While the rest of the body usually stops growing by the time we are about twenty years old, the mind seems to run on a very different time table. New research suggests that the human brain keeps on developing well into middle age.

Science is discovering that in some ways, the mind is much more like a muscle than they ever imagined. More specifically, the brain’s structure continues to change over time. These findings suggest that it may be possible to essentially build up the brain throughout much of adulthood.

What they found

Brain volume is commonly believed to stop expanding after age 20. But in MRI brain scans of 70 healthy men between the ages of 19 and 76, researchers found that the brain’s white matter continued to increase until the mid to late 40s.

They found that the brain kept growing in the frontal and temporal lobes. The frontal lobes are involved in motor function, problem solving, spontaneity, memory, language, initiation, judgment, impulse control, and social and sexual behavior. The temporal lobes have to do with emotional responses, hearing, memory, and speech.

This continued brain growth into middle-age is thought to be associated with better emotional development and wisdom.

What it means in practical terms

Knowing how the brain changes over time is important in understanding brain-related conditions ranging from schizophrenia to drug addiction to Alzheimer’s disease. If the mind keeps maturing in adulthood, that means drug use, poor nutrition or other assaults on the brain could arrest a person’s full development.

On the other hand, continuing to stimulate and challenge the mind throughout adulthood might promote its growth, just as exercise builds muscle.

In the future, the brain imaging used in this study may help monitor age-related changes in people’s brain volume and help signal deterioration before symptoms are apparent allowing time for corrective measures to be taken.

If you want to improve and more importantly save your brain, there may be nothing better that you can do than exercise. It shouldn’t surprise us that the brain, which is a physical organ, is directly impacted by the physical health of our bodies. There is a lot of truth in the adage “healthy body, healthy mind.” We tend to think of thoughts as something separate from our physical self, but they are not. Here are some of the benefits of exercising on the brain:

• Increases blood vessels and blood flow through the brain.
• Increases levels of oxygen in the blood.
• Speeds up the removal of waste products produced by your brain.
• Increases neurogenesis (new brain cells) in the hippocampus This area of the mind is critical to memory and learning.
• Synaptic plasticity is increased in the hippocampus.
• Spine density (used in synaptic connections) increase in the dentate gyrus (part of the hippocampus).
• Reduces stress and the effects of stress which is a potent brain killer.
• Improves sleep and sleep improves all kinds of mental functioning including memory and learning.
• Increases NGF (nerve growth factor)
• Increases the levels neurotransmitters in your mind.
• Increases the levels of hormones in your brain.
• Slows age related atrophy of some areas of the brain.

Nothing yet known will create growth of new brain cells that can become a cognitive reserve as you age better than exercise. No one really knows to what degree physical inactivity is related to decreased cognitive function as we age. But at this point they know enough to say that sitting is the new smoking. In fact, it is becoming widely accepted in scientific circles that the long term effects of a sedentary lifestyle are more damaging than those of smoking. It’s time to get up off the couch and run.

Most of the studies on the effects of exercise have been done with aerobic exercise, BUT some have been done with anaerobic exercise (weight lifting or sprinting). The results are that it too has these beneficial effects on the mind. Combining aerobic and anaerobic exercising produces maximum benefit.

There is a vast amount of research showing the many health benefits of vitamin D. New studies confirm that in addition to promoting a healthy brain, vitamin D absolutely critical for calcium absorption and maintenance. Osteoporosis, hypertension, cancer (especially colon), and autoimmune diseases have all been linked to low vitamin D levels.

In general the reports you see on deficiency usually range between 30% and 80% of the population. Since these are almost always conservative organizations and report on minimum rather than optimal levels, you can be sure the vast majority of the population is not getting the optimum amount of this nutrient and therefore are deficient.

There is strong and increasing evidence that high levels of vitamin D play a central role in the health of the aging brain. It’s unlikely that it helps old brains but not young brains, so take it even if you are a teenager. For optimal results the  dose seems to be somewhere between  4,000-6,000 IU of D3 every day.

If you don’t want to use the supplemental approach, then try to get at least 15-20 minutes of sunshine every day. Sunlight up-regulates the production of vitamin D in the skin and probably has tons of other benefits we don’t know about yet. With all the proven benefits of exposure to sunshine, I doubt it is as harmful as many people want us to believe.

The Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry reports:

A study of over 3,000 European men aged 40-79 found those with high vitamin D levels performed better on memory and information processing tests.

It follows research published in January which suggested that high levels of vitamin D can help stave off the mental decline that can affect people in old age.

Men with high vitamin D levels performed best, with those who had the lowest levels – 35 nmol/litre or under – registering poor scores.

Do you need any better reason to take a supplement and get some sunshine?

The brain does register subliminal images even if a  person is unaware they have seen them, UK researchers report. The research, in Current Biology, suggests subliminal advertising is probably effective.

The practice, which was first used in the 1950′s, has been banned in the UK, but is still permitted in the US. Using brain scans, a team from University College, London, showed people only registered the images if the brain had “spare capacity”.

“If there is ‘spare capacity’, in terms of attention, the brain will allocate that resource to subliminal activity” ~Dr Bahador Bahrami, UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience

Subliminal images may be contained in other information, which people are aware of receiving.

The researchers cite the example of the film Fight Club, where a character who works as a cinema projectionist inserts a single frame of pornography into the 24 frames of a film shown each second. In the movie, those watching were unaware of the split-second shot, but felt depressed or aggressive afterwards.

Invisible objects

Although it has long been thought that subliminal images can be detected without people being aware of them, and have been used in techniques such as subliminal advertising, this is the first time researchers have provided physiological evidence of the impact.

The seven participants in the study wore red-blue filter glasses that projected faint images of everyday objects, such as an iron, on to one eye and a strong flashing image on the other.

The strong flashing image meant the participants were not consciously aware of the faint images projected on to the other eye. At the same time, they were asked to carry out an easy task, such as picking out the letter T from a stream of letters, or a harder task of picking out a white N or a blue Z.

Using functional MRI brain scanning, the researchers found that during the easy task the brain registered the ‘invisible’ object although the participants were unaware they had seen it. This was highlighted by activity in a part of the brain called the primary visual cortex.

But during the harder task, which required more concentration, the fMRI scan did not pick up any relevant brain activity suggesting the participants had not registered the subliminal image.

Buying power?

Dr Bahador Bahrami, UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said: “What’s interesting here is that your brain does log things that you aren’t even aware of and can’t ever become aware of.

The brain is open to what’s around it. So if there is ‘spare capacity’, in terms of attention, the brain will allocate that resource to subliminal activity. These findings point to the sort of impact that subliminal advertising may have on the brain.

What this study doesn’t address is whether this would then influence you to go out and buy a product. Source: BBC News

Conclusion

Subliminal messages provide a method of quickly changing your thoughts and desires on the deepest possible level. They can help you boost your confidence, sculpt your body, and become fantastically wealthy.

They’re used by gurus such as Anthony Robbins, Tiger Woods and Darren Brown. They’ve been scientifically proven to work, over and over again. And the most effective subliminal messages are those delivered direct to the subconscious mind through video.

If you are interested in learning how you can use this breakthrough technology to make positive changes in your life visit Subliminal Videos That Will Change Your Life!

Do you have any experience with Subliminal Learning?
Do you believe that it works?
The lines are open!

Your non-conscious brain is perceiving, learning, and making decisions for you all the time. But because all of this takes place on a subconscious level, you are generally unaware of the process. It’s an amazing part of your mind and yet, for the most part it seems to operate quite independently.

By the way, your non-conscious brain (or mind) is the same thing as your subconscious mind. Neuroscientists prefer the term “non-conscious” because they feel that it does away with a lot of non-scientific baggage that is attached to the old term. For our purposes though, I will use the terms interchangeably.

Your non-conscious brain is parallel

While your thinking mind can be completely absorbed with a single thought, it’s quiet counterpart can easily be busy thinking five or more thoughts all at thee same time! The problems that we associated with multi-thought processing do not seem to exist on the subconscious level.

Your subconscious mind is big

The conscious part of your mind is a relative lightweight, accounting for only about 17 percent of total brain volume. Which means that the subconscious part of your mind is a heavyweight making up the other 83 percent.

Your subconscious mind is very fast

Impulses involved in the thinking process travel at about 120 mph. A virtual crawl compared to the subconscious impulses which travel at more than 100,000 mph. That is about 800 times faster!

Your subconscious mind is controlling

You may think that your conscious mind is in control, but in reality it only controls about 2-4 percent of your behavior and perception. On the other hand, your non-conscious mind controls 96-98 percent of your behavior and perception!

Your subconscious mind is extremely powerful

The part of your mind that you can readily access to process information operates at the rate of around 2,000 bits per second. It’s subconscious counterpart processes information at 400,000,000,000 bits per second.

WOW! My conscious brain is very intimidated and is needs to sulk for a while.

We assume that the brain is doing something while we’re asleep because we dream. But is dreaming all that is going on up there? Are dreams just random static coming out of our sleeping brains, or is our brain doing things behind our backs while we are asleep?

When we get tired, we sleep so we can shut down to rest and rebuild. It seems logical that the brain would follow a similar pattern. After all, don’t we get tired of thinking and want to turn the process off after a while? Sleeping sounds like the perfect way for our whole system, including our brain, to check out and take a break.

Not so much!

During sleep our brain is, in fact, extraordinarily active. As it turns out, much of that activity helps the brain to learn and remember. Sleeping is involved in the learning and memory process in several important ways. Let’s look at 3 of them.

Sleeping helps people recover forgotten skills

A study conducted by The University of Chicago concluded that sleep helps the mind learn complicated tasks. It also helps people recover knowledge they thought they had forgotten over the course of a day.

For example, in one study, after learning how to play a video game much of that skill was lost within 12 hours. Amazingly, after a night’s sleep those lost abilities were restored. Why does this happen? It’s a consolidation process that brain goes through while we are asleep.

Sleeping consolidates learning by restoring what was lost over the course of a day, and by protecting against further loss. These findings suggest that sleep has an important role in learning specialized skills, and in stabilizing and protecting memory. This consolidation process may also help with language skills like reading and writing, as well as eye-hand skills such as tennis. [read full report]

Sleeping selectively preserves emotional memories

A recent study offers new insights into the specific components of emotional memories. It suggests that sleep plays a key role in determining what we remember – and what we forget. Findings show that sleep helps the brain to selectively preserve and enhance certain aspects of a memory. Those with the greatest emotional value are enhanced, and simultaneously, those of lesser value are downgraded.

Emotional memories usually contain highly charged elements – for example, the car that sideswiped us on the ride home. These memories include some elements that are only vaguely related to the emotion. For example, the name of the street we were traveling on, or what store we had just passed. Evidently, the individual components of an emotional memory become ‘unbound’ during sleep. This enables the sleeping brain to selectively preserve only that information which it deems worthy of remembering. [read full report]

Sleep helps us remember the sequence of events

We may have vivid memories of past events, but how do we remember the order of events? Until recently, it has never been clear how the brain keeps track of the chronological sequence in such memories. New research has confirmed that long-term memories are formed while we are asleep. This is accomplished by the brain replaying the memories of our daily experiences during the night.

So sleep not only strengthens the content of a memory, but it also reestablishes the order in which those events took place. These findings show that it is the sleep associated consolidation of memories that helps establish our memory of events in chronological order. Something that we might not have been able to recall without this process. [read full report]

The importance of sleep

There are several different types of memory. There is declarative memory which includes retrievable, fact-based information. There is episodic memory which focuses on events from your life. Finally, there is procedural memory which allows us to remember how to do something. Researchers have designed ways to test each of them. What have they found?

In almost every case, no matter which type of memory was involved, one fact remained constant. After first learning the task, sleeping on it improves performance. It’s as if our brains squeeze in some extra practice time while we are asleep.

Why is all this important? Some sleep researchers believe that for every two hours we spend awake, the brain needs an hour of sleep. This sleep time is used to figure out what all these experiences mean. Clearly, sleeping plays a crucial role in helping us to grasp the meaning our own lives.

What good is knowledge that can’t be remembered?

We live in the age of information overload. There is more information in one Sunday edition of a big city newspaper than the average person took in during their entire life 200 years ago. On top of that, people are trying to get by on much less sleep. This is a dangerous combination that could lead to accelerated loss of memory as we get older.

Are you having trouble making sense out of your life? Do you find yourself forgetting things more often? Is it taking longer to learn new skills than it used to? Why not sleep on it and see what happens.

If you have trouble sleeping and would like to discover how to end insomnia without resorting to sleeping pills, even if you’ve struggled with sleep problems for years, I have a free 41 page special report to help you.

In his book, Brain Wave Vibration: Getting Back into the Rhythm of a Happy, Healthy Life, Ilchi Lee introduces a simple training technique that has already transformed thousands of lives.

Brain Wave Vibration is a powerful, easy-to-follow method that helps people bring their bodies and minds back into balance for total health, happiness, and peace. The simplest form of practice merely requires moving your body to your own internal rhythms.

llchi Lee serves as president of the Korea Institute of Brain Science and the International Brain Education Association. He lives in Sedona, AZ, but spends much of his time traveling around the world to share his philosophies and methods.

For more information about his book visit Brain Wave Vibration

The spice Turmeric contains the ingredient curcumin that has shown powerful properties important to the aging brain.  In addition it recently has been shown to have fantastic potential in cancer prevention. Turmeric is an ingredient in curry powder and that may explain why seniors in India have 1/10 the rate of Alzheimer’s disease as seniors in the U.S. It is safe and well tolerated in large amounts so you should definitely add curry or turmeric to your diet and curcumin to your supplement program.

Curcumin has powerful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties that help prevent amyloid-beta formation.  Amyloid-beta is the main component of the plaques in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.  It actually destroys the plaques in high doses.

Take 900 mg of curcumin a day with meals and use the spice turmeric in your diet.  You will protect your brain against neurodegenerative disease and your body against cancer.  When I learned all this, I immediately added 900 mg of curcumin to my regime.  I take a 300 mg capsule with each meal.