Researchers wanted to know why we are not getting smarter than we are given the adaptive evolutionary process. Their findings suggested that for every gain in cognitive functions, there is a price to pay elsewhere.

For instance, among individuals with enhanced cognitive abilities – such as savants, people with photographic memories, and even genetically segregated populations of individuals with above average IQ – these individuals often suffer from related disorders, such as autism, debilitating synaesthesia, and neural disorders linked with enhanced brain growth.

Also included in the research was the use of drugs like Ritalin, which only help people with lower attention spans, whereas people who don’t have trouble focusing can actually perform worse when they take attention-enhancing drugs.

University of Warwick psychology researcher Thomas Hills said: “If you enhance your ability to focus too much, and end up over-focusing on specific details, like the driver trying to hide in your blind spot, then you may fail to see another driver suddenly veering into your lane from the other direction.”

The research, entitled ‘Why Aren’t We Smarter Already: Evolutionary Trade-Offs and Cognitive Enhancements,’ is published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Brain shrinkage is typical of Alzheimer’s disease. Previous studies hinted at the role that nutrition may play in staving off the disease, but this study, the first of its kind, measured 30 different blood nutrient levels, reflecting a much wider range of nutrients, and adds specificity to the findings.

“This approach clearly shows the biological and neurological activity that’s associated with actual nutrient levels, both good and bad,” said Maret Traber, a principal investigator with the Linus Pauling Institute and co-author on the study.

“The vitamins and nutrients you get from eating a wide range of fruits, vegetables and fish can be measured in blood biomarkers,” Traber said. “I’m a firm believer these nutrients have strong potential to protect your brain and make it work better.”

The study group included elderly people with an average age of 87 with no special risk factors for memory or mental acuity.

The most favorable cognitive outcomes and brain size measurements were associated with two dietary patterns – high levels of marine fatty acids, and high levels of vitamins B, C, D and E. Trans-fatty foods were associated with the worst cognitive performance.

The hypnosis was performed on breast cancer and thyroid patients. ”In all of these procedures local anaesthesia is feasible but not, on its own, sufficient to ensure patient comfort,” says Professor Roelants from the Department of Anaesthesiology at the Cliniques Universitaires St. Luc, UCL, Brussels, Belgium.

“In addition to reducing drug use and hospital stay time, being able to avoid general anaesthesia in breast cancer surgery is important because we know that local anaesthesia can block the body’s stress response to surgery and could therefore reduce the possible spread of metastases,” said Professor Roelants.

The anesthesiologists use eye fixation, progressive muscle relaxation, or the retrieval of a pleasant memory to focus a patient’s attention on one particular point, enabling a modified state of consciousness, with a different perception of the world.

“There is still a lot of debate around the exact mechanism that allows hypnosis to reduce pain perception,” said Professor Roelants,” but what it absolutely clear is that it does so. The result is that one third of thyroidectomies and a quarter of all breast cancer surgery carried out at the UCL hospital are performed under local anaesthetic with the patient under hypnosis.”

The anesthesiologists have confirmed that, regardless of sex or age, and if the patient is motivated, ready to co-operate, and trusts the doctors, hypnosis will work. It can also be applied to surgical patients who undergo carotid artery surgery, inguinal hernia, knee arthroscopy, gynaecological surgery, ophthalmology, ear nose and throat, plastic surgery and egg retrieval for fertility treatment.

The research findings were presented June 12, 2011 at the European Anaesthesiology Congress in Amsterdam.

“We know this strategy works, and it works in sports,” says sports psychologist Antonis Hatzigeorgiadis. But Hatzigeorgiadis and fellow researchers wanted to know more – specifically, what makes it work better, and in what circumstances.

Researchers at the Department of Physical Education and Sport Sciences at the University of Thessaly found that different self-talk cues work differently in different situations.

For tasks requiring fine skills or for improving technique “instructional self-talk,” such as a technical instruction (“elbow-up” which Hatzigeorgiadis coaches beginner freestyle swimmers to say) is more effective than “motivational self-talk” (e.g., “give it all”), which seems to be more effective in tasks requiring strength or endurance, boosting confidence and psyching-up for competition.

Also, probably because it improves concentration, self-talk has a greater effect on tasks involving fine skills (such as sinking a golf ball) rather than gross skills (e.g., cycling). The researchers also found that self-talk is more effective for learning new tasks rather than well-learned tasks, because it is easier to improve at the early steps of learning.

The main goals behind self-talk—like other techniques such as visualization to “rehearse” a performance or meditation to improve focus and relaxation—are twofold, says Hatzigeorgiadis: “to enhance your potential; and to perform during competition in terms of your ability and not less.”

The five soldiers in the study, aged 25 to 40 years, experienced marked relief from stress and depression, and saw improvement in their relationships and quality of life.

“Even though the number of veterans in this study was small, the results were very impressive,” said Norman Rosenthal, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical School and the study’s senior researcher. “These young men were in extreme distress as a direct result of trauma suffered during combat, and the simple and effortless Transcendental Meditation technique literally transformed their lives.”

Rosenthal hypothesizes that Transcendental Meditation helps people with PTSD because regular practice produces long-term changes in sympathetic nervous system activity, as evidenced by decreased blood pressure, and lower reactivity to stress. “Transcendental Meditation quiets down the nervous system, and slows down the ‘fight-or-flight’ response,” he said. People with PTSD show overactive fight-or-flight responses, making them excellent candidates for Transcendental Meditation.

Rosenthal points out that there is an urgent need to find effective and cost-effective treatments for veterans with combat-related PTSD. “The condition is common, affecting an estimated one in seven deployed soldiers and Marines, most of whom do not get adequate treatment. So far, only one treatment—simulation exposure to battleground scenes—has been deemed effective, but it requires specialized software and hardware, trained personnel and is labor intensive.”

The details of the pilot study were published in the June 2011 issue of Military Medicine (Volume 176, Number 6).

“Psychiatrists seem to place more value in the influence placebos wield on the mind and body,” says McGill University Psychiatry Professor and Senior Lady Davis Institute Researcher Amir Raz, who led the survey.

“While most physicians probably appreciate the clinical merits of placebos, limited guidelines and scientific knowledge, as well as ethical considerations, impede open discussion about the best way we may want re-introduce placebos into the medical milieu,” says Raz. He adds, “This survey provides a valuable starting point for further investigations into Canadian physicians’ attitudes towards and use of placebos.”

“There’s good evidence to support using mind-body therapies clinically,” said lead author Aditi Nerurkar, MD, Integrative Medicine Fellow, Harvard Medical School and BIDMC. “Still, we didn’t expect to see provider referral rates that were quite so high.”

The study shows that attitudes about healing are changing and that the use of complementary medicine is on the rise. This is especially true for patients who are sicker and are seeking alternatives to their failed traditional treatments.

“What we learned suggests that providers are referring their patients for mind-body therapies as a last resort once conventional therapeutic options have failed. It makes us wonder whether referring patients for these therapies earlier in the treatment process could lead to less use of the health care system, and possibly, better outcomes for these patients,” said Nerurkar.

“In greener settings, we find that people are more generous and more sociable. We find stronger neighborhood social ties and greater sense of community, more mutual trust and willingness to help others.

“In less green environments, we find higher rates of aggression, violence, violent crime, and property crime—even after controlling for income and other differences,” Kuo said. “We also find more evidence of loneliness and more individuals reporting inadequate social support.”

Additional findings by Kuo include:

• Access to nature and green environments yields better cognitive functioning, more self-discipline and impulse control, and greater mental health overall.
• Less access to nature is linked to exacerbated attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms, higher rates of anxiety disorders, and higher rates of clinical depression.

If that isn’t convincing enough, Kuo says the impacts of parks and green environments on human health extend beyond social and psychological health outcomes to include physical health outcomes.

• Greener environments enhance recovery from surgery, enable and support higher levels of physical activity, improve immune system functioning, help diabetics achieve healthier blood glucose levels, and improve functional health status and independent living skills among older adults.
• By contrast, environments with less green space are associated with greater rates of childhood obesity; higher rates of 15 out of 24 categories of physician-diagnosed diseases, including cardiovascular diseases; and higher rates of mortality in younger and older adults.

Because of this strong correlation between human health and green environments, Kuo encourages city planners to design communities with more public green spaces in mind, not as mere amenities to beautify a neighborhood, but as a vital component that will promote healthier, kinder, smarter, more effective, more resilient people.

“Tai chi appears to be a safe alternative to low-to-moderate intensity conventional exercise training in patients with HF,” says Gloria Yeh, MD, MPH, a physician in Division of General Medicine And Primary Care at BIDMC and an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Research and Education in Complimentary and Integrative Medical Therapies at Harvard Medical School.

“Tai chi is safe and has a good rate of adherence and may provide value in improving daily exercise, quality of life, self-efficacy and mood in frail, deconditioned patients with systolic heart failure.”

The ancient Chinese exercise has already been suggested to be helpful for a variety of medical issues, including hypertension, balance, and musculoskeletal disease, including fibromyalgia.

The validity of such data is upheld by the fact that cultural background, national institutions, language and religion are relatively constant across a single country. While still not absolutely perfect, as the States are not identical, comparing the different areas of the country gave a much more homogeneous population to examine rather than a global sample of nations.

Comparing U.S. states in this way produced the same result. For example, the raw data showed that Utah is ranked first in life-satisfaction, but has the 9th highest suicide rate. Meanwhile, New York was ranked 45th in life satisfaction, yet had the lowest suicide rate in the country. Even considering factors such as age, gender, race, education, income, marital status and employment status produced the same correlation.

The researchers believe the key explanation that may explain this counterintuitive link between happiness and suicide rates draws on ideas about the way that human beings rely on relative comparisons between each other.

University of Warwick researcher Professor Andrew Oswald said: ”Discontented people in a happy place may feel particularly harshly treated by life. Those dark contrasts may in turn increase the risk of suicide. If humans are subject to mood swings, the lows of life may thus be most tolerable in an environment in which other humans are unhappy.”

Professor Stephen Wu of Hamilton College said: ”This result is consistent with other research that shows that people judge their well-being in comparison to others around them. These types of comparison effects have also been shown with regards to income, unemployment, crime, and obesity.”