Researchers at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute found Gingko Biloba triggers significant improvement in verbal memory in subjects with age-associated memory impairment compared to placebo.

Many earlier studies with Ginkgo Biloba have produced conflicting results. According to this article, however, most previous studies involving Gingko lasted less than 3 months. The current study is felt to be rather unique because of its longer duration (6 months). The UCLA is also notable in that it tracked brain changes via PET scans.

Unfortunately, however, the study size was quite small (10 patients).
The dose utilized was 120mg of Ginkgo twice a day.

You may be interested in an earlier post which describes how Ginkgo Biloba was found to be as effective as one of the regular prescription drugs (Aricept) used to treat Alzheimer’s disease.

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Today I received an email from someone who runs a memory and learning improvement internet business. It was the kind of email that gets blasted to thousands of inboxes simultaneously. Although I’ve never purchased any of their products, I always got the impression it was fairly reputable.

Advertised, however, was a new memory improvement program by a Los Angeles, CA doctor who has “perfected the best, easy to use techniques…” that promises to show you how to develop a “photographic memory”.Suspect most people know this already, but just for the record:

You can not develop a “photographic memory”. No matter how hard you try. No matter what techniques you’re taught, you can’t develop anything close to a “photographic memory”.

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Wow, I’m still having a hard time wrapping my mind around this one…

A real brain buster created by Marcel Debreuil:

Think you can solve this? It looks simple but the more you look the trickier it gets.

The idea is there are three panels - by switching the top two around you get two pictures. The catch is that although the figures line up, there are a different number of people in each of the two resulting pictures. Below is one I made 15 years ago (man!). The first picture has 13 people, the second only 12. For an extra twist, one person has turned into a fresh steamy dog turd. So the question then is, Who turned to doggie doo?

“These are the 3 pieces of the puzzle- the top 2 can switch around to make the images below”

“Thirteen people, you can count them”

“Twelve people, but the dog was busy. So who turned to doggie doo?”

Will post the answer in the comments section in 1-2 days;

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Just read an article on WebMD that discusses new research out of the University of Florida.

The study, published in The Journal of Pediatrics, reveals that children who are obese by age 4 are more likely to have lower IQ scores.

Specifically, children that weigh 150% more than their ideal weight had IQ scores that were 25-30 points lower.

While many would tend to think that the morbid obesity caused the brain power deficit; to me it seems just as plausible that a pre-existing disorder of the brain predisposes towards obesity and a lower IQ test score.

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My wife’s friend just sent this over via email:

cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty  uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig  to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy,

it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the  ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat  ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll  raed it wouthit a porbelm.

Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey  lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas  tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs psas it on  !!

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Instead of ‘kicking the dog’, try this for some stress relief.

Interactive Buddy v.1.02  can be found at www.deviantart.com

Don’t forget about the extras!

• check out the ‘items’: don’t miss the big fist
• ‘God Powers’
• ‘objects’ : watch him run from grenades
• ‘modes’
• try buying some baseballs, then apply the strong gravity vortex to the Napolean Dynamite skin

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Compared to those who drank less than one glass of fruit or vegetable juice per week, those who drank three or more were 76% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Qi Dai and colleagues out of Vanderbilt School of Medicine reported these results in the September issue of The American Journal of Medicine.

You can read the full article here.

Some other very important points raised from the article include:

• Recent studies indicate that high intake of antioxidant vitamins (vitamins C, E and beta-carotene) does not appear to provide significant protection against Alzheimer’s disease.
• Instead, researchers now believe it’s the conglomerate of phytochemicals in a fruit or vegetable that provides the real benefit.
• “We thought that the underlying component may not be vitamins, that there was maybe something else,” Dai said.
• The skins of fruits and vegetables are particularly rich in these phytochemicals. Think of the tough purple skin of a grape as opposed to the pale, fleshy sweet interior.
• “Recent studies have shown that polyphenols (like resveratrol in wine) extend maximum lifespan by 59 percent and delay age-dependent decay of cognitive performance in animal models.” (Wow, you may want to read that one again)

Several related posts you may enjoy reading include a ranking of fruit antioxidants for brain protection, as well as a post describing a memory boosting phytochemical in strawberries, and finally how grape juice can reverse brain aging.

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This puzzle comes courtesy of www.rinkworks.com:

If you put a coin in an empty bottle and insert a cork into the neck of the bottle, how could you remove the coin without taking the cork out or breaking the bottle?

will post the answer in the ‘comments’  below in a day or 2

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Can you make it to the end? I bet most will have trouble doing it on the 1st try.

The Idiot test was created by Ryan Curtis, and is available from www.addictinggames.com

Click here to play

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The prevalence of autism amongst our kids is alarmingly high. Many clearly consider it to be an epidemic. Personally, I know of many doctors and nurses whose children have it.

I have not gone through the evidence and research myself, but apparently there are many very well qualified experts who insist a large number of cases are due to the negligence of drug companies and the FDA in allowing too much thiomerosal in childhood vaccines.

For those who want to read more, a book by David Kirby may be of interest. It made the New York Times best-seller list and received the Investigative Reporters and Editors 2005 Award for outstanding investigative reporting in a book.

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Sometimes I get the impression the brain is like an iceberg. The small part that pokes up above the water is our conscious awareness, as well as the mental capacities we can control at will.

Beneath this, however, lurks a huge subconscious processing station whose activities we’re entirely oblivious of.

What does this bottom chunk of the iceberg do? Here’s one neat example published in the July issue of Psychological Science.

The research basically indicates that within a tenth of a second, without the top portion of the iceberg have any say in the matter, the bottom portion of the iceberg quickly processes all the nuances of facial features to determine whether or not a person is 1) attractive and 2) trustworthy.

Alex Todorov, author of the study out of Princeton University, notes:

We decide very quickly whether a person possesses many of the traits we feel are important, such as likeability and competence, even though we have not exchanged a single word with them. It appears that we are hard-wired to draw these inferences in a fast, unreflective way

To read the full article from physorg.com, click here.

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According to this article, the number of patients with awareness under surgery in is about 1-2 in 1000. To me, this number seems unacceptably high. According to some sources, however, just 10 years ago the number was 1-2 in 100!

This incredibly unfortunate event happens when the anesthesiologist does not give enough sedation to make you completely unconscious. And as the surgeon’s scalpel starts to cut your innards apart, you can’t fuss or say anything, because part of the general anesthesia process involves paralyzing you from head to toe.

I’m honestly shocked at how often “awareness during surgery” happens, and find it outrageous that anesthesiologists haven’t done something to fix this serious problem. Especially since levels of awareness can be assessed fairly easily with EEG technology.

Several companies have actually recently introduced such devices, but the US News article suggests only about 40% of operating rooms use them.

Personally, I would never go under general anesthesia without one being on hand.

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Julian Beever does some incredible things with pavement art:

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This puzzle comes courtesy of www.brainboggled.com.

There is a common English word that is nine letters long. Each time you remove a letter from it, it still remains an English word - from nine letters right down to a single letter. What is the original word, and what are the words that it becomes after removing one letter at a time?

(I wonder if there may be more than 1 solution…)

will post the answer in a day or two in the ‘comments’ section below…

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In an earlier post, I mentioned how a large amount of new research shows that chronic stress plays a major role in destroying the memory engine (hippocampus) of your brain.

Additionally, I’ve also pointed out how many studies now implicate stress as playing a major role in:

• Diabetes
• Atherosclerosis (which leads to heart attacks and strokes)
• Cancer

Now new studies suggest it actually causes premature aging of your immune system. From a recent article in Forbes:

Research suggests that stress can shorten the chunks of DNA at the tips of chromosomes in cells, making it harder for them to work properly, according to the Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the University of California at San Francisco. The bits of DNA “are like the plastic caps on the ends of our shoelaces. They prevent the ends from fraying,” she said.

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