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Groovy Music Improves Brain Performance

Groovy Music Improves Brain Performance

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Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

Get into the groove… or so sang Madonna with her hit single in 1985. Little did she know at the time but getting into the groove certainly does seem to be beneficial for you – not to prove your love as she demanded, but in improving cognitive, brain, performance.

Really, yes.

Researchers at the University of Tsukuba in Japan have investigated the impact of groovy music, music related to rhythm and dance, and stimulating the urge to move, on cognitive performance.

To do this these researchers gave cognitive tasks and conducted brain scans using near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure participants before and after playing groovy music.

They found that groovy music improved cognitive performance scores, and this was related to increased function in an area of the brain called the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (l-DLPFC). Many prefrontal regions are associated with higher cognitive functions. However, there is a caveat, and that is this effect could only be seen in those participants who said they enjoyed the music only.

So, this raises the question of whether it is groovy music that stimulated this process or simply music that you enjoy – other research has shown the positive benefits of music on just about everything.

So, for you groovers, music that makes you want to move your body, to groove, is likely good for your brain performance. If you don’t like the groove, you can certainly try with any music you like. It will at least elevate your mood and that in itself is no bad thing.

Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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Reference

Takemune Fukuie, Kazuya Suwabe, Satoshi Kawase, Takeshi Shimizu, Genta Ochi, Ryuta Kuwamizu, Yosuke Sakairi, Hideaki Soya.
Groove rhythm stimulates prefrontal cortex function in groove enjoyers.
Scientific Reports, 2022; 12 (1)
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-11324-3

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Even Moderate Alcohol Consumption Linked to Brain Decline

Even Moderate Alcohol Consumption Linked to Brain Decline

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Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

alcohol brain

The tide seems to have turned on alcohol. Though we have always known that excessive alcohol consumption is negative there were for a long time inconsistencies with the research into modest levels of alcohol consumption – with multiple studies showing beneficial effects.

These effects could, however, be from other sources, such as the antioxidants in red wine, or the increased social contact through drinking with friends. I reported here on how alcohol even in modest amounts can lower life expectancy – gulp! However, mild amounts only had mild effects – that’s the good news for you (us) drinkers.

A new study just published has looked at correlations between alcohol consumption and iron levels in the brain. High iron levels in the brain is associated with various neuro-degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and reduced cognitive function. The data was taken from the UK’s biobank and data from 21’000 people was analysed. This connects various lifestyle factors, personality, demographic, cognitive function, and is combined with brain scans and other biological data.

The researchers around Anya Topiwala of the University of Oxford found that more than seven units per week was associated with markers of high iron in a region of the brain called the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia is an important part of the brain associated with, amongst others, reward, but also motor control, and learning. This higher iron accumulation was associated with slower executive function, lower fluid intelligence, and slower reaction times.

There were other regions of the brain which showed higher iron levels, but they didn’t find strong and robust enough associations to deem these causal.

There are a number of caveats to the study we also know for example, that many people underestimate how much alcohol they drink. So, seven units is a very rough estimate.

However, this does show and support other research that shows even moderate alcohol consumption can have detrimental effects on the brain and cognition. Low to mild quantities though do show mild, if any, correlations to these declines.

So, the advice is simple – go easy on the drink!

Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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Reference

Anya Topiwala, Chaoyue Wang, Klaus P. Ebmeier, et al.
Associations between moderate alcohol consumption, brain iron, and cognition in UK Biobank participants: Observational and mendelian randomization analyses
PLOS Medicine, 2022; 19 (7): e1004039
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1004039

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Flu Vaccination Dramatically Lowers Risk Of Alzheimer’s

Flu Vaccination Dramatically Lowers Risk Of Alzheimer’s

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Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

vaccination alzheimer brain

I am always interested in headlines that are related to brain health. And though Alzheimer’s is a long way off for (hopefully) me, this still struck me as interesting.

For me this was also interesting because last year I decided to have my first ever flu jab. I had never really considered it being healthy and rarely sick. However, with the rise of COVID-19 and my subsequent vaccinations it raised my awareness of the importance of vaccinations. I know many people of turned the opposite direction, but I realised that not getting sick and protecting the immune system is a much better option in all circumstances.

So, what did these researchers at the University of Texas Health Care Centre find?

They found a strong correlation between having the flu vaccination and getting Alzheimer’s. This risk was 40% lower. That is a dramatic difference and of note is that this study was also large analysing data from 935’877 vaccinated and the same number of unvaccinated patients aged 65 or over. They were then tracked over a four-year period.

This effect was also stronger the more often the individual had been vaccinated so those who got themselves vaccinated consistently had an even lower risk of contracting Alzheimer’s within the study period.

There are multiple possible causes of this, but the researchers note that other vaccines also seem to impact propensity to getting Alzheimer’s. It could be that the protection of the immune system or alternatively activation to a safe degree has neuro-protective effects. But it does raise the possibility of vaccinating against Alzheimer’s.

But for now, you seem to be able to do that just by getting the flu jab regularly. I certainly will be!

Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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Reference

Avram S. Bukhbinder, Yaobin Ling, Omar Hasan, Xiaoqian Jiang, Yejin Kim, Kamal N. Phelps, Rosemarie E. Schmandt, Albert Amran, Ryan Coburn, Srivathsan Ramesh, Qian Xiao, Paul E. Schulz. 
Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease Following Influenza Vaccination: A Claims-Based Cohort Study Using Propensity Score Matching
Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, 2022; 1
DOI: 10.3233/JAD-220361

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How Mindfulness Meditation Reduces Pain

How Mindfulness Meditation Reduces Pain

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Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

meditation brain wellbeing

Mindfulness meditation has been shown to be beneficial for many things such as lowering stress, increasing wellbeing but also making better decisions and being less biased. Not bad.

However, some of these are attentional topics and the question a group of researchers from the University of California wanted to answer is how much and, how can mindfulness influence pain.

For this Riegner et al. recruited 40 participants all who had no experience of meditation. First their brain responses to pain were measured by being scanned while painful heat was applied to their legs. They were then split into two groups.

One group underwent four twenty-minute mindfulness training sessions where they were encouraged to focus on their breath and reduce self-referential processing by first acknowledging their thoughts, sensations and emotions but then letting them go without judging or reacting to them. The other group, the control group, listened to an audio book for their twenty-minute sessions.

They were then brought back to have their brains scanned again with the same painful heat stimulus. However, the meditation group was asked to meditate during this process while the control group just rested with their eyes shut.

So, you may wonder now whether this changed their pain perception and how?

The first answer is yes, it did change the pain perception, and quite dramatically. Both pain sensation and pain unpleasantness reduced by about 33%. That’s a big jump particularly considering this was only four twenty-minute sessions with meditation novices.

The more interesting part, maybe, is they were also able to see the precise mechanisms in the brain.

What they found is that those who had more reduced pain had decoupled networks. Specifically, between a region known as the thalamus and the default brain network. The thalamus is like a relay station connecting the body’s sensation to the rest of the brain. The default network and particularly a region called the Precuneus is involved in general mind wandering but also consciousness.

This decoupling seems to disconnect the sense of self from the physical sensation – a common goal of such mindfulness meditation.

This is impressive because it shows that mindfulness meditation can be effective against pain and is a quick and cheap method. It also empowers people and gives them a sense of control. What’s more this highlights various issues particularly with debilitating chronic pain, which is very common. Here pain can become a sense of identity for these people leading to a vicious circle of negativity, decreased wellbeing and more pain and suffering.

So, another one in the hat for the power of mindfulness meditation!

Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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Reference

Gabriel Riegner, Grace Posey, Valeria Oliva, Youngkyoo Jung, William Mobley, Fadel Zeidan.
Disentangling self from pain: mindfulness meditation-induced pain relief is driven by thalamic-default mode network decoupling.
Pain, 2022; Publish Ahead of Print
DOI: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000002731

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You Smell Like Your Friends

You Smell Like Your Friends

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Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

friends smell brain

We all know that dogs like to sniff each other – often in “delicate” parts of their body. We also know that many other animals have very good sense of smells. But in our daily lives, apart from food, our sense of smell seems to play a subordinate role.

However, this fascinating piece of research out of the Weizman Institute of Science says something else. Namely that our friends smell like us and that we likely choose our friends based on their smell!

This may sound far-fetched at first glance but we do already know that we use our sense of smell more than we think. We are actually often constantly smelling ourselves but often in unconscious ways. This could be through wiping our faces with our hands, a sneaky smell under our armpit, but also after shaking hands we often automatically and unconsciously rub this against our nose. The remnants of an automated smell reflex.

The question then remains do we choose our friends, or alternatively our romantic partners, based on smell? This is a question that Inbal Ravreby set out to answer.

First, she founds sets of so-called “click” friends. These are friends who click on first meeting and don’t need a lot of time to become familiar with each other. Ravreby hypothesised that this was down in part to a sense of smell in absence of other information. She used an eNose (yes, that is a thing – an electronic nose to identify smells and odours) and indeed found that these click friends had similar smells.

However, we also know that friendships tend to follow pretty predictable paths, similar social backgrounds, upbringing, etc. So maybe this similarity in odour was also down to similar eating and nutrition patterns which affects your body odour. Ravreby therefore set up a second experiment and in this volunteers who had never met each other were first “smelt” with the eNose before then being asked to engage in non-verbal interaction with others. The participants then rated how likeable they found the other person and how likely they thought they would become friends.

Based on the eNose data alone they could predict with 71% accuracy who was likely to have a positive social interaction. Not bad!

So, this shows that friendships are driven by many factors but that out underestimated sense of smell plays a much large role than thought. But hopefully we won’t start sniffing each other like dogs.

Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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Reference

Inbal Ravreby, Kobi Snitz, Noam Sobel. 
There is chemistry in social chemistry
Science Advances, 2022; 8 (25)
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abn0154

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