While doing it, you are traveling much slower than you would if you were running. The rhythmic nature of using the poles and swinging your arms is quite natural and requires little attention from the conscious mind so you are more aware of your surroundings and you walk more upright than you would if you were…well just going for a walk. All of this adds up to the perfect setting for the practice of mindfulness. I have been seeing the cemetery in whole new ways and I have lived beside it, or near it, almost all of my life.

Now I have come across a study that concludes that mindfulness, which the study defines as the ability to be aware and attentive of the present moment without emotional reactivity or volatility, improves working memory as well as mood.

In the next post I will talk more about this study.

There were two patterns emerging:

1. Children who later developed schizophrenia had early deficits in verbal and visual learning, reasoning and conceptualization and these remained as they grew older

2. They also developed more slowly than their peers in processing speed, attention, visual-spatial problem solving and working memory

How all this ends up as schizophrenia is still unknown but another co-author in the study, Avshalom Caspi, who is the Edward M. Arnett Professor of Psychiatry at Duke, speculates that a child who struggles to make sense of the world becomes more socially isolated or more delusional.

Keefe said that eventually he hoped that they might be able to intervene, perhaps with anti-psychotic medication, in childhood and head off the adult psychosis. The study suggests that adult psychosis doesn’t just emerge fully formed but has early roots in the developmental process.

I have thought for a long time that schizophrenia is one of the saddest disorders as it seems as if one’s mind turns against oneself but there is another disorder that it is even sadder where one’s mind does something quite similar. That disorder is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). One of the required symptoms for a diagnosis of OCD is that the person must be conscious of their obsessive or compulsive behavior but be helpless to do anything about it. I know at least one person who has OCD and my heart goes out to her. Many times when she is exhibiting symptoms, she is in tears. I have, for a brief time in the past, had OCD symptoms and so have some understanding of how this plays out. In my case the behavior was checking and it was like I had forgotten whether I had locked a door again and again and again. I had, as a child, seen my father do this (so maybe it’s a family trait) and at the time a part of me marveled at the fact that I was repeating this simple action so many times. In my case it passed and has not returned. It happened at a time of great stress so I do have a worry that it could, at some point, return but the person that I was describing earlier has it most of the time and spends much of that time locked in her apartment because it is so painful for her to go outside. Her behavior is also checking but it involves looking at every scrap of paper she comes across to see if one of her friends or family has left her a personal message. A mutual friend who was trying to help her by walking with her one time asked her, “Do you really think that a friend would leave a note for you on the street in the gutter.” The friend with OCD just looked down and cried.

I am so glad that my own symptoms were so short lived but I also hope that this new study will lead to the possibility of earlier intervention and perhaps head of the disorder–at least for schizophrenia.

This is scary to a person with working memory problems, namely me, as it suggests that my decision, perhaps even important ones, are not a result of choice but of expedience. I like to think that everything I do represents who I am and, more importantly, who I want to be. I believe the conclusion from the study based on what I do know about the way working memory functions. There is another down side to this and I’ll pursue it in the next post…

What has changed? It was a little book known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now in its fourth version. This DSM-IV, used by most physicians and health care workers in North America, categorizes disorders by symptomology and with it comes a rather novel idea in the world of mental health and this is the concept that if you don’t have symptoms–you don’t have the disorder. This means, for example, if you have been diagnosed with ADHD and you work in a high stimulation environment, say as a firefighter, and don’t exhibit symptoms, technically you don’t have ADHD. You can, of course, at some point have symptoms and then you once again have ADHD. But the diagnosis is not something that is going to be with you for the rest of your life nor is it your defining characteristic. The label is separate from the individual.

A few months ago I interviewed the Director of the Learning Center at one of Canada’s most prestigious independent schools and she told me she tells students with a diagnosis that they own the label and are free to use it as they will. At the time, I remember appreciating the simplicity and innate compassion in what she said.

But what am I getting at here? It is this–the DSM-IV has taken the witch doctoring out of psychiatric treatment by removing all the psycho-analytic terms from common practice, and it has made the labelling process, and the shame that can go with it, temporary and practical. The primary purpose of the DSM in the first place was not to create labels for patients but to create a common language amongst mental health practitioners.

The manual is not new.  It has been around in some form or other since 1950 but now it is employed by almost everyone in the field, at least in North America.  And in Europe, there is a similar tool known as the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems.

New ideas about neuroplasticity mean that there are now effective and permanent treatments from many disorders, acquired and innate.  Finally, we have been freed from this notion that if you have a mental disorder, the best you can hope for is symptom alleviation.  Now you can be made well and whole again.  A diagnosis is no longer a label for life but the beginning of a treatment program leading to a cure.

Dr. Alloway, one of the leading researchers in the working memory, said that Twitter provides an endless stream of information but that it is also quite succinct so you don’t have to process the information. “Therefore,” Dr. Alloway said, “Your attention span is being reduced and you are not engaging your brain and improving neural connections”

Dr. Alloway has conducted many studies about working memory and believes that it is far more important than IQ when it comes to living in the world and that it is the real foundation for learning.

She said, “It doesn’t matter if your mother left school at 15 or got a PhD, it’s a level playing field. Not only does working memory have a profound impact on every aspect of our working lives but now there is exciting evidence that we can train it and improve it.”

The subjects were 25 children with ADHD. The study is the latest from the team of Joni Holmes Ph.D and Susan Gathercole Ph.D who have been performing independent research examining the impact of Cogmed training on subjects with ADHD and working memory problems.