Reading Really Does Broaden Your Mind

            I’ll admit it. I love to read. After a hard day of school, sometimes all I want to do is curl up with a good fiction book and possibly a box of cookies. I love the hours I spend reading, for it’s during that time that I get to escape into a whole other world. However, even though for me reading feels like being transported to a different world, new research describes how reading fiction actually activates many of the same centers of the brain that real-life experiences do. The brain, it seems, does not make distinctions between reading about something and experiencing it in real-life.

            A new article in the New York Times explores this connection between reading fiction and the areas of your brain it activates. As you read, the same areas get activated in your brain as would be activated if you were actually experiencing the book. For example, let’s just say the protagonist of your book smells the scent of his grandma’s “home-made apple pie wafting out from the open window”. As the reader, these lines would activate the primary olfactory cortex, the area of your brain primarily responsible for smelling. Cool, huh?

            It goes even further than just sensory stimulation though. Reading books where the characters interact can actually help hone our real-life social skills. Scientists at the York University of Canada found that reading toddlers books can help with the development of their social skills from a young age and help them to develop a keen “theory of mind”.

            So in the end, I guess my elementary school teachers really were on to something when they told me reading is good for the brain, even if they didn’t mean it in such a literal sense.

If you want to read the full New York Times article, here is the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?pagewanted=all

Don't Try This At Home

            Sometimes I wish that there were a way to inject chemistry knowledge directly into my brain. (Okay, maybe I wish for this all the time.) Unfortunately, science has yet to create a way to do this. However, they’ve come up with the next best thing. Well, maybe not the next best thing, but something pretty awesome.

            Scientists at the University of Oxford have found that by passing a very mild current of electricity through a person’s brain, they can improve their math skills for the next sixth months. The scientists behind these alluring findings used a method known as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). This is a non-invasive technique that involves passing electricity through the skull to increase or decrease the activity of neurons, and it usually lasts around fifteen minutes.

            The scientists chose to stimulate the parietal lobe which is involved in number processing, a vital part of mathematics. Although math still requires practice, the subjects showed increased skills in number processing not just immediately after the stimulation but for the next six months!

            I, for one, am just about ready to buy a plane ticket to England so they can do this to me. Apparently I’m not the only one with that idea though. An enthusiastic do-it-yourself community of tDCS enthusiasts has sprung up. Machines that provide direct transcranial stimulation cost thousands of dollars and are generally only sold to researchers, but that hasn’t stopped the tDCS enthusiasts. Their online forums are filled stories of homemade experiments, some of which went wrong, and in one case left someone blind.

            To me it seems like the risk isn’t worth it. So for now I’ll stick with learning chemistry the old-fashioned way, and the only experiments I’ll be doing at home are the ones I can do with the chemistry set I got when I was eight.

Why Hitting the Gym Might Just Help You Ace Your Next Midterm

            I’m as liable as anyone to do it. Whenever I have a big midterm coming up, I forgo the gym in exchange for a couple extra hours of studying. After all, I reason, the exam is more important; the gym will still be there in a week. However, new research done by The Laboratory of Biochemistry and Neuroscience at the University of Tsukuba in Japan suggests that if you want to ace your exams, getting back on the treadmill might actually be a good idea.

            Exercise demands a lot from the brain. During exercise, countless neurons are activated; they generate, receive, and interpret messages from other neurons and coordinate everything from organ function to muscle movement to the balance that keeps you from falling over during your weekly yoga session (It’s okay, I have trouble with Tree Pose too). All of this work done by your brain requires an incredible amount of energy, and this energy often comes in the form of glycogen, stored carbohydrates.

            In the recent study done, published in The Journal of Physiology, researchers tested the effects of exercise on glycogen levels in the brain. What they found is that exercise depleted the majority of glycogen stores, but after a good meal of carbohydrates the glycogen levels were back up not only to where they were before exercise, but the brain had done a form of carbo-loading, and glycogen levels were even higher than before exercise!

            So how does increased glycogen levels in the brain relate to doing well on that one really hard midterm you’ve been dreading? You can think of glycogen as a kind of fuel for the brain, and an increase in fuel leads to an increase in productivity. What the experimenters found is that the increases in glycogen in the brain were predominantly in the areas of the cortex and the hippocampus—areas of the brain involved in learning and memory.

            But before you congratulate yourself and take a run on the treadmill in an effort to increase your chances of being able to learn all the material for your test, you should know there’s a catch—the study found that only working out once did not lead to a long-term increase in the baseline levels of glycogen in the brain. However, working out on a fairly consistent basis for four weeks did lead to a lasting increase in glycogen levels.

            So, on that note, I leave to go find my sneakers, Ipod, and a banana (remember to eat foods high in glycogen after working out), and hope that if I exercise enough, maybe I will finally be able to memorize everything for my tests.