Your Weekly Dose of #5ThoughtsFriday: A description of what we think is important at BIAMD
  #5ThoughtsFriday
Edition
02/15/2019
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"Making Your Best Move"

The 2019
Brain Injury Association of Maryland Annual Conference

Registration is now
​LIVE!
Here are the 5 things we thought were
worth sharing with you this week:
Does anyone remember the 1980s public service ad where the guy fries an egg and says: 


It’s a cool and memorable commercial, and it may have actually turned one or two people away from drug use. In fact, it’s such a great commercial that the Partnership for a Drug Free America remade an  extreme version  of the ad in 2008.
From these ads, not to mention a great deal of scientific research, it is clear to most people that addictive drugs  cause unnatural reactions in the human brain—reactions that sometimes lead to strange behaviors.

But doesn’t love sometimes cause similarly strange behaviors?
Indeed it does. In fact, love has probably started more schoolyard fights, adult feuds, and outright wars than every other catalyst combined—money,  alcohol , drugs,  politics sports , etc. And thanks to some recent brain-imaging research, we now know why: Put simply, the effects of love on the brain are strikingly similar to the effects of drugs on it. So yeah, whether it’s love or drugs, we’ve got the cracked egg, the hot frying pan, the sizzle and the stupidity.

CLICK HERE but no guarantee it will explain what happened yesterday on your Valentine's Day.
A small dietary supplement manufacturer—Quincy Bioscience of Madison, Wisconsin—has advertised for years that Prevagen, a synthetic version of a protein originally found in jellyfish, has been “clinically shown to improve memory” and can reduce memory problems associated with aging.

Last January the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the New York State attorney general filed a lawsuit charging Quincy and its two co-founders with fraudulent advertising. The company had asserted that its claims were verified by a “large double-blind placebo-controlled trial” which showed “statistically significant improvement in word recall, in executive function, and also in short-term memory.” The study measured improvements in the treatment group over the placebo group in nine cognitive tasks.

Quincy said they conducted more than 30 analyses in various sub-groups in a search to justify its claims and found a few positive findings on isolated tasks performed by small subgroups of patients.

The federal district court judge who heard the case noted that the treated patients showed no significant improvement in the study as a whole or in most of the subgroups. But he found that two of the subgroups showed improvement in memory after taking the supplement. 

CLICK HERE to find out about the lawsuit disputing the claims.
A number of things need to happen for a child to learn to read and to comprehend what she reads, says Nadine Gaab, PhD, an HMS associate professor of pediatrics who heads a research unit in the Laboratories for Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Infants must learn to process sounds. By early kindergarten or preschool, the child must learn phonological processing, which is the ability to manipulate the sounds of language, such as adding or deleting sounds to make words. The child must then learn to read single words and develop the vocabulary necessary to read and understand sentences and paragraphs, and, finally, master the ability to read fluently with reasonable speed.

“She has to decode words, she has to have the vocabulary once she decodes the words, she has to know meaning of the words, and she has to read fluently so that she can comprehend a whole paragraph,” says Gaab. “These all have to come together for successful reading comprehension.”

CLICK HERE to read more on the connection.


Each year The Heritage Players , a non-profit community theater group performing on the grounds of Spring Grove Hospital Center, stage a concert of a famous musical or movie. And each year, the Heritage Players donate a portion of the proceeds of the concert to a local non-profit organization serving the community.


This year the Heritage Players are singing Stephen Sondheim's
and have selected
the Brain Injury Association of Maryland
to be the recipient of this year's donation.

to buy tickets and
find out more about this unique concert event.

BIAMD would wholeheartedly like to thank The Heritage Players for selecting the Brain Injury Association of Maryland to be this year's recipient of such a wonderful community reinvestment.

2) What We Are Reading That You Might Enjoy
Why are we obsessed with the things we want and bored when we get them? 
Why is addiction "perfectly logical" to an addict? 
Why does love change so quickly from passion to indifference? 
Why are some people diehard liberals and others hardcore conservatives? 
Why are we always hopeful for solutions even in the darkest times--and so good at figuring them out? 
The answer is found in a single chemical in your brain: dopamine. Dopamine ensured the survival of early man. Thousands of years later, it is the source of our most basic behaviors and cultural ideas--and progress itself. 

Simply put, it is why we seek and succeed; it is why we discover and prosper. Yet, at the same time, it's why we gamble and squander. 

From dopamine's point of view, it's not the having that matters. It's getting something--anything--that's new.

In The Molecule of More, George Washington University professor and psychiatrist Daniel Z. Lieberman, MD, and Georgetown University lecturer Michael E. Long present a potentially life-changing proposal...

CLICK HERE for More

 If you decide to buy this book, please don't forget to use  Amazon Smile  and select the Brain Injury Association of Maryland as your donation beneficiary.
5) Quote We Are Contemplating...

  A Stumble May Prevent a Fall ."

Stay Safe. Stay Warm.
HAVE A TERRIFIC WEEKEND. 

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Got a story we need to follow or share? Send it to info@biamd.org .  

Want to find a story from a past #5ThoughtsFriday blog posts, visit the archive by clicking HERE .

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  Which bullet above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Let us know! Just send a tweet to  @biamd1 and put #5ThoughtsFriday in there so we can find it.

  Thanks for reading! Have a wonderful weekend.