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Brainstorm: The Spooky World of Mistra
John J. Medina Ph.D.
In the last entry I described how nature and nurture interact to produce specific behaviors in vervet monkeys. Do they interact in a similar way to produce human behaviors, too? The quick answer is “you bet,” but our big overweight brains so complicate the story that it will take two entries to really describe it.
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Brainstorm: Experiences Are Better Than Things
John J. Medina Ph.D.
My friend wanted me to explain the following comment, and quickly, because it was making him feel guilty.
“You’ve got three months with this gift,” I had just told him. We were out Christmas shopping for our spouses, and he was contemplating the purchase of a set of kitchen knives for his wife. “Just a quarter’s worth of goodness. After that, any blessing goes away.”
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Brainstorm: How to Take a Multiple Choice Test
John J. Medina Ph.D.
In this blog section, we are going to explore the science behind study habits. Most of these topics will concern myth busting, and we begin this segment with a whopper.
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Brainstorm: Violence, Videogames, and Learning to Say “I Don’t Know” – Part 1
John J. Medina Ph.D.
Confirmation bias is a term I have been thinking a lot lately, especially as the familiar guncontrol/ gunfreedom pugilists take their respective corners on the far sides of our televisions.
One particular subject has to do with the role violent videogames play — or do not play — in creating aggressive tendencies in the people who play them (particularly young males).
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Brainstorm: Violence, Videogames, and Learning to Say “I Don’t Know” – Part 2
John J. Medina Ph.D.
This is the second (and final) installment in a series examining the effects of videogames on aggressive behavior in the people who play them.
We just finished looking at a study suggesting that violent videogames represent a deep, causal risk factor for inciting violent behavior in kids — a loving parent’s worst nightmare. We are about to look at a second article, published right after the first, which says exactly the opposite.
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Brainstorm: A Tale of Two Video Clips
John J. Medina Ph.D.
I have spent a lifetime trying to understand the distance between a gene and a behavior. Using the lens of psychiatric disorders, I’ve spent most of my professional life as a private research consultant, primarily to the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, on issues related to mental health. Despite great strides made in the field by literally thousands of colleagues, I am here to report that the rocky terrain between behaviors and genes lies mostly unmapped. For that I blame two video clips, both featuring legendary golfer and famously troubled exhusband, Tiger Woods.
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Brainstorm: Brain Development, Part 1: Of Mops and Brain Cells and Human Behavior
John J. Medina Ph.D.
We have been discussing in equal measure the contributions that both natureand nurture make in the creation of human behavior. In this entry and the next, we are going to focus on the nature side of the discussion, summarizing a few features about how the human brain develops in the womb.
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Brainstorm: Brain Development, Part 2: We’ve Only Just Begun
John J. Medina Ph.D.
This is the second installment of a two-part series briefly summarizing salient characteristics of in utero (literally “in the womb”) human brain development. Here, we will concern ourselves with the nature side of the nature/nurture issue of human behavior.
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Brainstorm: Brain Rules
John J. Medina Ph.D.
12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School
- Exercise | Rule 1: Exercise boosts brain power.
- Survival | Rule 2: The human brain evolved, too.
- Wiring | Rule 3: Every brain is wired differently.
- Attention | Rule 4: We don’t pay attention to boring things.
- Short-tern memory | Rule 5: Repeat to remember.
- Long-term memory | Rule 6: Remember to repeat.
- Sleep | Rule 7: Sleep well, think well.
- Sensory integration | Rule 9: Stimulate more of the senses.
- Vision | Rule 10: Vision trumps all other senses.
- Gender | Rule 11: Male and female brains are different.
- Exploration | Rule 12: We are powerful and natural explorers.
Explore these brain rules and what they mean for you in John Medina’s best-selling book Brain Rules.
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Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the National Football League, Part 1: An Introduction
John J. Medina Ph.D.
This is all about head injuries and the National Football League. I have some mixed feelings writing about this subject mostly because — big surprise — it is not a pretty story.
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Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 10: The Tau of CTE, Continued
John J. Medina Ph.D.
In our last installment, I wrote about a protein called tau, which necessitated talking about salt. I said that when neurons suffer the types of injury associated with CTE, part of the damage occurs because of a change in salt distribution between the inside of a neuron and its immediate outer exterior.
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Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 11: Microglial Cells
John J. Medina Ph.D.
We are trying to understand the biology of CTE at the most intimate level possible, the level of cells and molecules. The last entry dealt with the tau protein and its role in mediating closed-head neural damage. In this installment, let’s consider the role of microglial cells, a little wisp of a cell type with a great big job.
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Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 12: Grump Factor
John J. Medina Ph.D.
I begin this entry on a sad note. While writing these last two installments in our series concerning CTE and the NFL, I found out about legendary linebacker Junior Seau’s suicide.
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Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 13: End of Regulation Play
John J. Medina Ph.D.
In my last column I talked about my skepticism about the relationship between head injuries, CTE, and mental illness. I promised that in this, my last installment in the series, I would elaborate on some of the gaps that need filling. As I endeavor to fulfill that promise, I’ll also provide some perspective for future research.
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Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 2: A History of Terms – CTE and Concussion
John J. Medina Ph.D.
The history of research into the relationship between head injuries and contact sports starts not with football, but with boxing.
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Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 3: A History of Terms – Characteristics of CTE
John J. Medina Ph.D.
Though repetitive closedhead injuries are often experienced in professional contact sports, many injuries are minor, with collisions involving the head an everyday experience of the sport. Collegiate football players can sustain anywhere from 400 to more than 2,400 head impacts per season, depending upon the player — and possibly his position. The athlete usually walks it off, or is examined and benched for a period of time, lives to play another day. Eventually he joins the NFL, retires, starts endorsing products, and, except for maybe gaining a few pounds, seems to suffer few ill effects.
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Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 4: The Physics of Head Trauma
John J. Medina Ph.D.
One fine afternoon in the autumn of 2010, Minnesota Vikings defensive end Ray Edwards executed one of the most dangerous acts you can do in football: He speared another player.
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Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 5: On the Matter of Damaging Neural Circuits
John J. Medina Ph.D.
In the last installment, we examined the forces capable of causing brain injury, but left out the most important question: What happens to brain tissues unlucky enough to experience those forces? Now it is time to face the biological facts. In this installment, we will talk about neurological tissue and closed-head injuries.
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Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 6: Memory Loss
John J. Medina Ph.D.
We are in the process of examining the relationship between neurological damage associated with repeated closed-head injuries and the behaviors of CTE. We’ve been using the example of spearing, illustrating the effects of this banned football behavior on the biological integrity of the human brain. We discussed how damage to one such neurological circuit, the Papez Circuit, can lead to chronic changes in mood. Here we discuss changes in three cognitive gadgets: executive function, memory processing, and motor control.
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Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 7: What Mops Have to Do With the NFL
John J. Medina Ph.D.
In the last few installments, we discussed some vulnerable regions of neurological real estate that suffer damage in afflicted athletes, and their association with changes in outwardly observable behavior. Unfortunately, this is only a partial list. Enough is now known that I could create three or four more installments of this blog and still not cover everything that is being researched.
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Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 8: CuttingEdge Nerves
John J. Medina Ph.D.
Armed with information from the last installment about nerve cells’ basic biology, we can now talk about how they get injured in a more informed fashion. That’s the subject of this post, and also the next two.
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Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 9: The Tau of CTE
John J. Medina Ph.D.
These next two entries all about a protein called tau, which you have probably never heard of before. To understand CTE, however, we need to understand some critical biology surrounding tau. And to do that, we have to discuss something of which you have heard all your life. To talk about tau, we have to talk about salt.
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Brainstorm: John J. Medina Biography
John J. Medina Ph.D.
John J. Medina, Ph.D., is director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University. He is a developmental molecular biologist whose research interests are focused on the genes involved in human brain development and the genetics of psychiatric disorders.
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Brainstorm: Nature and Nurture and Dogs
John J. Medina Ph.D.
It is easy to run across the intersection between nature and nurture in the everyday routines of life. You can even find it in a crisis, as the following true story relates.
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Brainstorm: Of Princesses and Football Players
John J. Medina Ph.D.
Sports-related head injuries are getting a lot of press these days. Learning from injuries sustained by prize fighters, hockey players, and American football players, researchers are beginning to understand there are severe consequences to sustained trauma on the mental life of professional athletes — even amateur, Saturdayafternoon athletes. Sports officials could do well to remember the cautionary tale I am about to relate here.
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