Newswise — Being an athlete or merely a fan improves language skills when it comes to discussing their sport because parts of the brain usually involved in playing sports are instead used to understand sport language, new research at the University of Chicago shows.
The research was conducted on hockey players, fans, and people who’d never seen or played the game. It shows, for the first time, that a region of the brain usually associated with planning and controlling actions is activated when players and fans listen to conversations about their sport. The brain boost helps athletes and fans understanding of information about their sport, even though at the time when people are listening to this sport language they have no intention to act.
The study shows that the brain may be more flexible in adulthood than previously thought. “We show that non-language related activities, such as playing or watching a sport, enhance one’s ability to understand language about their sport precisely because brain areas normally used to act become highly involved in language understanding,” said Sian Beilock, Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Chicago. “Personality of older fathers has been suggested to explain the association between mental disorders and advancing paternal age,” the authors write. “However, the mental disorders associated with increasing paternal age are under considerable genetic influence.” Therefore, there may be a genetic link between advancing age of the father and bipolar and other disorders in offspring.
“As men age, successive germ cell replications occur, and de novo [new, not passed from parent to offspring] mutations accumulate monotonously as a result of DNA copy errors,” the authors continue. “Women are born with their full supply of eggs that have gone through only 23 replications, a number that does not change as they age. Therefore, DNA copy errors should not increase in number with maternal age. Consistent with this notion, we found smaller effects of increased maternal age on the risk of bipolar disorder in the offspring.”
(Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2008;65[9]:1034-1040. Available pre-embargo to the media at http://www.jamamedia.org.)
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Playing, and Even Watching, Sports Improves Brain Function
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Biofeedback Contributes to gold Medal Performance
Newswise — When Abhinav Bindra took home the gold medal in the 10 metres air Skills of a Shooter Sport psychologist Timothy Harkness used biofeedback training to help Bindra Biofeedback and Optimal Functioning Biofeedback is used primarily for treatment of various medical disorders, including ADD/ADHD, chronic pain, headaches, and other. But it is gaining prominence in a more proactive capacity as well. Individuals, ranging from athletes to artists to business leaders and more, are tapping into the benefits of biofeedback to optimize health, mental, physical, emotional and spiritual functioning, and peak performance fields. Biofeedback training can help individuals optimize brain function for peak mental performance. It empowers people to achieve their goals, be they Olympic level or within day-to-day activities. It helps users manage their mental and emotional states and how these may help or hinder achievement of goals.
rifle event at the Beijing Olympics, he not only earned the first individual
medal ever for India, he also demonstrated how biofeedback training can be
an integral part of performance optimization at the highest level.
Dead aim is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the skills needed
to excel at shooting. In addition, shooters need controlled breathing and
heart rate, no excess tension in their muscles, no interior monologue, and
sharp focus and good reactions to trigger at the moment when the sight image
is correct.
master control over all these areas. Using the a FlexComp Infiniti hardware
system with BioGraph 4.0 software, Harkness joined a team of shooting
coaches, a physician, chiropractor, dietician and physiotherapist to prepare
Bandra for the 2008 competition. The result was that an already
world-champion athlete was able to push his skills and focus even higher. He
achieved his personal goal and earned the only medal for India during the
2008 games.
Biofeedback is a process that enables an individual to learn how to change
physiological activity for the purposes of improving health and performance.
Precise instruments measure physiological activity such as brainwaves, heart
function, breathing, muscle activity, and skin temperature. These
instruments rapidly and accurately "feed back" information to the user. The
presentation of this information - often in conjunction with changes in
thinking, emotions, and behavior - supports desired physiological changes.
Over time, these changes can endure without continued use of an instrument.