Meditation For ADHD Teens & Adults

Mindfulness meditation significantly helped three-quarters of the participants in a study described here by Dr. David Rabiner: Because of the wide spread interest in new ADHD interventions — particularly non-pharmaceutical approaches — I try to cover credible research in this area when ever I come across it. I was thus pleased to learn about a very interesting study of mindfulness meditation as a treatment for adults and adolescents with ADHD that was published in the Journal of Attention Disorders.

Although medication treatment is effective for many individuals with ADHD, including adolescents and adults, there remains an understandable need to explore and develop interventions that can complement or even substitute for medication. (…)

In recent years, mindfulness meditation has been used as a new approach for stress reduc­tion and incorporated into the treatment for a variety of psychiatric dis­orders, including depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. Of special rele­vance to the treatment of ADHD are findings that meditation has the potential to regulate brain functioning and attention. For example, research has demon­strated that mindfulness meditation can modify attentional networks, modulate EEG patterns, alter dopamine levels, and change neural activity.

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Rejection is Physical Pain

Randolph E. Schmid: The pain of rejection is more than just a figure of speech. The regions of the brain that respond to physical pain overlap those that react to social rejection, according to a new study that used brain imaging on people involved in romantic breakups.

“These results give new meaning to the idea that rejection `hurts,'” wrote psychology professor Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan and his colleagues. Their findings are reported in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Co-author Edward Smith of Columbia University explained that the research shows that psychological or social events can affect regions of the brain that scientists thought were dedicated to physical pain. In a way, we’re saying “it’s not a metaphor,” Smith said in a telephone interview.

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Video Games For Exercise

By Nancy Shute: Parents who fear that video games are turning their children into tubs of lard can now say with confidence that playing Dance Dance Revolution burns more calories than sitting on the couch.

In fact, active video games like Dance Dance Revolution give kids a better workout than walking on a treadmill at 3 mph, according to new study in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. And even the overweight kids say they liked playing the games.

However, a 3-mph walk is pretty darned leisurely, and the children who played Wii Boxing didn’t manage to get their metabolic rate above their walking rate. Dance Dance Revolution bested Nintendo Wii Boxing when 39 children ages 9 to 13 were dancing to the rock chestnut “Thirteen.”

Earlier studies have evaluated home video games as exercise options, but this study also looked at commercial video games like SportWall, in which students interact with wall panels equipped with motion sensors, that are becoming increasingly popular for school phys ed classes.

Three commercial games were among the four that burned the most energy —SportWall; Trazer, a laser-tag-like game; and LightSpace Bug Invasion, in which players stop lighted bugs on a mat.

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The Trouble With Plastics

From All Things Considered by John Hamilton: Most plastic products, from sippy cups to food wraps, can release chemicals that act like the sex hormone estrogen, according to a study in Environmental Health Perspectives.

(R)esearchers bought more than 450 plastic items from stores including Walmart and Whole Foods. They chose products designed to come in contact with food — things like baby bottles, deli packaging and flexible bags, says George Bittner, one of the study’s authors and a professor of biology at the University of Texas, Austin.

Then CertiChem, a testing company founded by Bittner, chopped up pieces of each product and soaked them in either saltwater or alcohol to see what came out. The testing showed that more than 70 percent of the products released chemicals that acted like estrogen. And that was before they exposed the stuff to real-world conditions: simulated sunlight, dishwashing and microwaving, Bittner says. Continue reading »

A Monkey Can Do That?

By Joanna Zelman: Professor John David Smith and Michael Beran trained macaques, which are of the Old World group (native to Africa, Asia, and Europe), to play a computer game where if they got an answer right, they received a treat. A wrong answer meant no treat, but a brief pause before the next question. But there was a third option — the question mark. By selecting the question mark, the screen skipped the present question, considered too hard, and moved on to the next.

The macaques responded in the exact same way as humans — the monkeys chose to skip the tricky questions. Meanwhile, Dr. Smith told the BBC, “Monkeys apparently appreciate when they are likely to make an error… They seem to know when they don’t know.”

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