Mental health
fromPsychology Today
1 week agoCognitive Impairment After Psychosis
Recovery from cognitive impairment is possible, and new opportunities can arise despite challenges.
The assumption that difficulty with reading or writing signals lower intelligence or diminished leadership ability is not supported by evidence. Decades of research show little to no correlation between dyslexia and lower general intelligence.
The fighting hypothesis proposes that there is a so-called frequency-dependent maintenance of left-handedness. The main idea is that over the tens of thousands of years of human evolution, left-handers did have an advantage in fights due to a surprise effect. This gives them an evolutionary survival benefit since they win more fights.
US researchers found that engaging in intellectually stimulating activities throughout life, such as reading, writing or learning a new language, was associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia, and slower cognitive decline. The study author Andrea Zammit, of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said the discovery suggested cognitive health in later life was strongly influenced by lifelong exposure to intellectually stimulating environments.
Just consider a typical day in the life of a modern human: you glance at your phone while waiting for coffee to brew, skim headlines while half-listening to a podcast, mentally rehearse a client pitch while walking your child to school, reply "noted" on Slack during a meeting while updating a slide deck, check your bank balance while standing in line,
It might come as a surprise to learn that the brain responds to training in much the same way as our muscles, even though most of us never think about it that way. Clear thinking, focus, creativity, and good judgment are built through challenge, when the brain is asked to stretch beyond routine rather than run on autopilot. That slight mental discomfort is often the sign that the brain is actually being trained, a lot like that good workout burn in your muscles.
Artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning is making a difference in assistive technology to help restore movement for the paralyzed. A new study in the American Institute of Physics journal APL Bioengineering shows how AI has the potential to restore lower-limb functions in those with severe spinal cord injuries (SCIs) by identifying patterns in brain signals captured noninvasively via electroencephalography (EEG).