these are not a good source: humans (and other mammals) cannot efficiently convert the plant-based fatty acids into the forms required for use in the brain. With the development of agriculture and an increasing reliance on plants in human diets, the size of human brains has actually decreased over the past 10,000 years.

In chapter 13 of Eat for Health, Dr. Fuhrman has an entire section inveighing against eating fish and shellfish because of mercury contamination. Mercury is a problem in large, long-lived fish. However, it is not a problem in shrimp and sardines, and other small, short-lived varieties. Is it worth relegating fish and shellfish to a very minor part of your diet if it also means that you are not providing your brain with enough omega-3 fatty acids?

Overall, Dr. Fuhrman’s book is full of good advice for those who are overweight and have chronic health problems. However, his nutritarian program is too close to that of a vegetarian/vegan if you want to have an optimally functioning brain. A few modifications will bring Dr. Fuhrman’s plan into line with Dr. Fuller’s Premier Nutrition Plan [http://www.anthrohealth.net/AHNews%20V6N7.htm]: a plan that keeps you healthy and brainy.

Flexibility for Life

When I was 32 I realized that I was not as flexible as I had once been. This disturbed me because at that time my grandmother was having increasing difficulty moving. Her shoulders were becoming stiff and inflexible. She needed a knee replacement. My grandmother was only 75. I loved her dearly, but I didn’t want to have the same problems with my body. From that point, I put together a series of joint movements I call Flexibilities; and I began doing them every morning when I first arose.

Over the next several weeks, I noticed that not only was I becoming more flexible, but I felt less achy and stiff when I awoke each morning. Doing the movements in the morning meant that I felt loose, alert, and ready for the day ahead. I walked a little taller with a bounce in my step.

Through the intervening years, I’ve continued to do the flexibilities each morning. On those days that for some reason I do not do the movements, I feel a little off. I’ve also found that if I do not do the flexibilities first thing in the morning, I am less likely to do them at all that day.

In addition to doing the joint movements, I do two other things to aid joint health. Each day with my breakfast (blueberries and bananas, tomato salsa omelet, and grapefruit juice) I take a vitamin D3 supplement. Vitamin D3 is vital for skeletal and muscle strength (and many other aspects of health). For lunch I eat water-packed sardines. Sardines are a super food: they are a great source of protein, calcium, vitamin D3, and omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 fatty acids help reduce joint inflammation (along with many other benefits).

Following this program for over two decades, I have great flexibility, no signs of osteoarthritis, and good overall health. Two research studies provide support for my anecdotal experience.

The first, published about one year ago by UC San Diego researchers, found that flexing joints prompts chondrocytes (cartilage cells) to produce a lubricating substance that keeps the joint surfaces smooth. The more the joint was flexed, the greater the percentage of chondrocytes that produced lubrication, keeping the glassy surface of the joint smooth. Joints that are not flexed produce very little lubrication resulting in an erosion of the smooth cartilage and, eventually, the pain of osteoarthritis.

The second study was published earlier this month in the American Journal of Physiology. These researchers in Texas and Japan found that an individual’s degree of flexibility could be positively correlated with that individual’s degree of arterial flexibility. That is, the most flexible adults had the best arterial condition and the lowest risk for having a heart attack or stroke. Those adults with the greatest joint stiffness were at highest risk of suffering from a heart attack or stroke.

Do you want to live a longer, healthier life? Then you need to add daily flexibilities to your routine. If you would like a PDF copy (for $3.00) of my Flexibilities booklet which includes photos and directions for each movement, click here. http://www.anthrohealth.net/ahflexbooklet.htm