Feeling dopey? Refresh your "circadian eye" with a burst of orange light.

Feeling dopey? (Or sneezy, grumpy, etc.) Have no idea what a “circadian eye” is? Neither did it, but, yes, I am a sucker for brain studies – especially ones that might help my traumatized brain improve. 

So I read about this study posted on the “New Scientist.” website: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25195-a-burst-of-orange-light-wakes-up-our-circadian-eye.html#.Ux7jYT9_vis?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=SOC&utm_campaign=twitter&cmpid=SOC|NSNS|2012-GLOBAL-twitter

Writer Kat Arney reported about this study saying: “Light is a powerful wake-up call, enhancing alertness and activity. Its effect is controlled by a group of photoreceptor cells in the eyeball that make the light-sensing pigment melanopsin. These cells, which work separately to the rods and cones needed for vision, are thought to help reset animals' body clocks - or circadian rhythms. Studies with people who are blind suggest this also happens in humans, although the evidence isn't conclusive.

To find out how melanopsin wakes up the brain, Gilles Vandewalle at the University of Liege, Belgium, and his team gave 16 people a 10-minute blast of blue or orange light while they performed a memory test in an fMRI scanner. They were then blindfolded for 70 minutes, before being retested under a green light.

People initially exposed to orange light had greater brain activity in several regions related to alertness and cognition when they were retested, compared with those pre-exposed to blue light.”

I plan to start shopping for an orange light bulb this afternoon. If you know where to buy one, text me (or is that too old-fashioned?).

Image credit: <a href='http://www.123rf.com/photo_10559923_festive-golden-lights.html'>cepn / 123RF Stock Photo</a>

“4 Essential (and Overlooked) Facts About Your Brain and Your Mind”

I just read another brain-focused Alvaro Fernandez (Sharp­Brains’ co-founder and Chief Executive Officer) article posted on The Creativity Post that I wanted to share with everybody. You can find it here: http://www.creativitypost.com/science/4_essential_and_overlooked_facts_about_your_brain_and_your_mind#sthash.ztc3o2Eu.dpuf

The four “essential (and overlooked) facts” he writes about are:

1. “Smart pills” simply don’t exist (drat)
2. Aging can bring (cognitive)decline...
3. … and also improve­ment.
4. “Cells that fire together wire together.”

Here’s the summary that I like: “our brains and minds are far from set in stone due to genet­ics or age. Grow­ing evi­dence sug­gests beyond a rea­son­able doubt that what we do at every sin­gle day has an impact on brain fit­ness that very same day and also later in life.”

Image credit: <a href='http://www.123rf.com/photo_17620970_humans-brain-with-gearwheel-inside-illustration-on-white-background-for-design.html'>dvarg / 123RF Stock Photo</a>

Can You Read? Post-Operation Reactions - 2010

Once I was home and friends started to reach out to me, it was clear that most people expected the worst—that I couldn’t talk, that my IQ had sunk to new lows, or that I was handicapped in some strange and terrifying way. I don’t blame them for those concerns. 

An old boss took me out to lunch.  One of her first questions was “can you read?” I knew that I could read, but she didn’t know I could read.  Given the horrific experiences of many brain tumor victims, and the memoirs of brain tumor survivors like Jill Bolte-Taylor, she had good reason to worry about my ability to function in normal society.  

Here’s a great example, a note from a friend who’d heard about my tumor:

“I'm glad to see you can type!! My experience of brain surgery is largely confined to the movies where the patient awakes to a circle of concerned faces all waiting to see if he suddenly speaks in Urdu or thinks a carrot smells like a sausage and so on. But it seems you have woken up in fully functioning order!!!

Actually, I do have a brain operation story. My friend had two seven hour brain operations after suffering severe head injuries in a car accident. (He made a full recovery.) But when he awoke from the surgeries he had to spend several days in a delirium while the brain tissue healed. During this time he spoke only Spanish, a language he learned in South America while he was at school until the age of four and which he had completely forgotten in the intervening 35 years! Or so he thought.

The Brain, it really is the last frontier.”