Remember – by Dr. Lisa Genova
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Memory is often viewed as one thing—either you have a good memory, or you don’t. At best, a lot of people have a vague idea of selective memory. But, the reality is much more complex—and much more interesting.
Dr. Genova lays out clearly and simply the various different kinds of memory, how they work, and how they fail. Some of these kinds of memory operate on completely different principles than others, and/or in different parts of the brain. And, it’s not just “a memory for faces” or a “memory for names”, nor even “short term vs long term”. There’s working memory, explicit and implicit memory, semantic memory, episodic memory, muscle memory, and more.
However, this is not just an interesting book—it’s also a useful one. Dr. Genova also looks at how we can guard against failing memory in later years, and how we can expand and grow the kinds of memory that are most important to us.
The style of the book is very conversational, and not at all textbook-like. It’s certainly very accessible, and pleasant to read too.
Bottom line: memory is a weird and wonderful thing, and this book shines a clear light on many aspects of it—including how to improve the various different kinds of memory.
Click here to check out Remember (we recommend to do it now before you forget!
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Beetroot Juice & Caffeine Work Better Than Either Alone
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Beetroot has many beneficial properties, which we’ve written about before:
Beetroot For More Than Just Your Blood Pressure
…and as for caffeine, it’s a mixed bag but for most people, the benefits of moderate caffeine use outweigh the risks:
Caffeine: Cognitive Enhancer Or Brain-Wrecker?
Now, caffeine’s less desirable effects can be mitigated somewhat by pairing it with l-theanine, as we’ve also discussed before:
L-Theanine: What’s The Tea? ← l-theanine also has many wonderful properties of its own, aside from its complementary effects when taken alongside caffeine
So, what’s the deal with caffeine and beetroot juice?
A performance-enhancing balancing act
Caffeine raises blood pressure, while beetroot lowers it, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
Researchers looked into the effects of caffeine and beetroot juice, together or separately, on athletic performance (in a 1000m run) in non-athletes.
They found:
- Caffeine alone enhanced second-run performance but not the first.
- Beetroot juice alone improved first-run performance but led to a performance decline after recovery.
- The caffeine + BJ combo resulted in the best initial and repeated 1000m run performances.
Specifically, they also noted:
- Caffeine alone caused higher blood lactate levels post-exercise.
- Beetroot juice increased muscle oxygenation by 25% during runs.
- The caffeine + BJ combo led to the highest post-exercise heart rate improvements.
You can read the paper in full here:
Caffeine and Beetroot Juice Optimize 1,000-m Performance: Shapley Additive Explanations Analysis
Now, maybe you don’t have a 1000m run to do, let alone multiple ones back-to-back, but most of us could sometimes do with an energy boost during the day, and this seems like an excellent way to get it.
That said, caffeine timing can be important too; midday is generally the best time for it, because:
- of course it should not be too late in the day, because the elimination half-life of caffeine (4–8 hours to eliminate just half of the caffeine, depending on genes, call it 6 hours as an average though honestly for most people it will either be 4 or 8, not 6) is such that it can easily interfere with sleep for most people
- because caffeine is an adenosine blocker, not an adenosine inhibitor, taking caffeine in the morning means either there’s no adenosine to block, or it’ll just “save” that adenosine for later, i.e. when the caffeine is eliminated, then the adenosine will kick in, meaning that your morning sleepiness has now been deferred to the afternoon, rather than eliminated.
Another reminder that caffeine is the “payday loan” of energy. So, midday it is. No morning sleepiness to defer, and yet also not so late as to interfere with sleep.
See also: Calculate (And Enjoy) The Perfect Night’s Sleep
Want to learn more?
Check out:
The Best Form Of Sugar For Energy During Exercise
Enjoy!
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Are Squats the Ultimate Game-Changer?
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Dr. Jess Grochowsky, PT, DPT, MTC, CLT, CMPTP, says the answer is yes, and here’s why:
The most complete exercise
Squats are a powerful full-body exercise that targets legs, core, and (when weights are used) upper body. All in all, they enhance strength, mobility, metabolism, and joint health, making them essential for longevity and maintaining quality of movement throughout life.
In particular, they allow a much greater range of movement through more dimensions than most exercises do, meaning that (unlike a lot of more linear exercises) they build functional strength that sees us well in everyday life—mobility, joint control, and muscle stability.
Proper Squat Technique:
- The squat involves lowering the center of mass (which is slightly behind your navel and slightly down; exact position depends on your body composition and proportions) toward the floor.
- Use the “head to hips” principle to maintain a straight spine: as the head moves forward, the hips go back.
- Different foot positions (sumo, narrow, etc) target various muscles.
4 key variables to adjust squats:
- Base of support: the surface you stand on (firm vs unstable like a Bosu ball) affects stability and muscle engagement.
- Foot position: wide stances increase stability and target inner thighs and glutes; narrow stances focus more on quads.
- Weights: can use free weights, kettlebells, or bars. Adding weights increases intensity and can incorporate upper body exercises (e.g. bicep curls, overhead presses, etc).
- Squat depth: ranges from partial to deep squats, depending on functional goals.
Types of squats and variations given in the video:
- Firm surface squats: provide stability and allow even weight distribution.
- Unstable surface squats: engage smaller stabilizing muscles.
- Yoga ball squats: shift the center of mass backward, increasing quad and glute activation.
- Weighted squats: add resistance to increase muscle load and core stability (e.g. one-sided weights for oblique engagement).
- Dynamic weighted squats: incorporate quick movements, like kettlebell swings, for power and coordination.
- Single-leg squats: enhance balance and increase workload on one side of the body.
For more on all of these plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Take care!
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Healthy Cook’s Anti-Inflammatory Diet & Cookbook – by Dr. Albert Orbinati
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Chronic inflammation is a root cause of very many illnesses, and exacerbates almost all the ones it doesn’t cause. So, reducing inflammation is a very good way to stay well in general, reducing one’s risk factors for very many other diseases.
Dr. Orbinati starts by giving advice for adjusting to an anti-inflammatory diet, including advice on trying an elimination diet, if you suspect an undiagnosed allergy/intolerance.
Thereafter, he gives guidance on pantry-stocking—not just what anti-inflammatory foods to include and what inflammatory foods to skip, but also, what food and nutrient pairings are particularly beneficial, like how black pepper and turmeric are both anti-inflammatory by themselves, but the former greatly increases the bioavailability of the latter if consumed together.
The rest of the book—aside from assorted appendices, such as 8 pages of scientific references—is given over to the recipes.
The recipes themselves are, obviously, anti-inflammatory in focus. As one might expect, therefore, most are vegetarian and many are vegan, but we do find many recipes with chicken and fish as well; there’s also some use of eggs and fermented dairy in some of the recipes too.
The book certainly does deliver on its promise of flavorful healthy food; that’s what happens when one includes a lot of herbs and spices in one’s cooking, as well as the fact that many other polyphenol-rich foods are, by nature, tasty in and of themselves.
Bottom line: if you’d like to expand your anti-inflammatory culinary repertoire, this book is a top-tier choice for that.
Click here to check out Healthy Cook’s Anti-Inflammatory Diet & Cookbook, and spice up your kitchen!
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How Nature Provides Us With A Surprisingly Powerful Painkiller
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It’s well-known (at least to regular 10almonds-readers) that seeing nature, ideally green leaves and blue sky, improves our mood by stimulating production of serotonin.
See also: Neurotransmitter Cheatsheet
But it does a lot more.
Reducing the actual signals of pain
Researchers at the University of Vienna have discovered that viewing nature scenes (even if just on video) alleviates physical pain—not just in self-reported subjective assessments, but also by a reduction of the neural activity that signals pain:
❝Pain is like a puzzle, made up of different pieces that are processed differently in the brain. Some pieces of the puzzle relate to our emotional response to pain, such as how unpleasant we find it. Other pieces correspond to the physical signals underlying the painful experience, such as its location in the body and its intensity.
Unlike placebos, which usually change our emotional response to pain, viewing nature changed how the brain processed early, raw sensory signals of pain.
Thus, the effect appears to be less influenced by participants’ expectations, and more by changes in the underlying pain signals❞
This was tested against, varyingly, viewing an urban environment or viewing an indoor environment, neither of which gave the same benefits.
The setup of the experiment is relevant, so…
Matching soundscape accompanied each visual stimulus. The three pain runs had a total duration of 9 min each, during which one environment was accompanied by 16 painful and 16 non-painful shocks. Neuroimaging was used for all parts, and participants were exposed to all environments:
- First, a cue indicating the intensity of the next shock (red = painful, yellow = not painful) was presented for 2000 milliseconds (ms).
- Second, a variable interval of 3500 ± 1500 ms was shown.
- Third, a cue indicating the intensity of the shock was presented for 1000 ms, accompanied by an electrical shock with a duration of 500 ms.
- Fourth, a variable interval of 3500 ± 1500 ms followed.
- Fifth, after each third trial, participants rated the shock’s intensity and unpleasantness at 6000 ms each.
- Sixth, each trial ended with an intertrial interval (ITI) presented for 2000 ms.
They found that as well as the self-assessment reports being as expected (nature scenes reduced subjective experience of pain),
❝In summary, the multivoxel and region of interest analyses converged in showing that pain responses when exposed to nature as compared to urban or indoor stimuli were associated with a decrease in neural processes related to lower-level nociception-related features (NPS, thalamus), as well as in regions of descending modulatory circuitry associated with attentional alterations of pain that also encode sensory-discriminative aspects (S2, pINS).❞
In other words—to the extent that pain can be quantified objectively by neural imaging—the pain was also objectively reduced, much like with a chemical painkiller.
You can read the paper in full, here:
Nature exposure induces analgesic effects by acting on nociception-related neural processing
How to benefit from this
Well, first there is the obvious, “view nature“.
However, note the timescales involved in the testing periods: 2000 milliseconds is two seconds, and that was the intertrial interval used—the equivalent of a washout phase in an interventional trial (but a drug/supplement/diet washout is usually a number of weeks).
The fact that the test periods were a matter of seconds, and the intertrial period was also literally two seconds, this means:
It works quickly, and the effect disappears quickly, too.
In other words: if you want pain relief from nature, the good news is you can get it immediately while viewing nature, and the bad news is that you have to keep viewing nature to continue enjoying the painkilling effect.
So that’s a limitation, but it’s still clearly a very worthy option for a little respite from chronic pain now and again, for example.
Want to learn more?
We’ve written quite a bit about pain management, including:
- Before You Reach For That Tylenol…
- How To Stop Pain Spreading
- How To Dial Down Your Pain
- Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
- Get The Right Help For Your Pain
- The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
- Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief (When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might)
Take care!
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The Lies That Depression Tells Us
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In this short (6:42) video, psychiatrist Dr. Tracey Marks talks about 8 commonly-believed lies that depression often tells us. They are:
- “I don’t measure up”
- “No one cares about me”
- “I’m better off alone”
- “No one understands”
- “It’s all my fault”
- “I have no reason to be depressed”
- “Nothing matters”
- “I’ll never get better”
Some of these can be reinforced by people around us; it’s easy to believe that “no one understands” if for example the few people we interact with the most don’t understand, or that “I have no reason to be depressed” if people try to cheer you up by pointing out your many good fortunes.
The reality, of course, is that depression is a large, complex, and many-headed beast, with firm roots in neurobiology.
There are things we can do that may ameliorate it… But they also may not, and sometimes life is just going to suck for a while. That doesn’t mean we should give up (that, too, is depression lying to us, per “I’ll never get better”), but it does mean that we should not be so hard on ourselves for not having “walked it off” the way one might “just walk off” a broken leg.
Oh, you can’t “just walk off” a broken leg? Well then, perhaps it’s not surprising if we don’t “just think off” a broken brain, either. The brain can rebuild itself, but that’s a slow process, so buckle in:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to know more?
You might like these previous articles of ours about depression (managing it, and overcoming it):
- The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need
- Behavioral Activation Against Depression & Anxiety
- The Easiest Way To Take Up Journaling
- Antidepressants: Personalization Is Key!
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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Easy Quinoa Falafel
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Falafel is a wonderful snack or accompaniment to a main, and if you’ve only had shop-bought, you’re missing out. Plus, with this quinoa-based recipe, it’s almost impossible to accidentally make them dry.
You will need
- 1 cup cooked quinoa
- 1 cup chopped fresh parsley
- ½ cup wholewheat breadcrumbs (or rye breadcrumbs if you’re avoiding wheat/gluten)
- 1 can chickpeas, drained
- 4 green onions, chopped
- ½ bulb garlic, minced
- 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, plus more for frying
- 2 tbsp tomato paste
- 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
- 2 tsp nutritional yeast
- 2 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tsp red pepper flakes
- 1 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
- 1 tsp dried thyme
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Blend all the ingredients in a food processor until it has an even, but still moderately coarse, texture.
2) Shape into 1″ balls, and put them in the fridge to chill for about 20 minutes.
3) Fry the balls over a medium-high heat until evenly browned—just do a few at a time, taking care to not overcrowd the pan.
4) Serve! Great with salad, hummus, and other such tasty healthy snack items:
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in more of what we have going on today:
- Cilantro vs Parsley – Which is Healthier?
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits?
- What Matters Most For Your Heart?
- An Apple (Cider Vinegar) A Day…
- Hero Homemade Hummus Recipe ← perfect accompaniment!
- Tasty Tabbouleh with Tahini Recipe ← also a great option!
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
