Donna M. Berry, RN, BSN, CGRN, is the endoscopy coordinator for Nazareth Hospital in Northeast Philadelphia, and she has a problem. Her department wants to award "certificates" to patients who complete a colonoscopy, but cannot find any templates or samples to use. "Not only is this good PR, but it can also be a great reminder for their next screening," she explains. "Often, doctors will tell patients to follow up in three to five years, but the patients forget the original exam date."

Berry contacted the SGNA to see if they had a template for this type of certificate, but the answer was no. "I was advised to go to risk management, but have not heard if this is a possibility to initiate. Are you aware of any units doing this?" Berry asks.

If you have a template or sample of such a certificate and would be willing to share this with other facilities, please submit your certificate to me at kdix@vpico.com. We could even create an online "library" with sample certificates for everyone to use.

According to research published online April 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, before we make mistakes, our brains begin abnormal activity as much as 30 seconds beforehand. The research, led by Tom Eichele, a neuroscientist in Norway, showed that "brain farts" are due to this activity.

Although research in the past has focused on what happened in the brain during and after a mistake, there was little research into what happened before it. Volunteers underwent scanning during the performance of repetitive tasks – essentially pushing buttons in response to visual stimuli.

When the researchers began seeing abnormal activity well in advance of mistakes, they first thought that they were interpreting the data incorrectly and repeatedly checked the results to be sure they were right. What they found was intriguing. Normally, one particular part of the brain only becomes active when the person is both awake and relaxed – indicating a state of rest. And another part of the brain – which becomes active when the person is keeping up the mental energy to perform a task – actually slowed down. But once the person identified a mistake, the abnormal brain activity stopped.

The scientists theorized that when faced with monotonous tasks, the brain may go into an energy-saving mode, attempting to reduce effort related to a task. But the brain overcompensates the slow-down, and this may lead to mistakes.

The researchers used functional MRI and "independent component analysis" to determine what was occurring in the volunteers' brains, and determined which brain regions' activity predicted performance errors. "In particular, a coincident decrease of deactivation in default mode regions of the brain, together with a decline of activation in regions associated with maintaining task effort, raised the probability of future errors," the researchers write in their abstract. "Our findings provide insights into the brain network dynamics preceding human performance errors and suggest that monitoring of the identified precursor states may help in avoiding human errors in critical real-world situations."

Why are we nice to others? New evidence suggests that the brain's reward system works similarly for both praise and money. Social psychologists say kindness to others pays off – their theory posits that we do something nice to others for a good reputation or social approval just like we work for a salary.

The research, announced in a press release by the Japanese National Institute for Physiological Sciences (NIPS), found neural evidence that perceiving one's good reputation formed by others activates the striatum, the brain's reward system, in a similar manner to monetary reward.

The team was led by Norihiro Sadato, a professor at the Japanese National Institute for Physiological Sciences, NIPS (SEIRIKEN), and included Keise Izuma, a graduate student of the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Okazaki, Japan. The team reported their findings on April 24 in Neuron (Cell Press).

The group conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments on 19 people with monetary and social rewards. The acquisition of one's good reputation robustly activated reward-related brain areas, notably the striatum, and these overlapped with the areas activated by monetary rewards. These results strongly suggest that social reward is processed in the striatum like a monetary reward.

The researchers say these insights will aid understanding of the basis of social behaviors.

The moral of this study appears pretty simple: be nice to your coworkers. It will enhance your reputation -- and the reward will be just as much happiness as if you'd received a huge bonus.

Extrapolating those results, I speculate that if your coworkers think well of you, they'll give good peer reviews when it's time for your annual evaluation, thus leading to a huge bonus in the form of a raise – perhaps creating what the Chinese call "double happiness."