Health

The book Brain Rules is full of interesting stuff. Last night’s chapter (ironically read at 3am last night) dealt with the importance of sleep to our mental functioning.

“What’s that got do do with birds,” you ask?

Not a whole lot, really - except that their names provide nifty labels for our chronotypes: the sleep/alertness patterns that determine if we’re the type to chirp happily in the morning, or stay up all night staring at the stars. [click to continue...]

The benefits of cognitive fitness programs still haven’t hit home with most people, but their fears of Alzheimer’s, dementia, and everyday memory loss are growing by leaps and bounds.

Thank you, Loyal News Media! Let’s all be skeered, yay! (Is sarcasm good for the brain? Quick, someone do a Newspaper on Stock.Xchng" align="right" border="0" height="229" width="166"/>study!)

Seriously, my Google News Page has been bogged this month down with news of Alzheimer’s related research.

Nearly every article cited brain-numbing statistics from the Alzheimer’s Association: Every 71 seconds, someone develops Alzheimer’s. More than 5 million people in the U.S. currently have Alzheimer’s disease. As many as 10 million baby boomers are expected to develop Alzheimer’s - that’s 18% of them. Us. Scared yet?

The risk-factor stories the news focused on were just as alarming.

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Ellen Langer is a Yale graduate, a Harvard psychology professor, an award winning researcher, and author of several interesting looking books on applied mindfulness. But it’s her study on hotel maids that’s gotten all the attention this year… hotel maids who apparently “thought themselves thin.”

(Yes, yes this is old news - but sometimes its fun to cover stories *after* the media frenzy dies down, dang nab it! Besides, it fits with the whole mindfulness craze that’s building from the Eckhart/Oprah thing)

Hotel maids are a busy and hard working group of people, lugging around heavy equipment, bending, turning, and scrubbing all day long. It’s a physically demanding and active job that burns a lot of calories.

But maids don’t typically see themselves as active, it turns out. When Langer and grad student Alia Crum surveyed 84 of these hard working women, two thirds of them said they didn’t regularly exercise. A full third said they didn’t get *any* exercise, inspite of their very active jobs. But what was really interesting is that when their fitness levels were measured - they matched their belief, rather than the reality. Their weight, blood pressure and other measurements were equivalent to people living a sedentary lifestyle.

“Given that they are exercising all day long,” Langer says, “that seemed to be bizarre.”

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Earlier this week, I was fighting off the flu.

“Don’t worry about posting” sez Me. “You’ll feel better soon.”

I was wrong. I don’t feel better. I’m sniffly, coughy, feverish, and most of all, whiney. Deep thoughts and disciplined writing are not really options at the moment. So here are 10 less-taxing ways to get your mind in order, suitable for cold and flu-season.

Ahem.

10. Set Lumosity’s difficulty levels down two four notches, then congratulate yourself on how well you did.

9. Remember all those classic movies that somehow slipped through the cracks of your cultural education? Maybe you’ve never seen Hitchcock’s original versions of Psycho or The Birds. Maybe you can quote Casablanca, but you’ve seen the whole thing. Download them on Netflix for free. Stare blankly. Be enriched.

8. Keep up with your healthy brain habits like drinking water and taking vitamins. The same habits will help you get over your cold.

7. Read the books you’ve had set aside for a month. (So far I’ve made it through two of them.)

6. Explore the flakier brainwave entrainment sessions available for MindStereo — see if you can induce a fever-assisted hallucination! OOOoohhh pretty colors!

5. Watch all umpteen episodes of Penn & Teller’s BullSh*t, also available for free download on Netflix. Guaranteed to satisfy the skeptic in you.

4. Balance all that healthy skepticism by indulging in your family folk medicine cures. Chicken soup, dirty socks around the neck, and enough vitamin C to turn you into a Florida Orange grove.

3. Experiment with new varieties of green tea. And honey, lots of honey. (Honey is good for the brain, right? Bees are smart, right?)

2. Try to remember if you posted this list last time you were sick. Fail. Post it anyway.

1. Sleep. Lots of slee—zzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz

You may have noticed an odd silence the last few days. It’s not a lack of inspiration - I’ve had a huge list of ideas, but none have actually made it into post form. Why not?

I’ve had Thistle-Brain.

Inexplicably, my brain has been replaced by rampant wild thistles - you know the type. Spiked flowers, over-ripe fluff, thorned stems that branch out and reach for light, trying to push through the surface of my skull…
Ok, ok, put down the giant butterfly nets, I’m not ready for the lunatic asylum, and I don’t think I have actual thistles in my my brain… but that IS what it feels like.

“Thistle-Brain” is a precursor to some rather nasty headaches I get. It usually continues during and sometimes after the pain. The most marked symptoms (other than the purple flowers sprouting out of my ears) are difficulty in co-ordination, a reduction in cognitive ability, and a heightened awareness of my brain itself.

Creepy, huh?

The invasion of aggressive flora seems to be brought on by a combination of things - allergies, stress, dehydration and low blood sugar seem to act as fertilizer, but but it’s almost always a sense of confusion and overload that trigger the brain-thistles, themselves.

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