How to Save Your Brain By Playing Dumb Word Games

If it is dumb, why should I do it?

Because you are going to live into your late eighties or nineties, and you want to
have all your cognitive (senses and memory) skills. See, fifty-percent of seniors past
85 live with Alzheimer or other forms of dementia. No good.

What about helping your brain now – in the present?

Ready? Word games, learning to improve your working vocabulary by regularly

using your dictionary, playing crossword puzzles, and maintaining social
relationships with verbal folks, create COGNITIVE RESERVE in your brain.

A great working memory NOW, improves your grades and tests in school, and
extends to winning promotions in your career. It is a scientific reality.

Active Braining

CR – Cognitive Reserve means you have the result of an active brain. Reading,
learning and thinking creates a buffer against disease related dementia like
Alzheimer and Multiple Sclerosis. We suggest being a lifelong learner now is a gift
to your brain later.

Who Says So

The Cognitive Reserve study appears in Neurology, the medical journal of the
American Academy of Neurology June 15, 2010. Lead author is James Sumowski,
of the Kessler Foundation. The results have been repeated by other scientists.

See the accompanying editorial by Pennsylvania State University professor Peter A.

Arnett who said, “There is the potential that people can improve their Cognitive
Reserve to reduce or prevent cognitive (mind) problems later.”

Folks with Cognitive Reserve live with other problems, but do not develop loss of
memory and difficulty in learning until their nineties – or NOT at all. That is a
blessing.

The secret is a mentally active lifestyle. It can overcome brain Atrophy

(degeneration, wasting away and decline) in mind functioning. So it helps now
and in your senior years.

Placebo Effect is Real as a Heart …

Many scientific articles in the past disparaged the Placebo Effect. They just did
not believe in it. They called it just the power of suggestion, as if that was nothing.

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The power of suggestion is a powerful force in influencing, persuading and
convincing people, which is what most of do all our lives. Hypnosis which is
approved by the American Medical Association is generated by the offering
of accepted suggestions by our Nonconsciousness.

Hypnotic suggestions have proven in effective in relieving and removal of pain,

weight loss, removal of phobias.

Latest Science

The brain’s reward system helps drive the Placebo Effect. Google: Dr. A. Jon
Stoessi of Pacific Parkinson Research Center, British Columbia, August 4, 2010.

The U.S. Federal Food And Drug Administration fully accepts the Placebo Effect.
Drug companies must prove by hard evidence they new product has a greater
validity to the public than the typical 30% Placebo Effect. If not, no approval.

When a physician or nurse suggests to a patient who is part of a test group, that
they have a decent change of getting the REAL treatment (not the placebo), it
raises their expectations by keeping them guessing.

Seventy-Five Percent Chain

Hearing from medical personnel that they had a 75% of receiving an active drug
(not saline solution or a sugar pill) physically causes Dopamine (neurotransmitter)
to flow in their brain.

Seventy-five percent is a magic number, Dopamine does is NOT produced by the

patient’s brain when they are told their chances are either 25%, 50% nor 100%.
Placebo works when you keep them guessing.

Dopamine

What is the chemical key to your brain’s reward system?

Answer: Dopamine. What is the Scientific Principle? It is the patient’s expectations

that directly regulate the strength of the Placebo Effect. How come? It causes the
brain’s Reward System to become active.

The number 1 form of Reward is to be healed and repaired, but second is to

experience an Expectation of Improvement, which is an Expectation of Reward.

Get this: scientists tracked the release of Dopamine using PET scans. The results
indicate the patient’s expectation of receiving the active drug produces the amount
of Dopamine released in the brain, after they took the Placebo.

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The placebo is directly related to the expectation, which releases the
neurotransmitter – Dopamine.

Bottom line

When the patient is told the OUTCOME is certain (100%) – there is no good
reason to have an expectation of reward. When the suggestion is you have a 25%
or even a 50% change, you do not get excited with expectation.

The magic number for brain activity in the form of the expectation of reward,
is 75%. Question: does this Placebo Principle of 75% influencing, persuading and
convincing other folks to expect to win, apply to your career, industry or business?

What does it take to activate the Reward pathways located in the Nucleus
Accumbens and Ventral Tegmental Area? What is the Tipping Point (critical mass
and chain reaction) to trigger the flow of Dopamine – the reward neurotransmitter?

Could it be the 75% expectation?

See ya,

copyright © 2010 H. Bernard Wechsler

Question: would you own a serious competitive advantage over your peers if you
could read-and-remember triple the knowledge in articles, reports and specialty
books, while they could hardly finish one?

We have a small number of free – no-strings-attached reports on the secrets of speed

reading. Find us and ask for your copy. www. speedlearning.org

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