Deans' stroke musings: How Memory Can Help Reduce Negative Thinking

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.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

How Memory Can Help Reduce Negative Thinking

Is your doctor making sure via a stroke protocol that you have enough working memory not to ruminate on your negative thoughts? Or like most doctors, doing nothing at all?
http://www.spring.org.uk/2016/11/negative-thinking.php?omhide=true

Young people are the most pessimistic, on average, with people’s negative thinking reducing as they get older.

Working memory plays an important role in how people cope with negative events in life.

Working memory is our ability to process information in the conscious mind.
For example, if I give you a series of 10 numbers and then ask you to add up the second and fourth one, you are using your working memory.
Our working memories can also be used to refocus our minds away from negative thinking.
Dr. Tracy Alloway, the study’s first author, said:

“There is a growing body of research supporting the role of working memory in emotional regulation.
We know that those with clinical depression have difficulties in suppressing irrelevant negative information, while those with high working memory are able to ignore negative emotions.
But we wanted to investigate whether you see a similar pattern in healthy adults across the lifespan.”

Testing of over 2,000 people revealed a number of interesting findings:

The young are the most pessimistic and people get more optimistic as they get older.
The more pessimistic people were, the more prone they were to depression.
Working memory can help refocus the mind from depressing thoughts.

Negative events tend to attract our attention more than positive ones, because it helps us survive.
Of course, it is easy for this bias towards negative thinking to go too far and send us into a spiral of depression.
Dr Alloway said:

“Human behavior is goal-directed and when we face an impediment to achieving a goal, we can respond with either a pessimistic outlook or an optimistic one.
A strong working memory can counter a pessimistic outlook.
This is good news, especially for younger individuals (teens and those in their 20s), who had higher pessimism scores compared to their older peers.”

The study was published in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology, (Alloway & Horton, 2016).