Soldiers in a war zone experience more trauma in a week than many others experience in their lives . . . . . . but it still feels like our tools for treating trauma aren’t quite sufficient. Mindfulness meditation could be a powerful healing intervention – but does it work with soldiers? The early research is promising. It’s still very young. . . but it’s promising. That’s why I thought this study was so interesting. Anthony King, PhD, research professor in the University of Michigan department of psychiatry, led a team to investigate whether mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) could help…

When kids have trouble paying attention in school, when they’re too emotional, or reactionary, or downright aggressive, what can we do to help them turn it around? Perhaps too often, these behaviors are addressed with medication for ADHD or bipolar disorder. But according to Bessel van der Kolk, MD, the problem (and the solution) may lie in knowing how to recognize the signs and symptoms of childhood trauma. Bessel walks us through the major markers of this kind of trauma in this short video – check it out, it’s just 4 minutes. Click here to sign up. Bessel will tell…

Have I managed to convince you that exercise is an optimal way to encourage neuroplasticity (brain growth) and maintain a healthy brain? Good. However, now I have a caveat: exercise can sometimes be bad for the brain. Just ask the people who end up with one of the estimated 300,000 sports-related injuries per year.* For the 15-24 year age range, sports-related injuries were second only to car accidents in the number of brain injuries. In addition, concussions account for 10% of all high school sports injuries. When looking at kids who played American football, nearly 2,000 injuries were treated every…

What foods could strengthen your memory, improve your problem-solving ability, and make you an even better multi-tasker? In short, can any foods help to improve your brain power? Are there foods that would increase the size of your brain? Studies suggest that omega-3s help brain function, specifically visual memory and executive function, including problem-solving, multi-tasking and abstract thinking. In a new study published in the February 28th volume of the journal Neurology, researchers from the UCLA-based lab of Zaldy S. Tan, MD looked at the role of Omega-3 fatty acids in influencing brain power and overall brain health. They took…

I’ve been talking a lot about exercise recently. We know that it’s good for the brain, and yet the studies showing this can be pretty dry. And when it comes to persuading patients to actually do what’s good for them, lectures aren’t too effective either. With that in mind, we wanted to try something new, something that you could use to get through to your patients. So we created a video that’s short, fun, and totally different from anything we’ve ever done. Check it out below and tell me what you think. Peak Performance with Brain Science You are welcome…

One way to measure how much age has fatigued an individual is to measure the length of their telomeres. Since telomeres naturally shorten with time many researchers use telomere length to determine cell age, and give a picture of overall brain health What are telomeres? They act as protective caps on the end of chromosomes to keep them from deteriorating. When cells replicate (think aging), telomeres are cut and become increasingly shorter. If the telomere becomes too short, it dies or at the very least, becomes dormant. I reported last year that researchers had found that middle-aged people who were…