Information Is Beautiful: Evidence for Popular Dietary Supplements

  

A beautiful chart from a beautiful website.

The chart shows graphically the scientific evidence for some popular dietary supplements. Check it out:

 http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplements/  

I have for example looked up the elements for mental health and googled the ones with strong to promising evidence:

*According to wikipedia, "St. John's wort" is a herbal treatment for depression and PMS. (Strong Evidence)

*Creatine which is found in meat and fish boosts brain power. "Vegetarians and vegans do not get any creatine from food sources. Creatine levels in blood plasma are very low in these populations." 

*Tyrosine is found in many food sources. "Low Tyrosine leads to conditions, such as muscle weakness, muscle loss, mood disorders, ...etc." 



Shutting Down Your Awareness

I read this interesting piece from the book: “Mindsight” by Dr. Daniel Siegel.

Chapter 7: Cut Off From the Neck Down, Reconnecting the Mind and the Body.

The chapter starts with this patient who came saying that her life felt empty and meaningless. She seemed disconnected and cold. In details the author talks about how the patient’s early life was filled with unfair opportunities. The turning point for the patient was when she promised herself that she "would never feel anything again". She was 11.

The author explains: to cope with those difficult situations we build our own defensive mechanisms whether for example by ignoring the situation, concentrating on the positive side (optimism) or by projecting those experience on others and then hating them for it.

By building these defense mechanisms, we build a firewall around our awareness to protect us from those feelings, but by doing that you filter out both the good and the bad feelings. The ACC “Anterior Cingular Cortex”, located in the middle prefrontal cortex in the brain, regulates our awareness.

The ACC is responsible for many things:

1. The pain for social rejection and the physical pain are both in the ACC.
2. “It's the area between our thinking cortex and our feeling limbic regions.”
3. “It registers physical sensations from the body and feelings from our social interactions.”
4. “It regulates the focus of our attention.”
5. “It links body, emotion attention social awareness.”
6. It’s responsible for letting us feel connected.

The problem with shutting down the ACC is not only with filtering the good feelings out but with the fact that even if you removed the pain from your awareness it still has an affect on you, your decision making and your body. Feelings will still be there in our nervous system, brainstem and the limbic areas. You’re eliminating the awareness only.

Think about it!

*note: There are so many other details in the chapter*.

More about “Left Mind vs. Right Mind”

From the book: “My Stroke of Insight” by Jill Bolte Taylo, Chapter 16.

Right Mind: 

• It’s all about right here, right now, the richness of the moment, filled with gratitude for my life and every one in it.
• It smiles a lot and is extremely friendly.
• Compassionate, nurturing and eternally optimistic
• It observes without judgment. No judgment of good/bad or right/wrong.
• It is sensitive to non-verbal communication, and accurately decodes emotion.
• It is your intuition and higher consciousness.
• Highly creative: thinks out of the box. Not limited by the rules of regulations set by the left mind.
• Free, not bogged by the past or fearful of what the future may bring or not bring.
• Thinks in images/pictures.
• Looks at the big picture and how things relate to each other.
• The Extreme Right Mind: seldom connect to a common reality and spend most of our time with head in the clouds.

Left Mind: 

• Preoccupied with details and runs your life on a tight schedule.
• The more serious side.
• It defines boundaries and judges everything as right/wrong or good/bad.
• Responsible for transforming all the information and possibilities into something manageable.
• It is what you use to communicate to the external world.
• Thinks in language and speaks to you constantly.
• Your organizer: has the ability to organize, categorize, describe, judge and critically analyze everything.
• Has the ability to multitask.
• Identifies patterns.
• Processes large volumes of information (much faster that that the right mind).
• The storyteller: brilliant at making up stories, filling the blanks where there are gaps in data and generating alternative scenarios.
• Genius at generating What-if possibilities and drawing conclusions.
• Your ego center.
• Your critical analytical mind.
• The Extreme Left Mind: exhibits extremely rigid thinking patterns that are analytically critical.

Brain Memory and Stress ...

Stress and depression lead to long-term memory loss. How?

Hippocampus is an area in the brain that turns our short-term explicit memories into long-term explicit memories.

Stress, depression and childhood trauma all release glucocorticoids, which kill cells in the hippocampus leading to memory loss.

The longer people are depressed, the small their hippocampus gets.

But …

After recovery from stress or depression, neurons can grow back in the hippocampus.

Physical exercise helps re-generate new neurons in the hippocampus while learning helps keeping those new neurons alive.

Source: The Brain That Changes Itself By Dr. Norman Doidge

Dr. Edward Taub

Stroke is one of the leading causes of disabilities in adults. Once the brain damage happens, there is little help that modern science can provide until Dr. Edward Taub invented his treatment (CI Therapy).

Dr. Taub’s treatment helped patients re-wire their brains. Patients who were paralyzed for years and were told they would never walk again began to walk.

Dr. Taub started working on his idea while he was a graduate student. The theory that explained our physical movement at the time was Dr. Sherrington’s Reflexological Theory of Movement.

Dr. Sherrington’s experiment was to cut all the sensory nerves in a monkey’s arm (a process called Defferentation). After the experiment, the monkey couldn’t move his arm although the sensory nerves were cut and not the motor nerves (which control the movement). Dr. Sherrington suggested that the movement must be based or initiated by the sensory part and that the monkey couldn’t move his arm because he had destroyed this part.

Dr. Taub modified the experiment by placing the good arm after the operation in a sling to restrain it. The monkey was then able to start using the affected arm. This is really critical because it implies that stroke patients with treatment can use their damaged parts again.

In the book Dr. Taub’s treatment is explained in details and recovery cases are also mentioned.

I was hesitant to post about Dr. Taub because there are so many details that you need to read in order to get the full picture.

Reference: Book: The Brain That Changes Itself By Dr. Norman Doige

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Taub

Right Brain vs Left Brain

I'm reading a book called "My Stroke of Insight" and while reading chapter 3 (Hemispheric Asymmetries) I remembered taking this test to know which hemisphere do I use more. It's interesting :)

Some Facts from the book (chapter 3):

* Over 85% of the right handed people in the U.S. are left hemisphere dominant and over 60% of left handed people are also left hemisphere. (I'm a left handed person with a right hemisphere dominance) .

* The right hemisphere is all about capturing the moment (feel, smell, taste ... ) while the left hemisphere is all about capturing the details (time, order, reason, dimension, patterns ... ).

* The right hemishphere is concerned about the big picture while the left hemisphere is concerned about the details and more details about the details.

* Your left hemisphere is the center of your ego. It provides you with an internal awareness of who you are.

* The right hemisphere complements the left hemisphere language center by interpreting the non-verbal communication. the right hemisphere evaluates the tone, facial expression and body language.

* People can live normally with with one cerebral hemisphere only.

If you see the lady spinning clockwise know that you have used your right hemisphere otherwise (anti-clockwise) it's your left hemisphere. (Source)

tell me which hemisphere do you use more