According to the study’s lead researcher Dr. Nuno Sousa in an article in Science magazine, “Behaviors become habitual faster in stressed animals than in the controls, and worse, the stressed animals can’t shift back to goal-directed behaviors when that would be a better approach.”

Take heart though, even though your brain may have rewired itself for the worse, it still has the potential to unlearn these habits and learn new more advantageous ones.

Dr. Sousa said, “The brain is a very resilient and plastic organ. Dendrites and synapses retract and reform and reversible remodeling can occur throughout life.”The

Am I self-centered?

The truth is that some decades ago when I was in my last year at university and going through a bout of real, black-dog depression the psychiatrist I was seeing fired me saying I wasn’t cooperating with him. I went home one weekend and my mother said to me, “You just can’t be always thinking of yourself.” I then telephoned the psychiatrist and begged to be taken back saying that I would try to do whatever he asked me. He agreed and within days I seemed back to normal. Were my friends right then, that depressives and anxiety sufferers are self-centered?
I think not. Just because getting out of self is effective with these disorders doesn’t mean sufferers are self-centered. Besides, the trouble with that line of reasoning is that if you believe that then everyone who has depression or anxiety or panic attacks is self-centered and what kind of world would that be?
Well it would be a world not unlike that described in Erewhon by Samuel Butler in the 19th century in which criminals are treated as being ill and confined to asylums and citizens with mental illness are put in prison. Erewhon, in its earlier chapters, appears to be a utopia but this is not the case and on close reading it is actually a satire. In other words putting the mentally ill in prison is a joke.

The world of mental disorders, in my experience is a world where only the very frontiers are now being mapped and where neuroscientists are currently revising almost everything we know about how our brains work. Besides if you believe you are self-centered when you are suffer from depression or anxiety then everyone who is depressed or anxious or has panic attacks is self-centered and this would be a world without compassion. It would be a world I wouldn’t want to live in. It would be an Erewhon and Butler called it Erewhon because if you look at it backwards, it is nowhere.

The subjects were 25 children with ADHD. The study is the latest from the team of Joni Holmes Ph.D and Susan Gathercole Ph.D who have been performing independent research examining the impact of Cogmed training on subjects with ADHD and working memory problems.

I have never forgotten this and although I can still do a number on myself over some mistake or misplaced object, I rarely let someone else get away with it. My reply to the mutual friend was simply, “Whether I got it from him before or not is irrelevant. What I said was that I don’t have it now.”

My close friends know that this sort of statement means the issue is closed, certainly as far as I’m concerned but the odd one, usually someone who doesn’t know me well will persist. It happened to me a few weeks ago. Someone whom I have known for a long time but not well asked me to ask another mutual friend to call him when I saw him next. I stated that I would not remember. He persisted, more-or-less along the referred guilt path with a statement like, “What do you mean you won’t remember?”

I replied, “I don’t know how I can make it any clearer. I wont remember.”

He still wasn’t buying it and said, “Okay I’ll call you and remind you.”

Now I had him and I knew as sure as I knew I wouldn’t remember the first message that he wouldn’t remember to call to remind me and sure enough he didn’t.

I don’t really get angry in these circumstances…unless pressed. At least I have stopped getting angry, for the most part, at myself. Oh it does happen occasionally but it passes quickly but not nearly as quickly as any referred guilt from someone else. I guess you could say this is my contribution to my own self esteem and when I am diligent about it, it works.

The rats in the study were taught to run a maze and then half of them were made to swim for 20 minutes and then run the maze again. Those who had been dunked made less mistakes than those that had remained dry.

In addition, Yan noted that chronic stress suppresses the the transmission of glutamate in the prefrontal cortex of male rodents and has the opposite effect of acute stress resulting in more mistakes in the maze. Apparently, estrogen receptors in female rodents makes them more resilient to chronic stress than male rats. But you already knew this didn’t you.

Another study assessing Cogmed is scheduled to start this fall under the supervision of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children researcher Rosemary Tannock. This study in Ontario’s demonstration school will track 120 students who are severely learning disabled. According to Tannock, “The big question is not just whether Cogmed can improve working memory but will it really improve classroom performance.” A further study using Cogmed is set to begin with students at the University of Toronto.