What makes us stupid

Researchers at Cal Berkeley changed the sleep schedule for hamsters every three days for a month and the hamsters produced 50 percent fewer neurons than they did on a normal sleep schedule. A recent study performed by Environmental Health Perspective, a journal published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, concluded that " children in high-fluoride areas had significantly lower IQ scores than those who lived in low-fluoride areas. In businesses around the world, it's fairly common to toss ideas around at meeting to help stimulate creative and productive activity.

But a Virginia Tech study revealed that " group settings can diminish expressions of intelligence, especially among women. A wide-ranging study by the University of Manitoba found that more than five percent of all mental disorder is caused by being spanked or other forms of childhood physical abuse.

If you believe the U. Army, PowerPoint presentations are making us stupid. Commanders in the Army told the New York Times in that the Microsoft program " stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making.

A study by the journal Pediatrics showed that children who watched fast-paced cartoons like SpongeBob performed poorer at a mental test than those who watched an educational show or those who drew.

In addition to the numerous other harmful effects secondhand smoke causes, children who are exposed to enough of it could end up with lower IQs and lower achievement in school and on test scores , according to Central Michigan University. The Yale Stress Center concluded this year that stressful situations "can reduce the number of connections between neurons in the brain and impair the ability of managing tense events in the future ," as reported by The Morning Call.

Cumulative stress, Yale found, can cause a decrease of gray matter in the brain's prefrontal cortex and "can impair the brain's ability to store information and respond to the environment. If you're an older individual, taking Ambien a sleeping pill and Xanax used to ease stress and anxiety could become extremely harmful, according to doctors at AARP.

Watching Television. This keeps you in a state of perpetual mental locomotion, which scatters your thinking. Reading a book, on the other hand, teaches you to focus your attention. The control and mental discipline that is acquired by reading a long sequence of pages is necessary for richness of thought. This includes abstract vocabulary, reflection, inductive problem solving, critical thinking, and imagination. The bottom line is, before going to bed pick up the book by your nightstand, instead of reaching for the remote control.

Staying Up Late. Not getting enough sleep makes you dumb because it makes it harder to learn. Jane E. Brody explains that in order to learn you need to pay attention, and then your brain needs to encode the information. First, not getting enough sleep impairs attention. Second, new memories and pathways are encoded in the brain during sleep, and adequate sleep is needed for those pathways to work as they should.

Specifically, cortisol can prevent memories from forming and it can even kill neurons. The hippocampus region of the brain—which is where long term memories are stored—suffers the most from cortisol exposure. In fact, the hippocampus has been known to shrink under extended periods of acute stress.

Therefore, for the good of your IQ , join a yoga class, learn to meditate, join the people doing Tai Chi in the park, or find some other effective way to relieve stress. Eating junk Food. It is very helpful for all the people on the web. Please continue to keep us informed like this. Thank you for sharing. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. SRR is google making us stupid Uncategorized.

Carr Nicholas. Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet.

The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. But it also took something away. The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in , the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device.