Dementia type tauopathies, including Alzheimer’s disease are accompanied by an accumulation of abnormal form of tau protein in the brain. By interacting with the filaments called microtubules, this protein plays an important role in non-pathological conditions as it helps the neurons to function correctly. The French team of Etienne-Emile Baulieu recently demonstrated that another protein may be involved in cellular degeneration related to dementias. This protein, commonly named FKBP52, interacts with the tau protein and it seems that its quantity is inversely correlated with tau’s. Simply said, the lower the protein FKBP52 is present, the higher the tau protein is present. This discovery offers crucial elements to understand this kind of disease as well as new clues for detecting and above all healing the disease.

Source: postnoon.com

In everyone of the five age categories (45-49, 50-54, 55-59, 60-64 and 65-70), the results showed a decline in all skills except in vocabulary.

The results of the sudy suggest that the decline in cognitive functions begins around the age of 45, however it does not specify if the outcome is linked to dementia. Still, more studies are necessary to confirm those results.

Source: www.newscientist.com
or British Medical Journal

To achieve an effective brain training, the brain must be challenged with the right degree of difficulty.

- if the level is too easy, there will be no brain modification and playing the games becomes a routine activity, not a brain exercise. If you experience immediate success, there is no victory to achieve, no challenge to overcome.

- if the level is too difficult, your motivation will be negatively impacted because it takes a lot of dedication to persevere at a high degree of difficulty.

The ideal is to work above what we call “the comfort zone”: try and try again and you will be successful.

At Happy Neuron we chose to setup rather challenging levels of difficulty.  If the easy levels seems too hard at first, it is often due to a misinterpretation or misunderstanding of the instructions. Do take your time to do the examples of the games, as many times as you need, before really starting to play the game.  Besides it is normal to experience difficulties at the beginning of your brain training.  In our view, the satisfaction is greater when the effort needed to achieve a goal was important.

This is what differentiates our philosophy with a number of our competitors.

The best goals are the ones you set for yourself.

Do not forget that brain training, just like physical training, is a process which takes time and must be maintained. While it is useful to do an intensive program for 3 months, it is really doing the program regularly for several years that will give you the best results.  To maintain interest, you not only need a wide range of activities but also continued challenges.  HAPPYneuron has the most exercises on the market and will keep challenging you.

The HAPPYneuron’s team is delighted to announce that a new game is already available on www.happy-neuron.com.

This game, named “Sound check” is an auditive game to train your attention and short-term memory. You just have to sit comfortably in front of your computer and listen to series of instrument sounds, then to determine which sound is the highest or the lowest, the loudest or the softest, the longest or the shortest.

By being focused on every particularities of each sound you hear, playing this game will train your ability to differentiate between sounds. This skill is very helpful to interact with the environment in a more efficient way. For example to detect an alarm at a distance or to recognize someone calling you in a crowd.

Brains of psychopaths seem to show differences in their structure and function compared to healthy brains. This is shown by a study led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and published in The Journal of Neuroscience. A mobile functional magnetic resonance images scanner was brought to a prison where 40 inmates participated in the experimentation; 20 of them had psychopathy and 20 did not. Images showed reduced reliability in the connections between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, the two brain areas respectively involved in empathy and guilt, and fear and anxiety. In addition, the activity between these two regions were also affected and showed a lack of coordination. According to Joseph Newman, a psychology professor and one of the researchers who worked on the research, the combination of structural and functional abnormalities in this specific brain circuitry is a constant in psychopaths prisoners.

This study provides good elements to help understand the neuronal basis of psychopath behavior and learn how to treat this type of disorder. Moreover, it could facilitate the diagnosis and treatment of inmates.

Sources:  The Scientist or Newswise

Source: www.news-medical.net

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