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.

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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.

Being a grump only makes things worse: a transactional account of acute stress on mind wandering

Is your neurologist taking this into account when designing your 100% recovery protocol? Having a stroke is extremely stressful, does your doctor realize that obvious fact?
http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00730/full?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Psychology-w49-2013
Melaina T. Vinski^* and Scott Watter

• Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

The current work investigates the influence of acute stress on mind wandering. Participants completed the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule as a measure of baseline negative mood, and were randomly assigned to either the high-stress or low-stress version of the Trier Social Stress Test. Participants then completed the Sustained Attention to Response Task as a measure of mind-wandering behavior. In Experiment 1, participants reporting a high degree of negative mood that were exposed to the high-stress condition were more likely to engage in a variable response time, make more errors, and were more likely to report thinking about the stressor relative to participants that report a low level of negative mood. These effects diminished throughout task performance, suggesting that acute stress induces a temporary mind-wandering state in participants with a negative mood. The temporary affect-dependent deficits observed in Experiment 1 were replicated in Experiment 2, with the high negative mood participants demonstrating limited resource availability (indicated by pupil diameter) immediately following stress induction. These experiments provide novel evidence to suggest that acute psychosocial stress briefly suppresses the availability of cognitive resources and promotes an internally oriented focus of attention in participants with a negative mood.

Introduction

The experience of stress is pervasive. In 2011, 23.6% of adult Canadians reported experiencing extreme stress in daily life (Statistics Canada, 2011). With chronic stress linked to immunological (e.g., Herbert and Cohen, 1993; Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 1996; Cohen et al., 2001; Esch et al., 2002a; Segerstrom and Miller, 2004, for reviews), cardiovascular (e.g., Harlan, 1981; Esch et al., 2002b; Bunker et al., 2003), and neurodegenerative disease (e.g., Gilad et al., 1990; Gilad and Gilad, 1995), as well as poor mental health (e.g., Negrão et al., 2000; Vaidya, 2000; Raison and Miller, 2003), an abundance of research has emerged with the aim of mapping both the psychological and physiological determinants of the body’s response to stress.

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