Deans' stroke musings: Nostalgia Activates Parts Of The Brain For Better Mental Performance

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Monday, October 27, 2014

Nostalgia Activates Parts Of The Brain For Better Mental Performance

Does your doctor have a stroke protocol to cover this to boost your cognitive abilities?

Nostalgia Activates Parts Of The Brain For Better Mental Performance

Cornell University researchers just reversed the idea nostalgia doesn’t activate the parts of your brain responsible for better mental performance; it 100 percent does.
"The prevailing view is that activating brain regions referred to as the default network impairs performance on attention-demanding tasks because this network is associated with behaviors such as mind-wandering," Nathan Spreng, lead study author, said in a press release. "Our study is the first to demonstrate the opposite — that engaging the default network can also improve performance." To arrive at this conclusion, Spreng and his team recruited 36 young adults to undergo a brain scan.

While being scanned, researchers asked participants to take a look at sets of famous and anonymous faces in a specific order. As they were going through the photos, researchers also asked participants to identify — or reminisce — whether the current faced matched the face in two previous photos. Participants answered both faster and more accurate when matching famous faces compared to anonymous faces, all the while experiencing spikes in their default network.
This goes to show that accessing long-term memory (famous faces) does work to strengthen short-term memory performance. "Outside the laboratory, pursuing goals involves processing information filled with personal meaning — knowledge about past experiences, motivations, future plans, and social context," Spreng said. "Our study suggests that the default network and executive control networks dynamically interact to facilitate an ongoing dialogue between the pursuit of external goals and internal meaning."
It's easy to see why mind-wandering was believed to negatively impact mental peformance. I mean, there's actual evidence. A study published in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology found mind-wandering hinders reading comprehension and performance on working memory- and intelligence-related tests. Interestingly enough, this same study found mind-wandering also played a crucial role when it came to creative problem solving.