Word: mental
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Adding to the deep body of research associating mental acuity with a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease, a study published online on July 8 by the journal Neurology suggests that people who possess sophisticated linguistic skills early in life may be protected from developing dementia in old age - even when their brains show the physical signs, like lesions and plaques, of memory disorders...
...finding adds to a collection of studies suggesting that the greater one's initial mental fitness - measured variously as higher educational achievement or high IQ, for example - the better it may be safeguarded in old age. "It's broadly consistent with the notion that if someone starts out with the ability, however their brain is organized, to have a greater set of skills in language and performing other complicated tasks, then maybe that brain is more resistant [later in life]," says Harvard's Hyman. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...
...past 50 years, people with mental problems have spent untold millions of hours in therapists' offices, and millions more reading self-help books, trying to turn negative thoughts like "I never do anything right" into positive ones like "I can succeed." For many people - including well-educated, highly trained therapists, for whom "cognitive restructuring" is a central goal - the very definition of psychotherapy is the process of changing self-defeating attitudes into constructive ones...
...Canada) psychology professor Colin Ellard compared the navigation habits of animals and humans in his July-released book, You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon but Get Lost in the Mall (Sold as Where Am I? in Canada.) He talked to TIME about how mental maps fail us, the importance of understanding physical space and why a bigger home won't necessarily make you happy...
...talk about how a lot of the time, our minds create mental maps that are actually really inaccurate. Did you find a reason for that? We tend to reduce things to the simplest order that we can. So where there are curves, we straighten them. Where there are weird angles, we make them right angles. And the reason why we're doing that is because it reduces memory load. It's much easier for us to remember something that's got a very simple geometry than something that doesn't. So we align where we shouldn't. We straighten where...