Word: mentalism
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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...
What sort of toll is all this disruption and mental channel switching taking on our ability to think clearly, work effectively and function as healthy human beings? Do the devices that make it possible to do so many things at once truly raise our productivity or merely help us spin our wheels faster? Over the past five years, psychologists, efficiency experts and information-technology researchers have begun to explore those questions in detail. They have begun to calculate the pluses, the minuses and the economic costs of the interrupted life--in dollars, productivity and dysfunction. More important, they're exploring...
...placebo-controlled laboratory experiments say exactly the same thing. Just last month Austrian scientists reported on a study showing that the equivalent of two cups of coffee boosts short-term memory significantly. And that's just the latest in a long line of tests proving that caffeine can enhance mental performance...
...Military Nutrition Division of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, Mass., "I use the word intelligence as an inherent trait, something permanently part of your makeup." Caffeine can't change that, Lieberman says. But what it can do, he says, is heighten your mental performance. If you're well rested, it tends to improve rudimentary brain functions, like keeping your attention focused on boring, repetitive tasks for long periods. "It also tends to improve mood," he says, "and makes people feel more energetic, generally better overall." Observes Dr. Peter Martin, professor of psychiatry and pharmacology...
...Harvard Medical School (HMS) professor announced last week that he is directing a long-term study of Hurricane Katrina survivors that aims to assess the disaster’s effects on their physical and mental health and determine how policymakers can best help them rebuild.HMS Professor of Health Care Policy Ronald C. Kessler will lead a team that will conduct telephone interviews of a representative sample of 1,000 survivors from the New Orleans area and 1,000 from other Katrina-battered regions. They plan to contact these participants every three months for at least two years.In the first round...