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Keeping the brain nimble in older adulthood may be as simple as playing a video game, according to researchers who compared the thought-process benefits of crossword puzzles with a computer program that increased users’ mental speed and agility.

“It seems some remodeling of the brain is taking place, but we need to figure out exactly which parts of the brain are undergoing functional improvements,” added Wolinsky, who has no financial stake in the video game used in the research.

The video game centers on quickly identifying a type of vehicle and matching its symbol with the correct road sign among a circular array of possibilities. The player must succeed three out of every four tries to advance to the next level, which speeds up the process and adds more distractions.

Participants who played the video game scored significantly higher than those in the crossword puzzle group on tests involving executive function such as concentration, agile shifting from one mental task to another, and information processing speed. The mental improvement in the video game group ranged from 1.5 to nearly seven years compared to those doing crossword puzzles, the investigators found.

“It’s really interesting to be able to demonstrate that these more challenging kinds of tasks … showed a significant benefit compared to crossword puzzles,” said Galvin, also a professor of neurology and psychiatry. “The nature of the brain is that even later in life, we can still remodel it. This suggests we have an opportunity to make a real impact on older adults in terms of their mental ability.”

Many believe that humanity’s caffeine addiction has wrought a lot of benefits. Earlier in the week, historian Mark Pendergrast told us about how coffee (and caffeine) helped Western civilization “sober up” enough to get down to business. And Jerry Seinfeld claimed coffee has made us a more productive society.

But is there any science behind the idea that caffeine, by way of coffee, makes us better workers? And what exactly is caffeine doing to our tired brains?

Of course, there’s a huge amount of variation in how caffeine affects individuals, which depends on genetics, tolerance and other factors. But several small studies have shown that at low doses (between 100 and 250 mg), caffeine improves alertness and mental performance, especially in people who are already tired. Neuroscientists report that it makes us more supportive of each other in social situations. And one study even found that higher caffeine consumption helped reduce the risk of workplace accidents.

As with all drugs, there is such a thing as too much caffeine. According to a 2001 Institute of Medicine report, 600 mg of caffeine (or six cups of coffee) will bring on negative cognitive effects, otherwise known as the jitters, in most people — including Kramer from Seinfeld. And some people are so sensitive to caffeine that one cup will bring on nervousness and irritability, rather than the alertness that most of us feel.

The Secret To Finding Meaningful Work

“We have entered a new age of fulfillment,” writes the philosopher Roman Krznaric, “in which the great dream is to trade up from money to meaning.”

For most of human existence, he says, people were too busy trying to survive to “worry about whether they had an exciting career that used their talents and nurtured their well-being.” But now as material wealth has grown, people are going up the and seeking fulfillment.

While Krznaric is more hopeful than grinning and bearing, he’s careful to note common career-planning pitfalls, like valuing salary above all else, worshiping prestige, or clinging to a notion of passion.

Instead, Krznaric says, grow a vocation. He drops a quote attributed to Aristotle–“Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation”–that reminds us of something productivity master Bob Pozen once told us: You need to not only know what you’re best at, but what skills your organization, your industry, and the world are looking for.

In this way, a vocation is not something to be found like a pot of gold at the end of the career-quest rainbow, but a process to be cultivated.

Krznaric puts it succinctly:

A vocation is a career that not only gives you fulfillment–meaning, flow, freedom–but that also has a definitive goal or a clear purpose to strive for attached to it, which drives your life and motivates you to get up in the morning.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;
If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same.
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build’em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling in Rewards and Fairies, cited in You Can Master Life

Confidence. It is an attribute we seek to have and look for in others, especially those in positions of leadership. Yet, time and time again, we meet executives who lack a confident presence. (We also encounter those who are overly confident — to the point that they are blinded by it — but that is a topic for another time). What many fail to realize is that confidence is dynamic and not a static emotion. Just like a physical muscle that needs exercise to grow stronger, a leader’s confidence requires continuous attention.

Face the Facts: To strengthen your confidence, first face the facts. When you look to your past, you’ll realize that successes often outweigh failures. And, more importantly, that you survived through the failures and gleaned priceless lessons along the way. Your track record provides an inventory of what has happened over the long run, which you can then balance against what you fear may happen in the short term.

Focus: With your track record as a foundation, it is helpful to focus on your strengths while managing your weaknesses. Most leaders are very strong in a few competencies, average in the majority of competencies, and weak in a few. Successful leaders focus on leveraging their strengths and managing their average/weak areas so that they do not become a deterrent to their effectiveness.

Faith: It is not by accident that the Latin root of the word “confidence” is con fidere, which translates to “with faith.” The ultimate faith is a belief in the unseen. Leaders are called to create vision and change for the future out of uncertainty — fundamentally, they operate on a level of faith that helps give purpose, strength, and trust to the path that they carve out for their organizations.

Confidence is a constant strengthening exercise. Like a well-conditioned muscle, it needs to be challenged and it also needs relaxation. Facts, focus, and faith each on their own may not get you there. But when you leverage all three in an integrated way, your confidence will absolutely grow.

The article is written for managers, but the concepts are generally applicable to anyone who finds themselves lacking in confidence. 

“SOVEREIGN in tastes, steely-eyed and point-on in perception of risk, and relentless in maximisation of happiness.” This was Daniel McFadden’s memorable summation, in 2006, of the idea of Everyman held by economists. That this description is unlike any real person was Mr McFadden’s point. The Nobel prizewinning economist at the University of California, Berkeley, wryly termed homo economicus “a rare species”. In his latest paper* he outlines a “new science of pleasure”, in which he argues that economics should draw much more heavily on fields such as psychology, neuroscience and anthropology. He wants economists to accept that evidence from other disciplines does not just explain those bits of behaviour that do not fit the standard models. Rather, what economists consider anomalous is the norm. Homo economicus, not his fallible counterpart, is the oddity.

Examples mentioned in the article include:

• [T]he “people” in economic models have fixed preferences, which are taken as given. Yet a large body of research from cognitive psychology shows that preferences are in fact rather fluid.

• People value mundane things much more highly when they think of them as somehow “their own”: they insist on a much higher price for a coffee cup they think of as theirs, for instance, than for an identical one that isn’t [the “endowment effect”].

• Cognitive scientists have also found that people dislike losing something much more than they like gaining the same amount [“loss aversion”].

• Unlike homo economicus, real people are strongly influenced by such things as the order in which they see options and what happened right before they made a choice.

• Pumping people with oxytocin, the so-called “love hormone”, has been found to make them much more generous in games where they have to decide how much of their money to entrust to another person who has no real incentive to return any of it.

Much of this may be alien to modern-day economists, but it is in line with the conception that other disciplines have of human decision-making. Psychologists have long known that people’s choices and preferences are influenced by others. Biologists have a much clearer understanding of altruism and kindness, whether to kin or strangers, than economists, who typically emphasise the dogged pursuit of self-interest.

Taking the path Mr McFadden urges might also lead economists to reassess some articles of faith. Economists tend to think that more choice is good. Yet people with many options sometimes fail to make any choice at all: think of workers who prefer their employers to put them by “default” into pension plans at preset contribution rates. Explicitly modelling the process of making a choice might prompt economists to take a more ambiguous view of an abundance of choices. It might also make them more sceptical of “revealed preference”, the idea that a person’s valuation of different options can be deduced from his actions. This is undoubtedly messier than standard economics. So is real life.