Word: braine
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...Somehow I have a confidence I didn't have before," says Crook. "I find that my brain makes leaps it didn't make so easily. I can hear my inner voice and trust instincts and hunches in ways I didn't used...
Risk-taking seniors making daring mental leaps? That's not the stereotype. Indeed, until quite recently most researchers believed the human brain followed a fairly predictable developmental arc. It started out protean, gained shape and intellectual muscle as it matured, and reached its peak of power and nimbleness by age 40. After that, the brain began a slow decline, clouding up little by little until, by age 60 or 70, it had lost much of its ability to retain new information and was fumbling with what it had. But that was all right because late-life crankiness had by then...
...Although such techniques may sound far-fetched, many therapists-and their patients-swear by them. And recent advances in brain-scanning technology suggest a mechanism by which they might work. "With fmris [functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain], we are starting to locate centers of creativity in the left prefrontal cortex, in the same area that lights up for heightened meditative states and the capacity for optimism," says Ron Alexander, a therapist based in Santa Monica, Calif., who specializes in treating creative blocks...
Caffeine also triggers the release of dopamine, mostly in the frontal areas of the brain and the anterior cingular cortex, in which the so-called executive functions like attention, task management and concentration are located. This is consistent with what the Austrian scientists reported last month at the Radiological Society of America's annual conference in Chicago. Dr. Florian Koppelstaetter and his colleagues at the Medical University in Innsbruck gave 15 male volunteers 100 mg each of caffeine?about the same amount as in two cups of coffee?and then tested their short-term memory. Not only did the caffeine...
...course, whereas coffee contains scores of substances. Some of them are antioxidants, which could explain part of its protective effect against disease. Some are psychoactive. "Our research," says Martin, "has focused on some of those other elements, such as chlorogenic acids, which keep adenosine in circulation in the brain longer than normal. That might augment coffee's ability to increase concentration without increasing irritability...