Sleep And The Process Of Keeping Our Brains Healthy

• Stabilize your blood sugar, by eating hearty food (protein and fat) more often.
• Reduce refined carbs and increase fats and proteins.
• B-complex vitamin supplements can give you an immediate boost in alertness and mental clarity.
• Soak in an Epsom salt bath - might even help you get enough energy to exercise the next day.
• Drink more water than you usually do to help compensate.
• Exercise is the single best way to “take out the trash” in your body, and after staying up more hours than you should.

As you climb, less oxygen in your blood means less oxygen in your brain.

At 15,000 feet, your cognitive performance, mood, and central nervous system functioning start to lessen. In severe cases, being at high altitude for long periods or without first acclimatizing, you are at a higher risk for swelling of the brain, (high-altitude cerebral edema - HACE.)

If you ascend without proper acclimatization, at around 9,000 feet, your lungs may begin to swell because the blood vessels constrict. Symptoms include a persistent cough and labored breathing.

If the swelling in your lungs worsens, high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE) can occur. Symptoms are a bluish discoloration of the skin, rapid breathing, and fever. The most effective treatment is to descend immediately.

Drinking tea is good for the brain, helping regulate the age-related decline. It also strengthens the brain connections, the neural network inside the brain, making information processing more efficient.

Even coffee is said to be good to ward off the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

Anything that is bad for the heart is bad for the brain, including smoking cigarettes, or having a sedentary lifestyle, or having diabetes.

Your blood sugar, body mass index, diet and blood pressure all contribute to the health of your heart, and your brain.

Thomas Edison said that sleep is "a bad habit." Like Edison, we seem to think of sleep as an adversary and try to fight it at every turn. The average American sleeps less than the recommended seven hours per night, mostly due to electric lights, television, computers, and smartphones. 

However, we are ignoring the intricate journey we're designed to take when we sleep.

When we fall asleep, the nearly 86 billion neurons in our brain starts to fire evenly and rhythmically. Our sensory receptors become muffled at the same time.

The first stage of shallow sleep lasts for about 5 minutes.

Sweet foods can be more addictive than cocaine, one study found.

Over time, greater amounts of the substance are required to reach the same level of reward.

Even a single occasion of increased glucose levels in the blood can harm your brain. It can impair your memory and attention.

High sugar consumption causes inflammation in the brain. But, it can be reversed by following a low-sugar, low-GI diet.

• Get a good night's sleep or take a power nap after learning something new, to help retain and retrieve memories better. Sleep deprivation and acquisition of too much information will not help you save those memories.
• Get moving, to improve the flow of oxygen-rich blood in your brain and to trigger neuron growth and new connections in the brain - critical for memory.
• Improve your diet. Fats from food can build up the brain, resulting to poor blood flow.

Any system or device designed to aid memory:

• patterns of letters or words (common mnemonics)
• ideas (memory palace)
• associations (chunking)

Eggs have a lot of cholesterol compared to other foods. Although cholesterol in the blood is strongly related to heart disease, eating cholesterol is weakly associated with raising the cholesterol levels in your blood.

Eggs have other heart-protecting properties and eating it probably won't harm your heart.

• A chain email in the 1990s was responsible for the false belief that antiperspirant was raising the risk of breast cancer. 
• When researchers found higher ratios of aluminum in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, aluminum in antiperspirant was suspect. But it seems aluminum in antiperspirant is hardly absorbed by your skin.
  
  

In the case of information, reading several articles and sources on the same topic can create a lot of clutter. Because it creates internal struggles and questions:

• What sort of information is important?
• This post said this is important while another post said it wasn’t important. What information is relevant here?
• What information should I internalize and apply?

... for organizing information:

• Location: put the most relevant stuff to be within reach.
• Alphabet: for organizing lists of people and statistics, dictionaries, and official documents.
• Time: used when providing step by step instructions or when things have to be in chronological order.
• Category: organize information by similarity or relatedness.
• Hierarchy: organizing information that is used collectively to compare things.

People used to speak of being left or right-brain dominant (where the left brain is more logical and algorithmic, and the right brain more artistic and intuitive).

However, both hemispheres of your brain are involved in all of the complex work you do. The most effective thinkers are the ones who learn to rely on both their intuitive judgments as well as their reasoning.

The theory goes that emotions reflect a more primitive form of thinking and that good thinking is only logical.

However, when faced with risky decisions, it is possible to talk yourself into almost anything. But, even a little anxiety in that situation can provide information too valuable to ignore.

You can improve your grey matter by learning a new, complex skill like juggling.

The simple act of juggling has recently been linked with better brain function. A new study reveals that learning to juggle may cause certain areas of your brain to grow.

Even if it is just for 10 minutes before going to bed, you should be learning new stuff every day, a new skill, a new word, a new kind of idea or philosophy. Expose your brain to new frontiers.