One Brain's journey

Word-finding One Year Later

Brian Rogers — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 21:21:47 +0000

I had the opportunity to speak to the same group of people I spoke to almost exactly a year ago and it seemed to go better this time. What did I do that was different? Two things were different. I had a couple of days warning this year whereas last year I had about a half hour to prepare. The second thing that was different is that I shook hands and spoke to as many people as I could before the event started. I thought that by doing that I could sort of get my verbal faculties in gear. I recalled that some time in the past I had been interviewing a large number of people during the course of one evening for a radio report and that I seemed to gather steam as I went along and had less and less trouble thinking of what to say or how to respond. I think the warm up idea worked although here was quite a temptation to just sit quietly until I was called upon. That’s more or less what I had done last year. I did have some difficulties but nothing on the order of what I experienced the first time. I also took a lot less time speaking than what I had been allotted in the belief that your audience is more likely to let you off the hook, if they don’t like what you are saying, as long as you don’t take too long to say it.

Working Memory, RAM And Good Teaching

Brian Rogers — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 21:40:03 +0000

Anyone who has owned a computer knows the more RAM the better. RAM, or remote access memory, is the computer equivalent of working memory. Working memory refers to the brain’s capacity to briefly hold and manipulate information. The latest research referred to on a website called Future Pundit by a research team at Michigan State University suggests that working memory can be the deciding factor between good and great. Some researchers break this down further into verbal working memory as well as numerical working memory and visual/non-verbal working memory. I know, for example, that I have poor visual/non-verbal working memory. The other two functions seem to work okay. For me this translates into problems learning from visual experiences. Or translating verbal instructions into movement. It became most apparent when I starting doing kobojutsu (karate weapons). The sensai (instructor) would demonstrate a sequence of moves and then ask me to do it. I would stand there with no idea, actually no mental picture, of what he had just done. I wouldn’t have been able to persist at it if I had not had an understanding instructor. His name was Jason Forbes and he was a fourth degree black belt. He was patient beyond belief. But perhaps even more importantly, if I wasn’t getting it, Jason took it as his fault and try to impart the information another way. I think this separates good teachers from the truly great. I don’t ever remember Jason losing his temper with me or even his patience in spite of the fact that I frequently lost both. Well to be honest what I experienced was frustration. Jason used to say that he could see the smoke coming out of my ears and at these times he would quietly suggest that I take a break and he would move on with the rest of the class.

Why am I posting this? For two reasons-one as an illustration of the frustration and sense of defeat that often goes hand-in-hand with learning disabilities and two to honor teachers like Jason who can make all the difference in the world, who make learning possible where it otherwise might not be.

Thanks Jason.

Neuroplasticity, Change And Hope

Brian Rogers — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:30:34 +0000

A friend asked me recently why I was interested enough in neuroplasticity to undertake the creation and maintenance of a blog on the subject. I replied, and I had to think for a moment, that I found it exciting because it was a new frontier in medicine. The friend happens to be a physician and her response was a knowing smile and a nod. I have read that almost all of our knowledge in the field of neuroscience has been gained in the last ten years. But there is more to my interest than that. Neuroplasticity means hope, hope that things will change. I read a post on a site called MD Junction by a patient who is particularly depression prone. She takes great comfort, not that new findings in neuroscience can treat her depression but that it can help reverse negative behaviors and habits. Current thinking in the treatment of neurological disorders is that if you don’t have symptoms you don’t have the disorder. For example, a firefighter might have been diagnosed with ADHD in high school but in his high stimulation job, he functions quite well–so no symptoms, no ADHD. To me this means that the disorder gets separated from the person. Not long after my diagnosis, a friend said to me at a low point, “You are not an ADHD person–you are a person with ADHD.” I still have symptoms, even on medication but I have never forgotten the hope inherent in my friend’s statement. And he would know because he too has been diagnosed with ADHD. Hope means many things but perhaps the most important is the idea of change. St. Augustine said that hope has two lovely daughters: anger at the way things are and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.

A Neuroplasticity Dream Team

Brian Rogers — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 19:32:33 +0000

The Center for Stroke Recovery in Toronto assembled a dream team of neuroscienctists to employ the latest findings in neuroscience to help stroke victims recover. Much of the effort afforded by a $10 million donation from the Heart and Stroke Foundation will focus on the association between exercise and brain health. Dr. Dale Corbett, CEO and Scientific Director of the center says, “We’re excited about the significance of how exercise can improve brain health by changing the blood flow to the brain to speed up recovery after a stroke.” Research will focus on learning what intensity and duration of exercise will bring the best results in getting the brain to reorganize and compensate for stroke damage.

Do You Crave Salt Or Sugar?

Brian Rogers — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 20:30:31 +0000

A friend recently posted a link on Facebook to a report by a research team from Duke University Medical Central along with some Australian scientists who found that, “Addictive drugs may hijack the same nerve cells and connections in the brain that serve a powerful, ancient instinct: the appetite for salt.” One of the co-authors of the report, Wolfgang Lietke, M.D., Ph.D. said, “We were surprised and gratified to see that blocking addiction-related pathways could powerfully interfere with sodium appetite. Our findings have profound and far-reaching medical implications, and could lead to a new understanding of addiction and the detrimental consequences when obesity-generating foods are overloaded with sodium.” You can read more about the study and its implications for addiction research here.

This finding reminded me of something Tim Bilkey M.D. told me in a consultation following his diagnosis of my ADHD. He noted that in his clinical practice he was finding that patients with ADHD had cravings for salt in snacks not sugar. He wondered whether there might be some connection to the fact that the most commonly prescribed drugs for this condition–Dexedrine and amphetamine–are technically salts.

The Gorilla In The Basketball Game And Why We Can’t Do Two Things At The Same Time

Brian Rogers — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 22:14:06 +0000

By now most of you have seen the Youtube video of the gorilla walking through a group of people passing a basketball and marveled that you missed him as he passed through the players. Don’t worry, apparently about half of the people that watch the video miss the gorilla. If you haven’t seen it you can follow this link: basketball gorilla . The mechanism at work here is called in-attentional blindness and happens to people when their cognitive capacity is stressed or with individuals with lower working memory capacity. That would be me. You can read an article about the implications here. One implication the article describes is driving and talking on the phone. Driving is an attention rich task and so is talking on the phone and you really can’t do both at the same time. Hence the reason we now have a low prohibiting it. Yeah I know you can do it. So can I. Or so I thought. Apparently one of the giveaways that you are not paying attention happens when your eyes are focused, almost unblinkingly and straight ahead, on the road in front. You don’t normally drive like that. When you drive normally, your eyes move around, scanning the area, not just in front of you, but to the sides as well and then, every so often, also check the rear and side view mirrors. The gorilla video is another nail in the coffin that people with low working memory capacity (pretty well anyone with ADHD) may think they can multi-task but actually can’t. Suffice it to say, I no longer try to do both although I do use a Bluetooth hands-free speaker even though another finding says that in terms of attentional capacity, it really doesn’t make a lot of difference whether you are holding a phone or talking hands-free.

Study co-author Jason Watson, assistant professor of psychology, said: “The potential implications are that if we are all paying attention as we are driving, some individuals may have enough extra flexibility in their attention to notice distractions that could cause accidents.”

However he went on to say, “That doesn’t mean people ought to be self-distracting by talking on a cell phone while driving — even if they have better control over their attention. Our prior research has shown that very few individuals [only 2.5 percent] are capable of handling driving and talking on a cell phone without impairment.”

The Good News And The Bad News About Adult ADHD

Brian Rogers — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 19:15:28 +0000

A comment made in a lecture a few years ago by Umesh Jain, who heads the ADHD clinic at Center For Addiction and Mental Health here in Toronto came back to haunt me over the last couple of days. He said that the major difference between treatment for Adults with ADHD and children is that with the adults you must first deal with the self esteem issues or you won’t get anywhere with treatment. With children, he went on to say, there usually aren’t any self esteem issue. There hasn’t been time. It is a different story with adults where has been failure after failure, defeat after defeat and years of not measuring up, all leading to self condemnation and despair. This is probably the reason that I have trouble controlling my anger when I encounter people who refuse to recognize that the disorder even exists. I hesitate to say that only a person who has been through the kind of failure that a lifetime with ADHD can breed can really understand that. Someone who has been down that path can have a special empathy for another fellow traveler. Perhaps some of us have developed a mechanism that prevents us from feeling sorry for ourselves. You could say this is a part of the resiliency that comes with making it into adulthood coping with a disorder that can be so debilitating. This mechanism doesn’t prevent us from feeling sorry for another individual who is struggling, perhaps still undiagnosed.

I have been puzzled lately, by how quickly I can be moved to tears, not in public, but in the privacy of my own apartment. Any suggestion on television or on the Internet that has to do with human suffering can trigger tears. After the potential for embarrassment I do hold them back in public. It doesn’t seem appropriate for a person with a second degree black belt in karate. But I am still affected.

On the other hand there is an upside to being an adult who has ADHD. Years of failure and defeat but never giving up means you have to have developed resiliency. It means you have staying power and you can survive. If you are an adult who has just been diagnosed–this simple fact may offer hope, perhaps enough hope to help you raise your self esteem.

Word Finding Problems

Brian Rogers — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 22:57:58 +0000

I did a lot of talking yesterday and at the beginning of the day I marveled at how I could find the right words talking over coffee with a friend. I went to a karate class, helped a couple of friends who were going to a grading Saturday (one black belt, the other 2nd degree black) with terminology. Then I went to the dermatologist and although I had to wait an hour and a half before I saw her, I managed to ask all the questions I needed to. Not like the last time. Then in the evening, with no dinner, I went to an event where a number of people spoke to the group, including me, more than once. The first time I needed to address three topics, briefly, and had some difficulty remembering the three while I waited to speak. When I did speak I did okay with a few rough edges but the last time I spoke to the group, about an hour later, I was quite tongue tied. I forgot a large part of what I wanted to say and what I did say was difficult with a few long pauses as I searched for the right word and then, in despair, an alternative word. I don’t think many of the attendees took any note of the problems. I did. In fact I was much more unsettled than I probably should have been. Why? I think it is because verbal skills is my strongest suit. On pych assessments I have usually scored in the gifted range. It felt almost as if that gift had been taken away from me, even though it was only briefly. I had resolved in the past not to fight it and when I get any kind of tip-off that it could happen, or might happen, I try to keep what I have to say brief, if not avoid speaking at all. I didn’t last night and probably more than anything that is what is bothering me. I had lots of warning that it might happen, even that it was starting to happen. Lots of people, especially past the age of 50, have word finding problems at one time or another. I doubt though, that they present their difficulties in front of a hundred people as I did. I think, mostly I am reminding myself, in writing this post, of my resolve to watch for the signs in the future and then cut my losses.

Any of you had this problem and if so how do you deal with it?

Why Dream

Brian Rogers — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 20:52:32 +0000

A new idea about why we dream was posted in Bill Klemm’s blog, thankyoubrain, yesterday. Bill is a semi-retired professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M University. He says we dream because the brain becomes activated in REM sleep and that activated brains want to think and thinking while sleeping is experssed as dreams. Bill than asks why we have REM sleep at all. He cautions that it is a oversimplification but REM helps to re-boot a sleeping brain so that we can wake and be conscious. I don’t tend to remember dreams much and most that I do have seem pretty half hazard but the most vivid and the ones that seem to stick in memory are ones that I have in the morning in the hour or so before my alarm goes off. This happens even if I have awakened and fallen asleep again thinking I have more time before I have to get up so my last waking thought would be that I have to get up soon.
I had one dream about a week ago in which two people were present that I actually had to meet later in the day, one for lunch together and the other for dinner. In the portion of the dream with the person I was meeting the events were comical. Not so with the dinner partner. That portiion of the dream provided insights that were more or less absent from my waking brain, or at least had been until that dream.

Staving Off Dementia

Brian Rogers — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 20:32:07 +0000

My father’s mother, my grandmother, developed dementia in her 80′s, I was about 14 at the time. It was not a pretty sight. She didn’t know me, she didn’t know my father and most of the time she didn’t know where she was. She was in a Salvation Army Home For The Aged and, I might add, well looked after. I also have a vivid memory of a neighbor trying to break down our front door, with her caregiver trying sesparately to prevent her, while I cowered just inside trying to remain invisible. She was calling out to be let in and I was trying to give the impression that no one was home. This time I was about 10. I know times have changed since those times and there is better care and better medication for what we used to call senility but better still would be not to have it at all. New studies in neuroplasticity indicate that it can be avoided and, if you do get it, you might be able to overcome at least some of the symptoms. This is reported in an earlier post in the blog referring to the Nuns’ Study. This study reported, amongst other things, that nuns who showed physical symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease but no neurological symptoms had been active in teaching right up until they died. This would tend to indicate that keeping the brain active is good but engaging with other humans is even better. A post yesterday in the Huffington Post authored by Dr. Marie Pasinski, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital suggest that activites present us with new ideas and challenges and require us to adapt in new and different ways are best to keep the brain healthy. She also emphasizes eating right, particularly foods rich in antioxidants such as Omega 3′s. She suggests seeking things that ignite passion which enhances our brains ability to learn and remember. “By enriching your mind each day with new experiences and information you are building up what is called ‘cognitive reserve’. It’s like putting money in the bank–the more information you have stored over time, the more resilient your brain will become.”

My earliest impressions of dementia are from a time when there was little that could be done about it. Those impressions need to be brought forward and rexamined in light of what medicine can accomplish now. But more importantly, there is much I can accomplish now and the time to start is today. Apparently reading posts on blogs is good. Writing them is even better.