Keeping Your Brain Healthy: Brain-FX

Food for the Brain: 7 Simple Steps

Daniel G. Amen, M.D., is a clinical neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and brain-imaging expert who heads up the world-renowned Amen Clinics. He's written a book, Making a Good Brain Great. Here's a 7-part article from the book, giving essential steps for keeping your brain healthy.

Seven Simple Brain Promoting Nutritional Tips
By Daniel G. Amen, M.D., author of Making a Good Brain Great

Here is the seven step plan to get your diet under control and to use food as brain medicine.

Step 1. Increase water intake

Given that your brain is about 80% water, the first rule of brain nutrition is adequate water to hydrate your brain. Even slight dehydration can raise stress hormones which can damage your brain over time.

Drink at least 84 ounces of water a day. It is best to have your liquids unpolluted with artificial sweeteners, sugar, caffeine, or alcohol. You can use herbal, non-caffeinated tea bags, such as raspberry or strawberry flavored, and make unsweetened iced tea. Green tea is also good for brain function as it contains chemicals that enhance mental relaxation and alertness.

Games for the Brain

Here's a site that specializes in giving your brain a workout through games:

http://www.gamesforthebrain.com/

These are mental exercises and games that will keep your brain thinking and developing its "neuro-muscles"!

Decision-Making: (Part 2)Dog Brain or Human in Control?

Experiments have shown healthy adults to take a bet even when they are sure to lose, when they can also make their opponent lose. The desire to punish the opponent overrides the desire to win a little bit of money. Clearly, we are not always logical.

We have dog brains with a human cortex on top. Although our cortexes represent all that is human, logical, rational, and civilized, our animal tendencies are not quiet. They sometimes win the argument over our civilized brain, and make decisions contrary to rationality.

(Here's a thought: maybe this is what happens when politicians decide to go to war?)

Emotion and Reason

Is this a good thing or not? There’s something critical to decision-making in both parts of the brain, the emotional and the rational. Effective decisions come from evaluating input from both parts.

You don’t have to be a neuroscientist to see how an emotional decision can badly distort judgment. We’ve all been there. Parents see this everyday in their children. But as adults, we are also prone to impulse and instant gratification. Anyone who’s ever been shopping or gambling knows the experience.

Risk and Reward

Much of the traffic between the primitive and modern parts of our brains is devoted to the conscious calculation of risks and rewards. As humans, we are unique because we can look out to the future and visualize the consequences of a decision or action. This sets us apart from dogs and other mammals.

We can contemplate what might flow from a decision to chase an immediate gratification. We get a thrill or immediate pleasure just from the prospect of future gratification.

Your Brain & Decisions: Part 1

You make decisions logically, don't you? Of course you do! And yet...what about those bets you made? What about when you go shopping? Are you making buying decisions based on rationality?...Or your emotions?

Neuroscientists are now discovering more about the brain and how it processes information and makes decisions. While much remains to be learned, apparently we may not be as rational and in control of our senses as we think we are.

The closer scientists look, the clearer it becomes that we are much like our animal ancestors. To understand the brain better, think of it in terms of three layers:

1. reptilian or primitive
2. dog
3. human

Three Brains in One

The reptilian brain consists of the top of the spinal cord and the base of the brain. It consists of those parts we share in common with reptiles and fish. It is responsible for many of our automatic systems for survival, such as breathing and hunger.

Wrapped around these structures is the ancient limbic system which is very similar to the brains of dogs and other mammals. It is the seat of basic emotions such as fear, aggressiveness and contentment.

And encasing these older structures is the modern cortex, the folded gray matter sets us apart from other mammals. Although many animals such as dogs and chimps have cortexes, the human cortex has grown to a huge size. It manages all sorts of things, like hearing and seeing, reasoning, abstract thinking, and our personalities.

We call the prefrontal cortex the ‘executive’ part of the brain because it considers all the input from the brain and makes decisions for goal planning and completion. Or, at least it makes decisions when we let it – when we don’t let our dog brain take over.

Stay tuned for part two on your brain and how it makes decisions:

Who's In Charge - Emotions or Reason?

Leadership "Power" Stress

Leadership, whether in an organization, small biz, sports team, or in your own family requires the exercise of influence or power. It requires having an impact on others to make things happen.

The higher a person is in an organization, the more power is involved in his or her role. In business leaders are selected for their strong motivation for power. (The power motivation is one of three powerful drives defined by David McClelland; the other two are the drives for affiliation and achievement.)

As a result of the nature of leadership roles, leaders experience a form of stress called "power stress." (Boyatzis, McKee, 2005, Resonant Leadership, Harvard Business School Press). The higher up they are in power, the more isolated and distant they are from feedback. The more likely they are subject to intense pressures, scrutiny, and stress. And the more likely they are to respond to stress through working harder, achieving more, driving themselves and others for results. Often, leaders will override their affiliation drive in favor of power and achievement.

Chronic stress releases glucocorticoids such as cortisol from the adrenal gland and this has immunosuppressive effects. One study showed that people with the leadership motive pattern, i.e., high need for power, primacy of need for power over the need for affiliation, and high self-control, showed consistently lower levels of immunoglobulin A, and accepted indicator of immune system functioning.

Many common human diseases are stress related: hypertension, myocardial infarction, infections, peptic ulcer, autoimmune disorders, obesity, cardiac arrhythmias, heart failure, diabetes, and susceptibility to cancer.

Relief from Stress

Relationships and connections to others activates the parasympathetic nervous systems, responsible for recovery from excitement. Thus leaders who wish to remain effective over the long term, who wish to sustain energy, might reach out to others in order to experience relief from stress. They must engage in recuperation and renewal activities.

Renewal from stress can come from many sources, including meditation, exercise, walks, caring for pets, and engaging in volunteer activities. Caring relationships have been associated with lower blood pressure, enhanced immunity, and overall better health. Social networks and social capital have both been found to decrease mortality rates in human population-based studies.

It is believed that during experiences such as compassion, hope, and mindfulness, a person has a greater amount of neural activity through the left pre-frontal cortex than the right. Feelings of happiness, amusement, enthusiasm, and elation emanate from the positive equivalents of the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens.

Some Questions

Is there a way to activate the nucleus accumbens artificially (drugs or other stimulation) as an antidote to stress?

Are talk therapies, executive coaching, or other leadership development programs addressing these issues effectively?

Can a leader choose a particular path for renewal, or is that like asking someone to fix themselves?