The study is part of ongoing research on British civil servants and is usually called Whitehall II.The researchers are following more than 6,000 men and women who were first evaluated in the early 90’s. Eleven years later whether they had died from a heart attack, had a heart attack but survived, or had significant pain from their hearts (angina). People who regularly worked an extra 3 to 4 hours had 1.6 times the risk of having coronary heart disease than were those who did not.

I’ve written in the this blog and said in my talks that more and more evidence shows that the things that are heart healthy are probably also brain healthy. If you think about how many blood vessels are in your brain, it makes sense that the same things that can have a bad effect on the blood vessels of the heart can also hurt the ones in your brain.

I would say the message is clear: maintain a balance between work and the rest of your life. If you do have to work more than may be good for you, be sure to have a clear strategy for stress management. Close your eyes once or twice a day and just breathe. Maybe you can picture yourself on a beach or sitting by a mountain lake. Doing this regularly can have a surprisingly big impact on your stress levels, even if you are working until 10:00 a night.

Reference:

Virtanen M et al. (2010) Overtime work and incidence coronary heart disease: the Whitehall II prospective cohort study. European Heart Journal advance access, published online May 11, 2010.doi: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehq124

Researchers at Wake Forest University studied whether just four days of training (at just 20 minutes a day) could make a difference in participants’ mood, energy, and cognition. Undergraduate students (average age 22 years) either participated in the meditation sessions or spent a similar amount of time sitting quietly and listening to an audio book.

Participants in the meditation condition showed decreases in anxiety and improvements in several mental processing tasks compared to those in the audio book group. The meditators’ performance on one aspect of a working memory task (how many answers they got correct in a row) suggested that they may have improved their attention.

This is a small and very preliminary study that extends others’ work on meditation and the brain.It shows that even brief meditation practice can make a difference. you don’t have to be a Buddhist monk to learn to still your mind and pay better attention. Paying attention may be one of the most important things you can do to improve your brain’s functioning.

Reference:

Zeidan F et al.(in press) Mindfulness meditation improves cognition: Evidence of brief mental training. Consciousness and Cognition, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.03.014

The study, reported in the journal Nature, highlights the problem called generalization. Most studies of computer-based brain training have shown, for example, that people can readily learn to do better on the tasks on which they train, People who work on learning how to remember a list of words will usually get better at it. If you train at solving mazes, you will probably get better at solving a maze puzzle.

What’s not clear, though, is that the training you do will help you on other things. You can learn a list of words and that may help you memorize a grocery list, but all that work probably won’t help you remember where you put your keys, or help you do better on a test for your job. In the same way, you may get pretty good at solving a maze, but it not likely that will help you be a better driver.

In the study reported in Nature, viewers of a popular BBC television show names “Bang Goes the Theory” participated in six weeks of online brain training. Participants completed baseline measure of reasoning, working memory, and paired associates learning and were randomly assigned to different training groups. Participants were aged 18 to 60 years, and 11,430 completed enough of the training to contribute data.

What did the study show? Consistent with a great deal of other research, the study showed that people who trained got better on the tasks they trained on, but there was essentially no evidence that they got better on the baseline tasks. The authors of the study give an illustration: people in the memory training group improved in their ability to remember numbers by about 3/100 (three hundredths) of a digit. They suggest that it would take almost four years of training to remember just one extra digit. Further, the control group in the study got better by 2/100 (two hundredths), and they didn’t even get memory training.

There are a number of legitimate criticisms of the study.Researchers could argue about the selection of tests, how participants were trained, and the small amount of training completed by some of the participants. Including a large age range may have masked improvements in some groups, such as older adults.

As always, more research is needed. But this study shows that at least short-term computer-based brain training may not make a big difference in daily life.

Reference:

Owen AM et al. Putting brain training to the test. Nature near-final version, 20 April 2010 (doi:10.1038/nature09042). Click here to go to the report.

In giving talks to community groups about brain fitness, I emphasize that a number of elements go in to brain fitness. And one of these key elements has nothing to do with high-tech computer training. For optimal brain fitness, a sense of purpose is crucial. You have to have a reason for getting out of bed in the morning.

The evidence for my proposition is there, if you look for it. Dan Buettner, in his book Blue Zones, shows that purpose and social engagement are present in areas of the world where people routinely live into their 80s, 90s, and 100s. Other studies have shown that people who have a sense of purpose in life are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.

Several recent studies support the view of sense of purpose may be an important factor in maintaining physical and psychological well being. A study reported in The Gerontologist shows that people involved in volunteer activities during midlife had better mood and physical health 20 years later.

Another study explicitly investigated purpose in life. The study reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry showed that people who reported a greater sense of purpose in life had reduced risks for developing Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment.

References:

Pillemer K, et al. (2010). Environmental volunteering and health outcomes over a 20-year period. The Gerontologist, published on line February 19, 2010. Click here.

Boyle PA et al. (2010). Effect of a purpose in life on risk of incident Alzheimer disease and mild cognitive impairment in community-dwelling older persons. Archives of General Psychiatry, 67, 304-310.

Memory self-efficacy, or someone’s beliefs about how well they understand their memory and how well they can manage and perform memory tasks, has been clearly related to someone’s actual memory performance. it’s a chicken-and-egg question, though, because one explanation for someone’s self efficacy can be their level of skills. People may have confidence in their memory skills because their memory skills are actually good.

One study from several years ago actually looked at how an intervention focused on self-efficacy affected memory skills (see reference below). West and colleagues showed that training older adults in memory skills in a way that focused on increasing self-efficacy produced significant gains not only in how the participants felt about their memory but also in how well their memories actually functioned.

Strategies these researchers used to improve both memory and self-efficacy were to emphasize the development of understanding how well participants could manage their memory and on their competencies rather than their problems or failures.

The take-home message for those interested in maintaining brain fitness is to be very objective about how you see your cognitive functioning. Use your scores on on-line games or cognitive training activities as evidence that you’re getting better. Don’t interpret minor set backs as evidence that your mind isn’t working – modify how you view yourself to move toward a realistic understanding of your strengths while you work to improve your abilities.

Reference:s

West RL et al (2008). Self-efficacy and memory aging: The impact of a memory intervention based on self-efficacy.Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 15, 302-329.