Feed the Brain

Here is a helpful post from an Early Childhood Brain Insights blog.

Nourish Your Brain with a Healthy Diet ...

Like any high-performance machine, the brain needs top quality fuel.
A few brain healthy tips shared by the brain team:

1. Your brain needs a well-balanced, low cholesterol, low saturated (animal fat) diet.

2. Timing is significant in nutrition. Research supports the importance of a good breakfast...for everyone, not only children.

3. Protein and unsaturated fat is especially important for developing brains.

4. Fish, a rich source of protein and "healthy" fat is often referred to as the brain vitamin, otherwise known as Essential Fatty Acids (Omega Fatty Acids).

5. Your brain needs vitamins and minerals; they come from your diet.

6. Eating a natural rainbow each day, comprised of fruits and vegetables provides important antioxidants (which will help keep you healthy and help ward off colds and getting sick)

7. Research suggests antioxidant vitamins E and C protect the brain.

8. Avoid excess food. Reducing calories can help slow age-related brain changes.

9. Get out into nature...it does a brain good!

10. Studies suggest that sleep is essential for the maintenance of proper immune function, and it also serves as a mental "down time" during which neurons can repair themselves and memories can be organized into long-term storage.
As a general rule, good nutrition for the body, is good nutrition for the brain.

Food Revolution

ABC is carrying a new show that starts this Friday the 26th, 8/7 Central -

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. Jamie is a young Chef from England. "One Man. One Mission - Let's Do It For the Kids" He has some creative ways - and sometimes confrontational ways - of getting people to understand what is wrong with the way we now eat and how to eat healthy. He works with schools and communities. Be cautioned that the language on the show is a bit rough but it is well worth watching.

He reminds me of Jo Frost, the Super Nanny - also on ABC - who came from England and helped moms and dads learn how to be a parent.

Eating well is a critical part of performing well... giving God our best.

Brain Awareness Week

Let's see... I am aware that I have one. Done!

Not sure who pitches for all these special weeks. Might as well be one for the brain!

Sure is lots of new stuff out there. For Charlie Rose it is Brain Awareness Year. He has a very interesting series (one show per month for a year) on the brain. He picks a topic and then invites experts in that area to come and talk together. Very interesting.

You can watch them online. So far he as covered:
-the organization of the brain
-seeing
-movement
-the social brain
-the developing brain

He will cover the aging brain, creative brain and lots more. Check it out. Well worth the time. What I've seen so far strongly reinforces the importance of the early years and how critical the parent's influence is.

Frontline - Digital-Nation

Frontline has another installment of their Digital Nation program. It is about 90 minutes of run time but very interesting stuff on:
-multi-tasking
-gaming
-virtual communities

MIT students were quite strong (perhaps even cocky) in their assessment of their own ability to multitask. Under controlled circumstances they actually do very poorly at it.

And there are some very interesting segments on how closely people can become connected without ever meeting each other in the flesh... virtual communities. They really know a lot about each other and care for each other.

Always a big shake up when you make huge paradigm shifts - pictures to alphabet/words; spoken word/memory to mass printed text; now to the digital world as well. Some things are lost and other things are gained. It will require thoughtful consideration, and some testing, to see which of the new patterns emerging among the digital natives are helpful and which are not... if that is even the best way to phrase it. If your "community" is made up of folks physically very far away from you, what happens when you need local folks to care for you physically in times of crisis? What is lost when we keep making our brain work in shorter and shorter busts as we multi-task. How important is the ability to think/work on one thing for a long time in a focused way? (Digital natives write their research papers - by their own admission - in paragraph bursts... often in unconnected paragraph bursts.) Are there some things that need sustained thought or you just don't 'get' them?