همه ما لحظه هایی را شاهد بوده ایم که در یک مسابقه شانه به شانه و در آخرین ثانیه ها ورزشکاران به خود فشاری به ظاهر ناممکن می آورند تا بتوانند مسابقه را برنده شوند. اکنون یک براورد علمی جدید چنین القا می کند که این قابلیت ورزشکاران نتیجه نیاز مغز آنها به برنده شدن است.

دکتر جو کوربت از دانشگاه پورتسموث [انگلستان]، دریافت که رمز آن فوران انرژی در بدن بی رمق ورزشکاران در لحظه های تعیین کننده در این است که مغز به انبارهای ذخیره انرژی اناروبیک [ناهوازی – زنده و فعال بدون دسترسی به غذا و هوا] بدن دست می برد.

یافته ها نشان داد حتی هنگامی که ورزشکاران به مرحله خستگی مفرط جسمی رسیده بودند، آنها هنوز قادر بودند تا به منابع ذخیره شده انرژی اناروبیک دسترسی بیابند. سامانه انرژی اناروبیک تامین کننده انرژی در هنگام عدم وجود اکسیژن بوده و برای تامین سریع و توانمند انفجارهایی از انرژی به کار می رود.

دکتر کوربت، یک مدرس ارشد فیزیولوژی کاربردی ورزش در دانشکده ورزش و علم تمرین، این مطالعه را با این هدف انجام داد تا دریابد که دقیقا چه چیزی در یک دوچرخه سوار کلید می خورد تا او بتواند در یک سابقه شانه به شانه با کسی سریعتر برود.

در این مطالعه، چاپ شده در "جورنال اف مدیسین اند ساینس این اسپرتز اند اکسرسایز،" (مجله علمی پزشکی و علم ورزش و تمرین) ورزشکارانی که با کسی مسابقه می دادند قادر بودند فورانی از انرژی در خود بیابند تا عملکرد آنها را 7/1 درصد بهبود دهد. در رده های بالای ورزشی این [میزان بهبود عملکرد] می تواند تفاوت میان برد و باخت باشد.

دکتر کوربت گفت: "بیشتر ورزشکاران می دانند که آنها در هنگام رقابت می توانند بهتر عمل کنند، اما تا این هنگام ما نمی دانستیم که دقیقا چرا. ما [اکنون] دریافته ایم که ورزشکاران می توانند برای شکست دادن رقیب به منابع انرژی اناروبیک خود دسترسی بیابند." [ادامه در زیر ...]

[در زیرتر کتابی منتشر شده در سال 2010 توسط یک استاد دانشگاه گلف کانادا معرفی می شود که در آن وی توضیح می دهد ورزشکاران برای برنده شدن باید چگونه مغز خود را آموزش دهند...]

It's All in the Mind - How an Athlete Wins Head-To-Head Competition

University of Portsmouth News | Oct 7, 2011

We’ve all seen the moment an athlete pushes themselves at the last second to try and win a head-to-head race, and now a sports scientist has discovered how they do that.

Dr Jo Corbett from the University of Portsmouth has found the secret to that winning burst lies in the exhausted athlete’s brain tapping into the body’s anaerobic energy stores.

The results showed that even when an athlete had reached physical fatigue they were still able to dip into stored anaerobic energy. The anaerobic energy system provides energy in the absence of oxygen and is used for fast, powerful bursts of energy.

Dr Corbett, a senior lecturer in applied exercise physiology from the Department of Sport and Exercise Science, conducted a study to find out what exactly triggers a cyclist to go faster when they are competing against someone head-to-head.

In his study, published in the Journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, sportsmen racing against someone else managed to find an extra burst of energy that increased their performance by 1.7 percent. At top level sport this can be the difference between winning or being unplaced.

Dr Corbett said: “Most sportspeople know they perform harder and better when they are competing, but until now we didn’t know precisely why.

“We’ve found out that an athlete is able to dip further into their anaerobic energy reserves in order to beat their opponent.

“Whenever you do exercise you’re likely to think ‘how much am I willing to hurt myself?’ and there’s usually a point which holds you back because you don’t want to do yourself irreparable damage. But when racing someone head-to-head the athlete’s brain can manipulate this signal and keep on going.”

Participants were instructed to complete a 2000 metre cycle in the quickest time possible, in front of a computer screen showing an avatar of themselves doing the ride on a virtual race-course. They had to repeat this exercise on five different occasions.

On the final occasion the cyclists were told to race against another individual behind a partition whose avatar was also being projected onto the same virtual race course in front of them. Despite thinking they were racing someone else – participants were in fact competing against their own previous best time.

Out of 14 cyclists participating 12 of them performed significantly faster in the final race - when they believed they were competing against an opponent. They finished with a burst of speed to ensure their victory and the average speed of most increased from 38.4km/h per hour to 39km/h. Dr Corbett said: “In each race the participants cycled vigorously until they were completely exhausted but it was only in the last race, when they were unknowingly competing against themselves, they were able to race even harder.

“When an athlete finishes exercising they are almost always left with a physiological energy reserve but our results show that head-to-head competition provides the motivation to tell the brain to eat into a greater part of this reserve.”

Prof Tells How to Train Your Brain in New Book

April 13, 2010 – University of Guelph News Release

Never mind age, social status or IQ. Anyone can fine-tune their brain to perform at a higher level, according to a new book by a University of Guelph neuroscientist.

It's not unlike training muscles in the body: for optimal results, you focus on strengthening the parts that enhance performance the most, said Mark Fenske, a professor in Guelph’s Department of Psychology who co-authored The Winner’s Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success with fellow Harvard-trained brain expert Jeff Brown.

The Guelph launch of the book will be May 12 at 7 p.m. at The Bookshelf in downtown Guelph.

In the brain, boosting function means learning how to flex the parts involved in operations that are critical for success, such as those related to focus, memory, adaptability, emotional control and self-awareness. And the more you learn about the brain and how to best exercise it, the more you can improve its condition.

“In the past, it was believed that the brain was relatively ‘hard-wired,’ that the capacity of the brain to change and develop was severely limited past adolescence,” Fenske said.

“We now know that is not true. Each of our brains retains the characteristic of neuroplasticity — the capacity for changes to its physical structure and function — well into adulthood.”

The Winner’s Brain includes strategies for reshaping the brain and improving function in areas associated with success, such as motivation, optimal risk-taking and resilience. It also explores the brain science behind such factors and includes interviews with famous and not-so-famous people who have developed “winning brains.” Subjects include blues legend B.B. King, actor Laura Linney, Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug, FBI agents and even cab drivers on the streets of London.

“Across the board, what these people have in common is that they have trained their minds to reach their maximum potential,” said Fenske. This involves teaching the brain to do everything from focusing to shut out crowds of thousands to bouncing back from rejection with passion and determination.

His role in the book involved identifying the latest science behind “the winning brain.” A U of G professor since 2007, he uses neuroimaging and studies human behaviour to examine how the brain’s attention and emotion systems can enhance performance. Brains that perform successfully really do “light up” differently in brain scans and perform more efficiently, he said.

In the book, Fenske discusses how the structure and function of the brain is altered as a result of how it’s used. For example, it’s known that cab drivers in London have more developed hippocampuses — the area of the brain involved in memory and spatial navigation — than other people. And musicians who are able to improvise can shut down the portions of the brain correlated with self-consciousness in the process of composing on the fly.

The book’s message is simple: anyone can transform their thinking, feelings and behaviour and even the physical structure of their brain. “We all have a brain, and how it functions depends in part on what you choose to do with it,” he said.

الکساندر پوپ، شاعر انگلیسی، درک درستی داشت هنگامی که در سده 1700 نوشت: "امید می جوشد در سینه انسان – تا به ابدیت."

اکنون مطالعه علمی تازه ای در انگلستان کشف کرد که انسان ها سخت افزاری شده اند تا خوشبین باشند، حتی زمانی که رو در روی واقعیتی تیره و تار قرار دارند.

دانشمندان دانشگاه کالج لندن، با هدایت تلی شرت، گروهی از کسان را مورد مطالعه قرار دادند که به آنها گفته شده بود این احتمال وجود دارد که واقعه ای تلخ را تجربه نمایند. اما، این پژوهش دریافت که بیشتر افراد بسیار خوشبین باقی ماندند.

دانشمندان می گویند: این مطالعه نشان می دهد چرا مردم بیشتر هنگام بی پروا، ساده لوح یا بیش از حد آرزومند/جاه طلب به نظر می رسند.

به گفته دکتر شرت: "ما تمایل داریم تا بیشتر از راه اطلاعات مثبت درباره آینده بدانیم. این به این دلیل است که بخش هایی از پیشانه مغز ما در ردگیری و رمزگذاری اطلاعات مثبت درباره آینده بسیار توانمند است. [اما] هنگامی که شما اطلاعات منفی درباره آینده دریافت می کنید، قطعه های پیشانی مغز شما آن اطلاعات را با کارآمدی رمزگذاری نمی کنند."

دکتر شرت همچنین نویسنده کتابی است با عنوان "پیش انگاری خوشبینانه،" که در آن وی توضیح می دهد چگونه مغز انسان برای امیدوار بودن سیم کشی سخت افزاری شده است.

وی افزود: "اکنون این به این معنا نیست که ما اطلاعات مثبت یا منفی را به یاد نمی آوریم، این تنها به این معنا است که ما برای به روزرسانی باورهایمان اطلاعات مثبت درباره آینده را می گیریم." [ادامه در زیر ...]

Hope Springs Eternal, Scientists Say

Emily Bourke
ABC-AsiaPacific | October 10, 2011

Photo: Study finds human beings are largely optimistic, even in the face of a darker reality. (Matt Cardy: Getty Images)

English poet Alexander Pope got it right in the 1700s when he wrote "Hope springs eternal in the human breast".

A new British study has found human beings are hard-wired to be optimistic, even in the face of a darker reality.

Scientists led by Tali Sharot at the University College London studied a group of people who were told they were likely to experience something bad.

The results found most people stayed highly optimistic.

And the researchers say the study shows why people are often foolhardy, naive or overly ambitious.

"We tend to learn more from positive information about the future," Dr Sharot said.

"The reason is that regions of the front of your brain are very good at tracking and coding for positive information about the future.

"When you get negative information about the future, the frontal lobes don't code that information as efficiently."

Dr Sharot is also the author of a book called The Optimism Bias, which explains how the human brain is hard-wired for hope.

Audio: Human brain accentuates the positive (AM)

"Now it doesn't mean that we don't remember positive or negative information, it just means that we take positive [information] about the future in order to update our beliefs," she said.

"For example, if we learn that the probability of suffering from a certain disease is actually less than what we expected, we take that information and we update that belief of how likely we are to suffer a medical disease.

"But if we get negative information about the future, for example, everyone knows that divorce rates are about 50 per cent, we don't take that information as relevant to us and don't change or estimate on how likely we are to get divorced."

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

Even in the face of mounting negative information about the likelihood of illness, accident or even heartbreak, people still cling to the positive.

"It's some sort of denial. We think that we will be okay. This is not going to happen to us. You can say it's some sort of denial," Dr Sharot said.

But she warned downplaying the negative comes at a cost.

"We might not take the precautionary actions needed," she said.

"For example, you might not go to medical screening as often as you should because you think you are going to be okay.

"You might not buy insurance, and when we talk about financial markets, what happens is the optimism bias of all of the individuals come together into a bubble and actually a bias that is much, much bigger, and in that situation it can be ever more dangerous."

Dr Sharot says the research also provides insights into mental illness.

"If we know how the healthy brain works, we get insight into what happens in mental illness such as depression.

"The second thing we learn is that optimism doesn't change your beliefs. It will actually make you more likely to take actions to protect yourself."

Looking on the bright side, the findings show being optimistic makes us more adventurous and productive, lowers stress and anxiety, and promotes health and wellbeing.

The research is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

First posted October 10, 2011 10:59:29

Brain Imaging Reveals Why We Remain Optimistic in the Face of Reality

EurekAlert! | Public release date: 9-Oct-2011

For some people, the glass is always half full. Even when a football fan's team has lost ten matches in a row, he might still be convinced his team can reverse its run of bad luck. So why, in the face of clear evidence to suggest to the contrary, do some people remain so optimistic about the future?

In a study published today in Nature Neuroscience, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London) show that people who are very optimistic about the outcome of events tend to learn only from information that reinforces their rose-tinted view of the world. This is related to 'faulty' function of their frontal lobes.

People's predictions of the future are often unrealistically optimistic. A problem that has puzzled scientists for decades is why human optimism is so pervasive, when reality continuously confronts us with information that challenges these biased beliefs.

"Seeing the glass as half full rather than half empty can be a positive thing – it can lower stress and anxiety and be good for our health and well-being," explains Dr Tali Sharot. "But it can also mean that we are less likely to take precautionary action, such as practising safe sex or saving for retirement. So why don't we learn from cautionary information?"

In this new study, Dr Sharot and Professor Ray Dolan from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, together with Christoph Korn from the Berlin School of Mind and Brain have shown that our failure to alter optimistic predictions when presented with conflicting information is due to errors in how we process the information in our brains.

Nineteen volunteers were presented with a series of negative life events, such as car theft or Parkinson's disease, whilst lying in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which measures activity in the brain. They were asked to estimate the probability that this event would happen to them in the future. After a short pause, the volunteers were told the average probability of this event to occur. In total, the participants saw eighty such events.

After the scanning sessions, the participants were asked once again to estimate the probability of each event occurring to them. They were also asked to fill in a questionnaire measuring their level of optimism.

The researchers found that people did, in fact, update their estimates based on the information given, but only if the information was better than expected. For example if they had predicted that their likelihood of suffering from cancer was 40%, but the average likelihood was 30%, they might adjust their estimate to 32%. If the information was worse than expected – for example, if they had estimated 10% – then they tended to adjust their estimate much less, as if ignoring the data.

The results of the brain scans suggested why this might be the case. All participants showed increased activity in the frontal lobes of the brain when the information given was better than expected, this activity actively processed the information to recalculate an estimate. However, when the information was worse than estimated, the more optimistic a participant was (according to the personality questionnaire), the less efficiently activity in these frontal regions coded for it, suggesting they were disregarding the evidence presented to them.

Dr Sharot adds: "Our study suggests that we pick and choose the information that we listen to. The more optimistic we are, the less likely we are to be influenced by negative information about the future. This can have benefits for our mental health, but there are obvious downsides. Many experts believe the financial crisis in 2008 was precipitated by analysts overestimating the performance of their assets even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary."

'Understanding the brain' is one of the Wellcome Trust's key strategic challenges. At the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, clinicians and scientists study higher cognitive function to understand how thought and perception arise from brain activity, and how such processes break down in neurological and psychiatric disease.

Commenting on the study, Dr John Williams, Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust, said: "Being optimistic must clearly have some benefits, but is it always helpful and why do some people have a less rosy outlook on life? Understanding how some people always manage to remain optimistic could provide useful insights into happens when our brains do not function properly."

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The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust, the British Academy and the German Academic Exchange Service.

Contact: Craig Brierley
c.brierley@wellcome.ac.uk
44-207-611-7329
Wellcome Trust