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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Neal

Neal

How to Improve Your Working Memory and Become More Productive | The Art of Manliness - 0 views

  • Whether you’re answering hard questions, making impromptu remarks, analyzing a situation, or synthesizing a bunch of data points into a cohesive and convincing presentation, the ability to think and process multiple pieces of information quickly and effectively is a vital skill to have. In our fast-paced and fluid world, you’ve got to be able to pull out the right piece of knowledge at the right time.
Neal

Validation of the self regulation questionnaire as a measure of health in quality of li... - 0 views

  • The Self Regulation Questionnaire (SRQ) was found to be a valid and reliable tool which measures unique psychosomatic abilities. Self regulation deals with competence and autonomy and can be regarded as a problem solving capacity in terms of an active adaptation to stressful situations to restore wellbeing. The tool is an interesting option to be used particularly in complementary medicine research with a focus on behavioural modification.
Neal

Physical activity, diet and other behavioural interventions for improving cognition and... - 0 views

  • Despite the large number of childhood and adolescent obesity treatment trials, we were only able to partially assess the impact of obesity treatment interventions on school achievement and cognitive abilities. School and community‐based physical activity interventions as part of an obesity prevention or treatment programme can benefit executive functions of children with obesity or overweight specifically. Similarly, school‐based dietary interventions may benefit general school achievement in children with obesity. These findings might assist health and education practitioners to make decisions related to promoting physical activity and healthy eating in schools. Future obesity treatment and prevention studies in clinical, school and community settings should consider assessing academic and cognitive as well as physical outcomes.
Neal

Technological aids for the rehabilitation of memory and executive functioning in childr... - 0 views

  • This review provides low‐quality evidence for the use of technology‐based interventions in the rehabilitation of executive functions and memory for children and adolescents with TBI. As all of the included studies contained relatively small numbers of participants (12 to 120), our findings should be interpreted with caution. The involvement of a clinician or therapist, rather than use of the technology, may have led to the success of these interventions. Future research should seek to replicate these findings with larger samples, in other regions, using ecologically valid outcome measures, and reduced clinician involvement.
Neal

E‐Health interventions for anxiety and depression in children and adolescents... - 0 views

  • At present, the field of e‐health interventions for the treatment of anxiety or depression in children and adolescents with long‐term physical conditions is limited to five low quality trials. The very low‐quality of the evidence means the effects of e‐health interventions are uncertain at this time, especially in children aged under 10 years.
  • Although it is too early to recommend e‐health interventions for this clinical population, given their growing number, and the global improvement in access to technology, there appears to be room for the development and evaluation of acceptable and effective technologically‐based treatments to suit children and adolescents with long‐term physical conditions.
Neal

Heart Rate Variability and Cognitive Function: A Systematic Review - 0 views

  • The results highlight the influence of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) in cognitive functioning. However, the marked interest facing toward a specific domain, i.e., the executive functions, and the relatively small number of the studies on this topic do not allow understanding better this relationship. Despite these limits, HRV could be considered a promising early biomarker of cognitive impairment in populations without dementia or stroke. This index should be evaluated within a preventative perspective to minimize the risk of developing cognitive impairment.
Neal

Heart Rate Variability and Cognitive Function: A Systematic Review. - PubMed - NCBI - 0 views

  • The results highlight the influence of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) in cognitive functioning. However, the marked interest facing toward a specific domain, i.e., the executive functions, and the relatively small number of the studies on this topic do not allow understanding better this relationship. Despite these limits, HRV could be considered a promising early biomarker of cognitive impairment in populations without dementia or stroke. This index should be evaluated within a preventative perspective to minimize the risk of developing cognitive impairment.
Neal

Brain Training to Raise IQ - 0 views

shared by Neal on 17 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Our brain training solutions are grounded in published scientific papers from several laboratories around the world, and are proven to be effective in significantly enhancing learning, mathematical and verbal skills, educational aptitude, working memory, Performance IQ, verbal IQ, perceptual reasoning skills, visual processing skills, working memory and general intelligence in users of all ages and intelligence levels. Some published preliminary data also suggests that SMART can slow down the progress of cognitive decline due to age or forms of dementia.
Neal

A Relational Frame Skills Training Intervention to Increase General Intelligence and S... - 0 views

shared by Neal on 17 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Significant increases in verbal and numerical reasoning were recorded for almost every child. These findings corroborate the idea that relational skills may underlie many forms of general cognitive ability.
  • the evidence base is shifting in favor of the idea that intelligence is not a stable trait, with leading researchers in the field arguing that an increasing role can be assigned to the environment in determining intelligence levels (e.g., Nisbett et al., 2012). Evidence for this perspective comes from educational, cognitive, neuroscientific and, most recently, behavior-analytic sources (the focus of the current study).
  • A more recent behavioral approach to intellectual functioning is provided by Relational Frame Theory (RFT; Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001; Dymond & Roche, 2013) that attempts to codify a wide range of cognitive skills in terms of a smaller range of underlying, teachable skills
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  • relational skills
  • might be considered loosely as the functional counterpart of the more widely used concept of relational reasoning skills
  • Researchers have been fast to capitalize upon the obvious relevance of this and related phenomena to a wide range of cognitive skills, including language, reasoning, and problem solving
  • Indeed, it is a widely held view that derived relational responding and language processes are in fact synonymous
  • The relational frame approach to intelligence is somewhat commensurate with several mainstream cognitive approaches to understanding intellectual skills. The most obvious of these is the concept of relational reasoning or knowledge. Specifically, relational knowledge is thought to integrate heuristic and analytic cognition and to be important for symbolic processes. As it happens, the regions of the brain activated by relational reasoning are in the prefrontal cortex, which further corroborates the view that relational reasoning is central to many higher cognitive processes (see Halford et. al., 2010).
  • the development of framing appears to be correlated with the development of language, itself seen as a crucial aspect of intellectual development and ability
  • In addition, numerous empirical and conceptual research papers have presented evidence that the ability to derive relations is associated with, and possibly even underpins language ability (Moran, Stewart, McElwee & Ming, 2010, 2014; O’Connor, Rafferty, Barnes- Holmes & Barnes-Holmes, 2009).
Neal

Psychological Flexibility as a Fundamental Aspect of Health - 0 views

  • Psychological flexibility spans a wide range of human abilities to: recognize and adapt to various situational demands; shift mindsets or behavioral repertoires when these strategies compromise personal or social functioning; maintain balance among important life domains; and be aware, open, and committed to behaviors that are congruent with deeply held values.
  • Psychological Flexibility as a Fundamental Aspect of Health Achieving psychological health is one of the foremost goals of human existence.
  • We are not disputing that positive emotions are important (Fredrickson, 1998), strengths or positive traits are important (Peterson & Seligman, 2004), or that the satisfaction of basic needs for belonging, competence, and autonomy are important (Deci & Ryan, 2000). However, these static approaches fail to capture the dynamic, fluctuating, and contextually-specific behaviors that people deploy when navigating the challenges of daily life.
    • Neal
       
      positive emotions positive traits strengths
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  • Indeed, research on psychological flexibility has for the past five decades traveled by a multitude of different names, among them ego-resiliency (Block, 1961), executive control (Posner & Rothbart, 1998), response modulation (Patterson & Newman, 1993), and self-regulation (Carver & Scheier, 1998; Muraven & Baumeister, 2000)
    • Neal
       
      Psychological flexibiligy
  • Psychological flexibility actually refers to a number of dynamic processes that unfold over time. This could be reflected by how a person: (1) adapts to fluctuating situational demands, (2) reconfigures mental resources, (3) shifts perspective, and (4) balances competing desires, needs, and life domains.
  • one might question whether any regulatory strategy provides universal benefits, as opposed to contingent benefits that hinge on the situation and the values and goals that we import.
  • These pathological processes span cognitive rigidities such as rumination and worry (Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco, & Lyubomirsky, 2008), patterns of behavioral perseveration, as well as a relative inability to rebound following stressful events, and difficulties planning and working for distant goals.
  • As these skills flourish, people become more versatile and more adept at committing finite attention and energy to meaningful interests and values (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999)
  • At subjective, behavioral, and biological levels of analysis, researchers continue to find that psychopathology is relatively independent from positive experiences
  • Thus, rather than focusing on specific content (within a person), definitions of psychological flexibility have to incorporate repeated transactions between people and their environmental contexts.
  • The work on ego-resiliency is extensive. Briefly, an important prediction is that ego-resilience would be associated with greater progression through the stage of identity development from being young and impulsive to learning social rules and conforming and for the most mature, advanced stages such as being wise and self-determined (Loevinger, 1987)
  • Instead, consider the flexible application of different types of emotional expression as the situation warrants.
  • the ability to modulate behavior as required by the situation contributed to real-world adjustment over and above any particular regulatory strategy.
  • Interestingly, variability in appraisals and coping strategies was positively related to the effectiveness of handling stressors. More importantly, the 30% of people demonstrating coping flexibility were better adjusted on a daily basis and showed less anxiety and depressive symptoms over a 1-week period than people demonstrating more rigid adherence to particular coping strategies, regardless of whether they were problem- or emotion-focused, active- or passive-focused. These findings on the benefits of flexibility compared with any particular configuration of self-regulatory strategies have been replicated in subsequent experimental and prospective studies (e.g., Cheng, 2003; Cheng & Cheung, 2005).
  • By ego-resiliency, we meant…a dynamic ability to temporarily change from modal reaction or perceptual tendencies to reactions and percepts responsive to the immediately pressing situation and, more generally, to the inevitably fluctuating situational demands of life. In particular, the ego-resiliency construct entailed the ability to, within personal limits, situationally reduce behavioral control as well as to situationally increase behavioral control, to expand attention as well as to narrow attention, to regress in the service of the ego as well as to progress in the service of the ego…The relatively unresilient or vulnerable individual displayed little adaptive flexibility, was disquieted by the new and altered, was perseverative or diffuse in responding to the changed or strange, was made anxious before competing demands, and had difficulty in recouping from the traumatic.
  • Rumination involves stereotypical and perseverative thinking about the reasons for and meaning of one’s own sad, dysphoric affect. Not only is a ruminative response style inflexible in that it involves habitual application of circular, looping thoughts, it also represents a passive, inactive mode that displaces more active engagement with the environment; engagement that could potentially relieve depressed mood.
  • For adolescents at age 14 and adults at age 23, ego-resilience was strongly associated with higher stages of identity development.
  • Upon reaching more mature stages of identity development, young adults are visibly more flexible in multiple contexts compared with less mature peers.
  • Besides the development of maturity and wisdom, the most characteristic features of ego-resilient children and adolescents (as rated by teachers, parents, and independent observers) include: vitality, curious and exploratory, self-reliant and confident, creative, an abundance of meaningful experiences, abilities to effectively master challenges, and quick recovery following stressful events (Gjerde, Block, & Block, 1986; Klohnen, 1996).
  • Equally useful to understanding the psychologically flexible person are the least representative features of ego-resilient youth: rigid repetitive strategies to handle stress, socially inappropriate emotional expressiveness, and discomfort in unpredictable and challenging environments.
  • Although causality cannot be determined, flexibility appears to move people from extrinsic motivated actions toward self-determination and the related health benefits
  • In the ACT model, flexibility is about being aware of thoughts and feelings that unfold in the present moment without needless defense, and depending on what the situation affords, persisting or changing behavior to pursue central interests and goals.
  • psychological flexibility was on average correlated .42 with outcomes ranging from job performance and satisfaction over a 1-year interval, daily activity engagement in pain patients, and mental health (Hayes, Luoma, Bond, Masuda, & Lillis, 2006)
  • Being more open and accepting of emotional experiences, being willing to engage in difficult activities to persist in the direction of important values, allows a person to pursue a rich, meaningful life right away.
  • Emotional preferences should hinge on the goals people are inclined to pursue. We have not given due consideration to the task of identifying which emotions are functional and at what levels of intensity and type of expressiveness. Sometimes negative, unpleasant emotions can be more useful than positive emotions. Taking advantage of this knowledge, teaching people this knowledge, is to explicitly address psychological flexibility.
  • Another perspective on the health benefits of psychological flexibility arrives from work on the ability to switch one’s focus from one life domain to another, one time perspective to another, and ensure that various important elements of a person’s identity are being satisfied in a harmonious manner.
  • If these examples suggest anything, it is that greater satisfaction and meaning in life can be captured by shifting temporal perspectives when the situation requires a particular mode of being (Boniwell & Zimbardo, 2004).
  • Similarly, recent daily-diary and prospective studies show that when time is allocated effectively in important life domains (e.g., work, school, leisure, relationships) to minimize discrepancy between a person’s actual day-to-day activities and their ideal, greater well-being is experienced. This includes life satisfaction, frequent positive emotions, infrequent negative emotions, and the ability to satisfy needs involving belonging, competence, and autonomy (Sheldon, Cummins, & Khamble, in press)
  • As we will highlight below, a signal feature of many disorders is that a person’s fluid transactions with the environment break down and responses become stereotyped and invariable.
  • Ironically, by being flexible and living in service of our deepest values instead of being narrowly focused on achieving happiness, we end up experiencing more frequent joy and meaning in life and less distress; we end up with greater vitality and degrees of freedom for how to live each moment (Hayes et al., 1999, 2004).
  • Recent extensions add important layers of complexity by suggesting that researchers and clinicians should look beyond the stereotypically negative content of attributions as a marker of depression risk to consider (1) the process of fixedly deploying the same attributions across different situations, a construct known as explanatory inflexibility (Moore & Fresco, 2007), and (2) the connections between an inflexible explanatory style and inflexible coping behavior (Fresco, William, & Nugent, 2006).
  • one commonality involves psychological inflexibility with respect to responses involving fear and anxiety.
  • Our premise, shared with the “acceptance-based approaches,” is that a flexible approach to one’s experiences will be associated with health and well-being, even when those experiences are sometimes painful.
  • There is growing evidence that the anxiety disorders are characterized by experiential avoidance for a variety of experiences, whether it is the experience of bodily arousal in panic disorder (Zvolensky & Eifert, 2000), the fear of strong emotional impulses in generalized anxiety disorder (McLaughlin, Mennin, & Farach, 2007), or concerns about openly expressing and exposing intense emotional experiences to other people (Kashdan & Steger, 2006). In turn, avoidance responses, as they become the default behavioral response, maintain the disorder over time.
  • Finally, as with depression, anxiety disorders are associated with inflexibility of physiological responding. Perhaps most notably, researchers have shown repeatedly that individuals with anxiety disorder exhibit reduced flexibility in autonomic responding (e.g., Thayer, Friedman, & Borkovec, 1996)
  • In fact, the pervasive and widespread nature of evidence for inflexibility in so many different response systems in so many different mental disorders is potentially overwhelming. Can these problems be reduced to a smaller core set? If so, what are the most important forms of inflexibility?
  • For example, individuals with higher resting CVC perform better than low CVC individuals on experimental tasks that require executive function. High CVC is associated with good performance on the Stroop task, which requires people to overcome attentional interference, as well as good performance on the n-back task (Johnsen et al., 2003; Hansen, Johnsen, & Thayer, 2003), which is a working memory task that requires people to monitor a continuous sequence of stimuli and remember which stimuli were presented n trials ago.
  • Relative to participants who did not maintain the exercise routine, those who maintained the exercise regimen had higher resting CVC and better functioning on an executive functioning task
  • The Building Blocks of Psychological Flexibility
  • Now that we have demonstrated the benefits of psychological flexibility and the costs of inflexibility, we consider three critical factors that influence the likelihood of being psychologically flexible and gaining access to its benefits:
  • Acceptance and awareness processes, coupled by a curious and receptive attitude toward negative or potentially negative experiences appear to be a precursor to psychological flexibility
  • prioritize and integrate cognitive capacities.
  • Essentially, executive functioning provides critical neuropsychological support for self-regulation
  • In fact, as discussed below, it is hard to imagine psychological flexibility without at least adequate performance in this domain.
  • When someone is described as being psychologically flexible, they are more apt to be versatile, using top-down strategies. That is, they show an awareness of what a situation requires and an ability to organize and prioritize strategies that “fit” the situation rather than relying on dominant, default strategies (Fleeson, 2001).
  • Another related, essential cognitive function is the ability to tolerate distress and develop an open, receptive attitude toward emotions, thoughts, and sensations.
  • executive functioning, default mental states, and personality configurations
  • When a person is unable to accept frustration and unwanted negative experiences, attentional capacity and decision-making capabilities are narrowed.
  • Instead of flexibly responding to a situation in an active manner, a person preoccupied with avoiding experiences is psychologically unavailable to adapt to the cues afforded by an existing situation.
  • This is because negative emotions and obstacles are an inevitable part of being a human that is constantly learning and growing, going through developmental changes in identity and social roles across the lifespan, experiencing daily hassles and stressors, and striving to organize a life built around meaningful goals and values (
  • Other social neuroscience studies provide additional support for the notion that acceptance of and openness to experience, and related emotion regulation processes are bound to executive functioning
  • Finally, executive functioning also typically includes working memory and recall, information processing speed, and the ability to inhibit behavior. These, too, are relevant to psychological flexibility, for similar reasons.
  • A weak danger cue in the environment may be prepotent, shutting down executive control, leading a person to conflate their anxious feelings as evidence of the dangerous potential that was never actualized. In the end, this person will be more worried and avoidant in similar, future situations, constricting their life space by tiny portions; a precedent that interferes with flexibility and the pursuit of a pleasurable, engaging, and meaningful life.
  • Taken together, robust executive functioning is critical for modulating responses to suit the circumstances and achieving desired outcomes—whether it is extracting rewards, reducing behavioral control, or some other situationally-bound strategy.
  • Social situations impose even greater demands upon executive functioning because of the need to simultaneously represent the desired outcomes of both the self and the other parties, without compromising either one
  • If human beings lacked predictive ability and were required to be in conscious control of how to interpret and respond to each gesture in each interaction, social interactions would slow to a crawl, relationships would have to be continually renewed, and it is hard to imagine how social groups and societies would ever form.
  • in enhancing psychological flexibility
  • To be adept at forming and maintaining significant, meaningful social relationships, there is utility in recognizing the limitations of our biased social judgments.
  • end our search for new and potentially useful information about each situation being different (even slightly) from any other (Kashdan, 2009). Although this can be energy consuming, this act prevents misjudgments of people and situations, and increases engagement, creativity, and the type of mindful, compassionate style of communication that is attractive and desirable to other people.
  • The problem is that habitual thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and goals are easily activated automatically, pulling us toward common well-worn directions as opposed to being sensitive to the unique hedonic or utilitarian value of acting differently (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000; Foa & Kozak, 1986). Essentially, conscious free will and flexible responding is subtly reduced by habits.
  • Unfortunately, the default mindset of most adults is a relatively inactive state where the past unduly influences the presen
  • Regardless of origin, there is evidence that humans commonly fail to detect novel distinctions and opportunities in the immediate environment and this can erode psychological flexibility.
  • Relatively few people can marshal the psychological flexibility to override default mental state in demanding visual tasks.
  • There is other evidence that experts often attempt to adapt old templates to new situations because of inflated confidence in their abilities to the neglect of contextual information.
  • Taken together, this line of research suggests that people are relatively insensitive to context and perspective in the present when there is the potential to rely on prior knowledge and experience.
  •  
    "The Relationship Between Heart Rate Variability, Psychological Flexibility, and Pain in Neurofibromatosis Type 1"
Neal

Relational-frame-theory-and-executive-function-A-behavioral-approach.pdf - 0 views

shared by Neal on 17 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • there is a set of activities that most or all researchers refer to under the rubric of executive function. That set is both fuzzy and broad but does have recognizable outlines. Itincludes "self-regulation, set-maintenance, selective inhibition of verbal and nonverbal responding, cognitive flexibility, planning, prioritizing, and organizing time and space, and output-efficiency" (
  • Executive function involves selecting and later monitoring and revising behavioral strategies, based on task analyses, planning, and reflectivity in decision making
  • Although the tasks vary widely, most of these tests involve an unusual circumstance in which subjects are required to perform actions that conflict systematically with immediate and well-established sources of behavioral regulation.
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  • Although the tasks vary widely, most of these tests involve an unusual circumstance in which subjects are required to perform actions that conflict systematically with immediate and well-established sources of behavioral regulation.
  • In summary, on the basis of the requirements of the kinds of tests used in this area, executive function is not invoked when responses are well-practiced, smooth, or automatic.
  • Given that well-practiced sources of behavioral control do not work, .subjects must either derive new rules that work or they must follow rules given by the experimenter and override alternative sources of behavioral control.
  • Given that well-practiced sources of behavioral control do not work, .subjects must either derive new rules that work or they must follow rules given by the experimenter and override alternative sources of behavioral control.
  • According to this way of looking at tests of executive function, what is at issue is the ability to derive, apply, or actually follow verbal rules when they are in
  • According to this way of looking at tests of executive function, what is at issue is the ability to derive, apply, or actually follow verbal rules when they are in
  • conflict with other verbal or nonverbal sources of behavior.
  • conflict with other verbal or nonverbal sources of behavior.
  • he flexibility and effectiveness of verbal regulation,
  • as distinct from the adequacy of the existing set of verbal relations (i.e., the verbal "knowledge base") per se.
  • verbal behavior is viewed as the major substantive process in complex human behavior.
  • Rules appear to be one way that humans reduce the tendency to respond automatically to immediate contingencies. These findings ultimately led behavior analysts to investigate the role of verbal rules in the differences found between humans and nonhumans.
  • There are three derived relations said to be characteristic of stimulus equivalence (Sidman & Tailby, 1982): reflexivity (e.g., Al = AI); 2) symmetry (e.g., if Al pick Bl is trained, then Bl pick Al is derived); and 3) transitivity (e.g., if Al pick Bl, and Bl pick Cl are trained, then given Al pick Cl is derived and vice versa). Stimulus equivalence has been shown with a wide variety of human subjects, using a wide variety of stimulus materials
  • Why would such a general behavioral class form? Much as with the behavioral account of generalized imitation (Baer, Peterson, & Sherman, 1967; Gewirtz & Stengle, 1968), we need only suppose that training with many, many exemplars of a class can lead to formation of the class.
  • Relational frame theory suggests that an inherent component of verbal behavior, whether from the point of view of the speaker or the listener, is the learned derivation of stimulus relations based on contextual cues to do so, and not merely on the formal properties of the related events
  • Relational frames have three defining properties.
  • Following arule requires two additional events: the transformation of stimulus functions in terms of the underlying network of stimulus relations, and contingencies that support activity with regard to these transformed functions. A failure in either process can mean a failure in verbal regulation.
  • Several rules may be reflectively considered. The person may "decide" what to do. In this case, several rules that are available by virtue of their relation to verbal categories in the environment are examined by applying an if-then relational frame to them.
  • Rule following is more likely if the consequences are psychologically present, because having those functions verbally present is a motivative augmental (Hayes & Ju, 1993).
  • rule flexibility should increase when the person has ready alternatives to an existing rule.
  • The rule should be tied to clear and immediately measurable outcomes and be sufficiently specific that the rule follower can know when it is not working.
  • rules that emphasize strategies, rather than specific topographies of behavior, are likely to be followed more flexibly.
  • Our line of thinking also suggests that pliance usually helps establish tracking, which helps establish augmenting.
  • According to our way of looking at executive function, what is at issue is the ability to derive, apply, or actually follow verbal rules in conflict with other verbal or nonverbal behavior.
  • To say it another way, there has been a tendency to stay "in the head" and to de-emphasize the direct behavioral effects of verbal abilities. Executive function challenges that tendency, because it is all about the connection between human verbal abilities and actual behavioral regulation.
  • Whether or not the relational frame approach turns out to be useful, behavioral psychologists are used to thinking about events functionally and, as a result, have something important to contribute to the development of our understanding of this area.
Neal

A Brief Overview of the Research Behind Revibe - 0 views

  • Results for Male middle school students Attention span
  • Similar to the male elementary group, male middle school students started with a baseline Attention Span of 8 minutes. After wearing Revibe for one week, this group saw an impressive jump to an average Attention Span of 12 minutes (50% improvement over baseline). At the three week mark this group saw another increase to an Attention Span of 14 minutes (75% gain over baseline).
Neal

Adaptive Capacity Model | Diigo - 0 views

    • Neal
       
      ombining aerobic exercise and cognitive challenges across the lifespan leadstothe maintenance of brain structure and associated function during aging.
Neal

Short‐term Sahaja Yoga meditation training modulates brain structure and spon... - 0 views

  • While cross‐sectional studies have shown neural changes in long‐term meditators, they might be confounded by self‐selection and potential baseline differences between meditators and non meditators. Prospective longitudinal studies of the effects of meditation in naïve subjects are more conclusive with respect to causal inferences, but related evidence is so far limited.
  • Compared with 30 control subjects, the participants to meditation training showed increased gray matter density and changes in the coherence of intrinsic brain activity in two adjacent regions of the right inferior frontal gyrus encompassing the anterior component of the executive control network. Both these measures correlated with self‐reported well‐being scores in the meditation group.
  • The significant impact of a brief meditation training on brain regions associated with attention, self‐control, and self‐awareness may reflect the engagement of cognitive control skills in searching for a state of mental silence, a distinctive feature of Sahaja Yoga meditation. The manifold implications of these findings involve both managerial and rehabilitative settings concerned with well‐being and emotional state in normal and pathological conditions.
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  • Subjects participating in the meditation intervention displayed a significant improvement in self‐perceived general well‐being after training. In addition, compared with control subjects they also showed a significant change in brain structure and intrinsic activity in inferior fronto‐insular regions associated with executive control, and previously highlighted by cross‐sectional studies on the neural effects of long‐term SY meditation (Hernandez et al., 2015).
  • A significant time‐by‐group interaction on spectral power highlighted, in meditators vs controls, a training‐related remodeling of the contribution of slow frequencies in the anterior component of the fronto‐parietal “executive control” network.
  • involved in goal‐directed behavior
  • This set of regions, which is commonly recruited by tasks requiring controlled information processing (Dosenbach et al., 2007), has been recently proposed as a “superordinate” cognitive control network, recruited across different executive domains including flexibility, working memory, initiation, and inhibition (Niendam et al., 2012).
  • This hypothesis fits with neuroimaging evidence on other types of short‐term meditation interventions, sharing with the SY meditation an open monitoring approach aiming to develop the capacity for mindfulness (i.e., awareness of present‐moment experiences with a compassionate, non judgmental, stance). Across different studies, such interventions resulted in stronger intensity of activation (Holzel et al., 2011) and efficiency (Xue, Tang, & Posner, 2011) in functional networks involving the dACC, possibly reflecting higher cognitive control and improved suppression of distracting events
  • our results suggest a potential broad impact of meditative practice on neural organization, in turn reflecting on other outcomes related to health and well‐being (Muehsam et al., 2017).
  • General well‐being
  • Fatigue
  • Dissatisfaction
  • The SY meditation training consisted of four one‐hour sessions per week over 4 consecutive weeks, that is, a total of 16 hr.
  • No other commitments, including home practice, were required.
Neal

(PDF) Psychology of Individual Differences: Intelligence and Personality in Action. Cha... - 0 views

  • Psychology of Individual Differences: Intelligence and Personality in Action. Chapter 2: The Nature of Intelligence
  • This chapter showsthat intelligence, defined as “a very general mental capability that involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience” (Gottfredson, 1997) is at the centerof the cosmos composed by a range of psychological factors(Figure 1).Figure 1. The Psychological Cosmos.
  • Nevertheless, finding the most likely‘structure’ of human personality (including intelligence) based on behavioural differencesmeasured by standardized tests,is just the first stepof a long and fascinating voyage.The identified elements,or factors,that define the ‘structure’ of human personality follow a given ‘dynamic’ and they may be rooted in human‘biology’.
Neal

The Athletic Dimension of eSports | NeuroTracker - 0 views

  • He suggests eSports athlete should be following diets similar to those in professional sports, as well as performing regular physical training to support better motor-skills. His thought is that this may extend career time by 5 years or more. “My advice is that gaming is more than just playing video games. It is a complex interaction of many different, mostly cognitive, skills. To improve these skills and guarantee sustainable results, a holistic approach is needed.” In fact now some of the biggest eSports teams are turning to sports science to raise their game, including using NeuroTracker to sharpen their minds. This means that in coming years we’re likely to see cyber athletes pushing the boundaries of human performance.
Neal

Your Guide to NeuroTracker Scores | NeuroTracker - 0 views

  • A landmark NeuroTracker study published Nature Scientific Reports showed that elite athletes have brains with superior capacities for learning, which could be a critical factor as to why they can achieve such high levels of performance on the sports field. Professor Faubert, the inventor of NeuroTracker explained the meaning of this for world-class athletes, “The fact that they are there…is because they are more plastic.  I think that’s one of the criteria.  You would think that this brain is optimal at the highest competitive level, that it’s reached its maximum potential.  But maybe they are there because they can acquire new potential so much more rapidly and so more efficiently.” Neuroplasticity is also known to be a key factor in brain health, with reduced plasticity being a related factor for increased risks of cognitive conditions such as dementia in older populations.
  • The NeuroTracker score itself is established in the neuroscience literature as a high-level measure of attentional capacity.  This means that the higher your score is, the better your attention.  It’s a high-level measure because performing NeuroTracker requires using and integrating several different types of attention.
  • Distributed or Divided Attention – similar to multi-tasking, tracking several targets at the same time requires allocating attentional resources separately to each individual target.
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  • Selective Attention – because there are many decoys vying for your attention, selective attention is required to focus attention away from the ‘distractors’ and keep it fixed on the real targets.
  • Sustained Attention – mental focus must be distributed continuously across time, a split second lapse and the targets will be lost.
  • Attention Stamina – concentration must be maintained across twenty mini-tests per session, and across different sessions when performing them back-to-back.
  • NeuroTracker speed thresholds have been shown through many research studies to correlate with other high-level cognitive functions, including executive functions, working memory and processing speed.  They also correlate with many areas of human performance, for instance, one study showed that score predicted on-court performance statistics of NBA players across a season.
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