This is a pretty good article about natural vs supplemental Vitamin D intake: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/vitamin-d-sun-exposure-supple...
The original article linked to a scientific study in which nocturnal animals (rats) were exposed to light over long time periods, which caused the rats to get stressed and depressed.
Apparently, the article's author concluded from this that diurnal animals like humans must get stressed and depressed by long periods of darkness. Probably true, but certainly not supported by the cited study. And it had nothing to do specifically with sunlight, per se.
With regard to the "natural vs supplement" argument, some people are very pale and susceptible to skin cancer. It may not be safe for everyone to get enough Vitamin D through natural means alone.
What cause most Vitamin D issues today is that people are NOT enough in the sun...
I personally dislike the sun and used to avoid it a lot (because I am more or less white and it burns me fast), now I have a really bad Vitamin D deficiency and was obliged by the medics to take supplements.
I stopped avoiding the sun... But it is still not really enough (I am programmer... I wake up in a dark room, walk to work in the sun, but the walk is 5 minutes, and then I stay indoors until night, when I walk back home, without any sun, thus my total sun daily is 5 minutes :/)
I fully admit that teasing out correlation and causality is very difficult in situations like this.
"elite athletes...perform better than the rest of us in yet another way. These athletes excel...in how fast their brains take in and respond to new information -- cognitive abilities that are important on and off the court." [1]
[1]: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130318151634.ht...
I've seen much less as research professors or computer programmers. This could also be because the time commitments required in school for these topics is inconsistent with what's required to do sports competitively.
I'm not saying that exercise is bad. I'm positive that it's good. It's just my perception that those who exercise more in their youth tended not to be the best students.
If the article actually compared the benefits of fitness to the benefits of playing music - now that could speak to your question.
What about playing an instrument? Don’t you have to use right and left brain for a stringed instrument?
Yes. That has clear cognitive functions that do crossover. Especially learning to play and read the music at the same time. But exercise is number one, diet number two and then social interaction. These are the important things for brain function.edit: maybe being good at both is a sign of an innate skill for abstraction, or maybe it's another way for a student to dive into a subject and grow new abstractions and reinforce his brain.
Now I think there may be some causality. Learning music is an intro to binary math. (2 half notes in a whole note. Two quarter notes in a half note.)
I haven't seen a good empirical study to try and split this apart.
In that regard, it would also be similar to the exercise comparison in that any single exercise is likely to have very limited impact, but a rounded exercise routine provides much stronger benefits.
Fallacy right there.
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While the presence "neuroscience" should be enough to set off your bullshit detector, the fact the the author couldn't go two paragraphs without undermining his own point indicates that the title should really be "Nothing to see here". Luckily the author throws in a gratuitous and creepy reference to female orgasms to make sure readers won't feel ripped off having wasted 15 seconds reading this crap.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/brainwashed-neuroscience...
goes into some additional detail about what we can know, and can't know, from current neuroscience research. The best of current neuroscience research helps us know what is flat wrong about earlier preliminary findings from neuroscience research, while the worst of current neuroscience research feeds on the hype hooks in the science news cycle
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174
to tell us things we want to believe even if they aren't true. As always, we have to discern what's established fact and what's speculation in reports about new research findings.
As for "listening to Mozart," that strikes me as an extremely passive (i.e., cognitively untaxing) activity. I've always been highly skeptical of the putative benefits of listening to music, because the brain is extremely good at "tuning out" ambient sounds. I'd be more inclined to believe there's some benefit if the listener actively attempts to listen and perform another task simultaneously. Trying to keep attention focused on two very complex tasks at once is challenging; simply kicking back and letting music stream in the background is not. I'm sure there are creative benefits to listening to complex and stimulating music, but one needs to be actively engaged in the music.
My lay theorizing on this: certain types of music (and much of the classical repetoire) helps relax the mind. We spend far too much of our time being grossly overstimulated, and I've found that a great many of the typical stimulations in a Western experience (advertising, technology, popular music, city streets, etc.) simply wear at me. Nature, nonlinear landscapes, classical (or earlier) Western music (there is some awfully annoying non-western music, Indonesian gamelan being very high on the annoyance list for me) help immensely in this regard.
Just as strength training is stimulus for growth that comes during recovery, I suspect music may be part of the downtime which helps the brain and/or emotional / stress aspects of the body recover. Meditation or similar practices might operate similarly.
Total armchair theory here, but it's what I've got.
EDIT: I wrote the above when the title was "Gym workouts and sunbathing do more for your brain than crosswords and Mozart" and the link was to a different URL.
Cognitive training outperforms crossword puzzles: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
Crossword puzzles aren't protective against cognitive decline: http://portalsaudebrasil.com/artigospsb/idoso068.pdf [PDF link]
I don't think they make me clever either, but they do calm me down and help me settle into whatever area I'm in. That helps me take the edge off of what I'm about to say/present. It's not quite the same as staring at a flashlight (a la tablet/laptop).
The paper and pencil in my hands have a dramatic effect on my mood. Add a cup of coffee on the side and I'm a completely different person after a crossword. I'd say a noticeably more lucid (even without the added coffee), calm and collected individual.
Personally I've lived 61 degrees north for most of my life and I don't think SAD has been a problem for me.
- I've suspected and read from others that all the fuzz about classical music is mostly the result of some kind of high culture bias - I have a hard time believing that people have studied the effects of classical music to the same extent as something like rock or techno. I wouldn't be surprised if studies show that listening to your favourite music has overall more benefits compared to listening to classical music whether you like it or not.
"...the brain of nocturnal rats generates a stress response to a long-day photoperiod, contributing to depression..."
Somebody must have extrapolated from this result that, since humans are diurnal, long periods of darkness would cause us stress and depression.
There is no direct mention of Vitamin K (or for that matter, any healthful benefits of the sun) in the cited study.