Tetris against PTSD

According to Lalitha Iyadurai and Ella James of Oxford University playing Tetris may help against PTSD. Their experiment involved having people see a disturbing film and then either having them play Tetris or do nothing inside the 6-hour period in which the brain is believed to permanently store the memories. People who played the game had less flashbacks. This is at some distance from having soldiers play games after a battle or in therapy (where it might work while storing the reprocessed memory). But it could work. Interesting is also the movie Let there be light from 1946 that documents treatment of WW II veterans for PTSD. There is no copyright on the movie.

Psychedelic drugs for the dying?

An article in the NY Times ("How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death") tells about researchers who give people who are expected to die within a short time and are afraid of dying psychedelics like MDMA (Ecstacy) and psilocybin with good results. However, it should be noticed that they have extensive protocols like having the people bring special attributes like photos of relatives. The widespread recreational use of such drugs usually doesn't have much beneficial effect.

Training to become more intelligent

The NY Times has an article ("Can You Make Yourself Smarter?") about training to become more intelligent. For a long time it was thought that it was impossible to become more intelligent with training. Training was perceived to work only on a very narrow field. Training to do math won't make you a better reader, for example. But now there seems considerable evidence that training the working memory (the amount of things you can keep "online" together in your head) may improve your fluid intelligence (capacity for problem solving). It started in 2002 in Sweden: The study, by a Swedish neuroscientist named Torkel Klingberg, involved just 14 children, all with A.D.H.D. Half participated in computerized tasks designed to strengthen their working memory, while the other half played less challenging computer games. After just five weeks, Klingberg found that those who played the working-memory games fidgeted less and moved about less. More remarkable, they also scored higher on one of the single best measures of fluid intelligence, the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. Improvement in working memory, in other words, transferred to improvement on a task the children weren’t training for. This was picked up by two doctoral candidates at the university of Bern in Switzerland, Jaeggi and Buschkuehl, who did some studies of their own on improving intelligence. They used a simple game, the N--back test for training and could show significant improvements on Raven's matrix test. Since then it has become a little hype. Some companies have jumped into the subject and offer commercial training. And researchers are looking whether improving other basic skills might work as well. The main drawback is that it takes a lot of effort of achieve these results. Training a half to one hour a day for many weeks can be rather boring. Some people find this really hard to keep up. And you need commitment: Only those children who improved substantially on the N-back training had gains in fluid intelligence.. So people are trying to make the training more attractive. “That’s the biggest challenge we have as researchers in this field,” Jaeggi told me, “to get people engaged and motivated to play our working-memory game and to really stick with it. Some people say it’s hard and really frustrating and really challenging and tiring.” In this context some related things may be of interest: - training with neurofeedback also takes many hours of training. - it is well known that physical training prevents decline of mental abilities in old people. - In another article ("How Exercise Could Lead to a Better Brain") the effect of so-called “enriched” environments — homes filled with toys and engaging, novel tasks — on the intelligence of lab mice was studied. It appears that only running a wheel had lasting effects. It looks like physical exercise leads to new neurons that are even more general than those of the working memory tasks. A rich environment does have effects on mice but differently: They explore more; they learn faster; they seek pleasure. Enrichment, in short, acts behaviorally like an antidepressant. - little children tend to be very good at the memory play. Later on they loose that. Might it be that we all have a lot of working memory when we are young and that we slowly loose it? - Recently there was an article about beneficial effects of playing games. It claimed that playing games increased spacial orientation and made women as good as men in that area.

Investment habits are to a considerable extent inherited

Nu.nl (a Dutch news site) discussed a study by Henrik Cronqvist en Stephan Siegel ‘Why Do Individuals Exhibit Investment Biases?’ of 15,000 twins, of whom 4600 monovular.

They looked at five common investment mistakes: lack of diversity, too much trading, too much risk avoidance ‘performance chasing’ (buying shares that did well in the past) and too much greed. The monovular twins showed more similarity, even when they had been raised separately. For the preference for well known names and trade marks they found a similar effect.

Extraversion and leadership

Here is an article about extraversion and leadership ("Stop Stealing the Spotlight: The perils of extraverted leadership").

According to the article the "real core" of extraversion is the tendency to enjoy and attract social attention. They take initiative, bring the vision, assertiveness, energy, and networks necessary to give employees direction.

But what happens when an extravert comes in a leadership position and he must lead modern pro-active employees? They will more often than introverted leaders ignore their suggestions or take credit for their ideas.

So the article - that is based on some scientific experiments - recommends extraverted leaders for passive employees and more introverted leaders for pro-active employees.

Restored lives

The New York Times has a series "Restored Lives" about people who have overcome psychiatric problems.

- In the first article ("Expert on Mental Illness Reveals Her Own Fight") the story of Linehan - designer of a therapy for borderline disorder - is told. In her early 20s she had a lot of borderline problems herself.

- The second article ("Learning to Cope With a Mind’s Taunting Voices") tells about Joe Holt, a computer consultant and entrepreneur who has a diagnosis of schizophrenia. His main problem was sometimes hearing people insult him. For a long time he took this for real - what caused many broken friendships and lost jobs. Now he is aware of the danger and tries to check whether what he hears is real.

- The third article ("A High-Profile Executive Job as Defense Against Mental Ills") tells about Keris Myrick, who has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. She did considerable effort to find a job that fit her and she finds that a busy job helps against hearing voices. In her view her mind starts producing voices and illusions when it is bored.

- As a side-article there is "Memoir About Schizophrenia Spurs Others to Come Forward". It tells about "The Center Cannot Hold.", a book written by Elyn R. Saks, a professor of law at the University of Southern California about her struggle with schizophrenia.

- the fourth article is "Finding purpose after living with delusion". It tells about a man who saw that his hallucinations did have a real core. In his case his messianic visions could be implemented by doing some good. He has a website about his vision of psychosis: "A blueprint for schizophrenia".

Teaching young children works - but differently

Th education of very young children like with Head Start is often criticized because when tested later the effects become smaller and smaller. So learning to read at 4 may help you in the first classes of primary school but when you are at high school your grades will not be much different from if you hadn't followed that program.

However, according to this article ("Occupy the classroom") there are other effects that are ore lasting: those children repeat less grades, are less likely to be diagnosed with a learning disability, or to suffer the kind of poor health associated with poverty. They are also more likely to graduate from high school and attend college.

Probably the attention of adults and learning to focus and learn are more important than what you actually learn at this young age. So mom teaching you to cook or dad teaching you to fish or track the traces of animals might be just as effective.