"concentration" news and stories

Attention fellow bloggers, desk jockeys, students and anyone else who's chained to a computer all day: eating strawberries and flaxseed can help.

Lifehack.org tells us twenty foods and drinks that will help boost productivity, including essentially any kind of fruit, water and green tea, sunflower seeds and lowfat yogurt.

Flaxseed may sound intimidating, but it's pretty easy to add it to tons of foods, and its chock-full of health benefits like better concentration and lowering of LDL (bad) cholesterol. (To remember which cholesterol is which, I remember "LDL" as lousy cholesterol, and "HDL" as happy cholesterol. Silly, but it works).

My roommate recently bought flaxseed and ground it up in our coffee bean grinder, so we sprinkle a little in everything we can: oatmeal, omelets, yogurt, pasta, smoothies...the list is endless. If it's easier, you can also add flaxseed oil, but a tablespoon or two a day will do it. Then, just keep your fluids up and your heart rate steady, and you'll be a workin' machine.

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The other day, Andrew posted on a BBC story about UK schools considering using Omega-3 supplements to improve students' behavior and performance. The BBC article cites a year old study, and now The Daily Mail reports on more recent findings that show fish oil to be more effective than Ritalin in treating children with ADHD. Groups of seven- to 12-year-olds were given six capsules of fish oil daily over the course of several months. By the end of a seven month period, researchers found that nearly half of the group showed better concentration and performance in school. Researchers also compared the results to studies done with Ritalin and Concerta and found fish oils to be more effective, the Daily Mail reported. The results of the study are to be published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.

The next time I want to convince a friend that vanilla cake is actually far superior to chocolate cake, I'm going to give them a cup of coffee first. New studies done by Australian researchers show that having a cup of coffee before hearing an argument makes you more likely to agree with it, provided that the argument is convincing.

Caffeine, for a brief time, will increase your ability to concentrate and take in new information. When voluntary subjects were given a persuasive argument on a controversial topic after having coffee, they were more likely to agree with it than they were before they had the drink. They were also far more likely to be persuaded than the non-caffeinated control group. The subjects who had the caffeine processed all the information that was given to them in the argument, instead of relying on their preconceptions and simply ignoring the bits that they did not want to hear.

The researchers said that this information could be of great use to advertisers, who should attempt to get their ads seen in the mornings, when people are likely to be drinking coffee. It also means that if you want to convince someone that you're right about vanilla cake versus chocolate cake, or any subject, you should probably invite them out to breakfast.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]

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Who didn’t hear the phrase “Don’t chew gum at school!” when they were growing up? Of course, this sort of instruction always encourages a few people to flout the rules and chew gum even more frequently. The main reason that gum chewing was frowned upon was that students would probably stick the used wads under the desk or on the floor, where other unsuspecting students might come into contact with them. For some reason, though, the teachers always claimed that the reason was that students couldn’t pay attention while chewing gum. This was a ridiculous excuse since people are more than capable of engaging in other activities while they chew, like walking, for example.