Are you preparing for a big test? If so, you may want to play some basketball in between hitting the books. Doctors are starting to find more and more information that suggests a connection between exercise and brain development. Judy Cameron, a scientist at Oregon Health and Oregon Health and Science University, studies brain development. According to her research, it seems that exercise can make blood vessels(管), including those in the brain, stronger and more fully developed. Dr. Cameron claims this allows people who exercise to concentrate better. As she says, "While we already know that exercise is good for the heart, exercise can really cause physical changes in the brain."

The effects of exercise on brain development can even be seen in babies. Babies who do activities that require a lot of movement and physical activity show greater brain development than babies who are less physically active. With babies, even a little movement can show big results. Margaret Barnes, a pediatrician(儿科医生), believes in the importance of exercise. She thinks that many learning disabilities that children have in elementary school or high school can be traced back to a lack of movement as babies. "Babies need movement that stimulates their five senses. They need to establish a connection between motion and memory. In this way, as they get older, children will begin to associate physical activity with higher learning," says Margaret.

Older people can beef up their brains as well. Scientists from 11 universities studied a group of seniors ranging in age from seventy to seventy-nine. Their study showed a short-term memory increase of up to 40 percent after exercising just three hours a week. The exercise does not have to be very difficult, but it does have to increase the heart rate. Also, just like the motion for infants (婴儿), exercise for older people should involve some complexity. Learning some new skills or motions, such as with yoga or tai-chi, helps to open up memory paths in the brain that may not have been used for a long time.

For most people, any type of physical activity that increases the heart rate is helpful. The main goal is to increase the brain's flow of blood. And your brain can benefit from as little as three hours of exercise a week.

Also known as Adlerian psychology, individual psychology offers a refreshing perspective and insights into interpersonal relationships, fear and trauma (精神创伤). It is a theory of human behavior that focuses on the basic need of belonging and the importance of engaging in constructive actions. The Courage to Be Disliked, using the theories of Alfred Adler, follows a dialogue between a philosopher or a teacher and a young man. The philosopher helps his student to understand how each of us is able to determine the direction of our own life, free from the past trauma and the expectations of others.

Alfred Adler believes that our past trauma don’t define our future. Instead, we choose how trauma affect our present or future lives. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead, and we make whatever suits our purposes out of them. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.

In other words, he claims that one doesn’t suffer from the shock of their experiences (the trauma), but that we feel that way because that was our goal in the first place. Adler conveys an example of a person that doesn’t want to step out of his house due to anxiety and fear filling him up every time he steps outside. The philosopher asserts that the person creates fear and anxiety so that he stays inside.

Why? Because possibly he’ll have to face the uncertainty of being out there, facing the mass. Possibly, the man believes that he’s so average that nobody will like him. So, it’s better to stay home and not risk feeling unwanted emotions.

In the Adlerian worldview, the past doesn’t matter. You don’t think about past causes; you think about present goals. You choose an emotion or behavior to achieve a present goal.

Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged? Judging from the drastic experiment of Frederick I in the thirteenth century, it may be hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent.

All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected.

Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick I. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again. A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at right time, but the process is slow and hard once the critical stage has passed.

Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and makes vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1,000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than in grammar.

Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man’s brain, compared with that of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a toy-bear with the sound pattern “toy bear”. And even more incredible is the young brain’s ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyse, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways.

But speech has to be induced(激发), and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the signals in the child’s babbling(咿呀声), grasping and smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child’s nonverbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.