I don’t know if you took music lessons as a child but . . . It’s hard for me to forget practicing my piano with my rather stern-faced teacher counting out the beat along with the metronome (it’s possible that she was stern-faced due to my lack of practice from the week before…). Now, returning from my trip down memory lane, you may ask what metronomes have to do with actual memory formation. Research published last month in Nature Neuroscience illustrates the rhythmic activity patterns that arise from billions of neurons communicating with each other. They found that patterns are…

Many of you may have read my blog last Thursday, talking about Terry Bradshaw. Daniel Amen, MD has conducted studies on former NFL players, finding that many of the professional football players exhibited significant differences in their brain functioning that was consistent with chronic brain trauma. Many of these players were depressed and overweight when they sought out help from Amen. What is most interesting to me about his study is that Amen also found that as the players lost weight, their brain functioning improved. Improvement occurred in areas of memory, general cognitive functioning, information processing, and reasoning. How does…

An article about Terry Bradshaw has just caught my attention – partly because I somewhat follow NFL football (the Patriots, Giants and Colts), but more because of it’s connection to the brain. On Monday, Bradshaw spoke out about the effect that his numerous concussions have had on his general cognitive functioning. He sustained more than six concussions over his lengthy NFL career, leaving more than one reader on Monday to reminisce about seeing him being carted off the field in a stretcher. He now has problems with his short-term memory, as well as his hand-eye coordination, and is undergoing therapy…

Many of us work with elderly people, either in our practices or in our personal lives. And of course, some of us are also getting closer to retirement ourselves and are starting to think about issues of brain deterioration in a more personal light. The field of neuroscience is exploding with new revelations from the top brain research laboratories around the world. Some of these studies are directly applicable to our work with elderly patients, while others are more theoretic and while interesting, aren’t going to be changing our work anytime soon. With so much information available, it can be…

Our ancestors didn’t have televisions or even electricity. When it got dark, candles may have come out for a while, but before too long it was “lights out” for most people. With the advent of technology, nature no longer has to dictate our sleeping schedule, though perhaps it still should. “…the mice got fatter, showed less mental flexibility, and were more impulsive.” A new paper out of Dr. Bruce S. McEwen’s Rockefeller University lab looked at the effects of artificial lighting changing our 24-hour circadian rhythm. Researchers housed mice in an artificial environment with a 20-hour “day” rather than our…

There have been lots of studies showing that kids are more likely to be overweight or “sugar-holics” if their parents, particularly their mothers, are. Many of these studies have based their conclusions on the role that mothers play in selecting foods for the household and in building awareness (or the lack thereof) of good nutrition in their kids. A new study takes a different perspective, suggesting that the food that women ingest while pregnant and lactating helps to determine neural pathways and later eating habits. Beverly Muhlhausler, Ph.D., from the University of Adelaide in Adelaide, Australia led the investigation into…