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How Exercise And Other Activities Beat Back Dementia
NPR: The numbers are pretty grim: More than half of all 85-year-olds suffer some form of . But here's the good news: Brain researchers say there are ways to boost brain power and stave off problems in memory and thinking. In other words, brain decline is not necessarily an inevitable part of aging. "It's simply not pre-destined for all human beings," Bryan James tells Shots. He's an epidemiologist at the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center in Chicago. "Lots of people live into their 90s and even 100s with no symptoms of dementia." So what can you do to increase the odds?
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Professor works to change future of business ethics
Today: Adam Grant, the youngest tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is taking on the “greed is good” mentality of some CEOs and business executives, hoping to shape the leaders of tomorrow by teaching them it’s possible to give and still get ahead. Gran'ts big idea is this, the cultural wisdom that says only the strong and self-interested survive in the dog eat dog world of business is demonstrably wrong. Read the whole story: Today
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For Obesity, the Future Is Now
The Huffington Post: Obesity is largely a failure of self-control. I know it's possible to quibble about calories and carbs and dietary fat, but fundamentally, obesity comes down to valuing fattening foods today, in this moment, more than we value a healthy future. We know, rationally, that we should forego the French fries and brownies for some greater payoff down the line, but the moment's temptations make it hard to keep our eyes on that future reward. We do have the cognitive ability to project days or weeks or even years into the future, but we don't do it when we're making food choices in the here and now. What if we could trick ourselves into keeping our heads in the future?
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Unconscious Choices Can Sabotage Health Goals
Scientific American Mind: Plans for working out and eating well often go awry, and the reasons for those lapses are not always obvious. Three new papers highlight unconscious influences that affect our choices. In several related studies published last fall in Psychological Science, researchers at the University of Cologne in Germany investigated the link between health behaviors and the belief in mind-body dualism—the concept that mind and body are two separate entities. Participants who were primed to embrace dualism made less healthy choices than participants encouraged to think of the mind and body as interrelated.
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How Terror Hijacks the Brain
TIME: Fear short circuits the brain, especially when it hits close to home, experts say— making coping with events like the bombings at the Boston Marathon especially tricky. “When people are terrorized, the smartest parts of our brain tend to shut down,” says Dr. Bruce Perry, Senior Fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy. (Disclosure: he and I have written books together). ... Every loud sound suddenly becomes a potential threat, for example, and even mundane circumstances such as a person who avoids eye contact can take on suspicious and ominous meaning and elicit an extreme, alert-ready response. Such informational triage can be essential to surviving traumatic experience, of course.
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Feeling Powerful Will Make You Smarter
Business Insider: Successful leaders often seem to have sharper minds than the rest of us—isn't that how they got to the top in the first place? While we often assume that people become powerful because of their superior thinking skills, research shows that the relationship flows in the other direction as well: power changes the way a person thinks, making them better at focusing on relevant information, integrating disparate pieces of knowledge, and identifying hidden patterns than people who are powerless. ... A sense of power "has dramatic effects on thought and behavior," writes Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business School, in 2011 article in the journal Psychological Science.
