The Priscilla Palmer’s Per­sonal Devel­op­ment List has snow­balled into a great direc­tory of blogs deal­ing, directly or indi­rectly, with per­sonal devel­op­ment and growth issues. If you want to check a neuroscience-based under­stand­ing of what “per­sonal devel­op­ment” means, you can check how 11 Neu­ro­sci­en­tists Debunk a Com­mon Myth about Brain Train­ing.

Below you have the most recent list: Read the rest of this entry »

As every Mon­day, we bring you many blog car­ni­vals (col­lec­tions of blog posts around spe­cific top­ics) we have con­tributed to. But before we do so, we have 2 announcements: 

• Learn­ing, The Gravy Way will host the next edi­tion of the Brain fit­ness car­ni­val on August 20th. You still have a few days to sub­mit your post on any­thing related to brain exer­cise and men­tal train­ing. And let me know if you want to host future editions.
• We will host the med­i­cine 2.0 car­ni­val on August 19th. Please sub­mit your great posts if you want to participate!

Here are our favorite car­ni­vals today

• Tan­gled Bank (sci­ence)
• Encephalon (neu­ro­science)
• Grand Rounds (med­i­cine)
• Gene Genie (genes and DNA)

 

Other good ones Read the rest of this entry »

The field of computer-based cog­ni­tive train­ing (part of what we call “Brain Fit­ness”) is start­ing to get trac­tion in the media and becom­ing an emerg­ing indus­try, and we are happy to see how a grow­ing num­ber of researchers and science-based com­pa­nies are lead­ing stud­ies that will allow to bet­ter mea­sure results and refine the brain exer­cise soft­ware available.

Pub­lished new research

• Com­put­er­ized work­ing mem­ory train­ing after stroke-A pilot study. A pub­lished study on how Cogmed work­ing mem­ory train­ing may help stroke patients. See the ref­er­ence at Cogmed Research page (and full arti­cle here)
• The Jour­nals of Geron­tol­ogy pub­lished a series of related papers in their June issue, includ­ing this by Kar­lene Ball, Jerri D. Edwards, and Les­ley A. Ross on The Impact of Speed of Pro­cess­ing Train­ing on Cog­ni­tive and Every­day Func­tions, J Geron­tol B Psy­chol Sci Soc Sci 2007 62: 19–31.  Abstract: “We com­bined data from six stud­ies, all using the same speed of pro­cess­ing train­ing pro­gram, to exam­ine the mech­a­nisms of train­ing gain and the impact of train­ing on cog­ni­tive and every­day abil­i­ties of older adults. Results indi­cated that train­ing pro­duces imme­di­ate improve­ments across all sub­tests of the Use­ful Field of View test, par­tic­u­larly for older adults with ini­tial speed of pro­cess­ing deficits. Age and edu­ca­tion had lit­tle to no impact on train­ing gain. Par­tic­i­pants main­tained ben­e­fits of train­ing for at least 2 years, which trans­lated to improve­ments in every­day abil­i­ties, includ­ing effi­cient per­for­mance of instru­men­tal activ­i­ties of daily liv­ing and safer dri­ving per­for­mance.”

Ongoing/ start­ing research

• MindWeavers set to launch new ‘brain health’ soft­ware in the UK. “The company’s move into the adult brain health Read the rest of this entry »

Alice Snell kindly brings to our atten­tion her nice post, Baby Boomers: The Beat Goes On, com­ment­ing on sev­eral reports and arti­cles on the aging work­force challenge. 

This is a very impor­tant topic, and directly related to what we are doing. Let me pro­vide an overview with these 10 points. First, some context:

1) The Con­fer­ence Board pub­lished a good report in 2005 titled America’s Aging Work­force Pos­ing New Oppor­tu­ni­ties and Chal­lenges. Quotes:

Not only in the US: the largest sin­gle group within the UK work­force in 2006 was com­prised of peo­ple between 45 and 59.

2) Some con­sult­ing com­pa­nies like Accen­ture seem to be bet­ting that the solu­tion will be to improve tech­nol­ogy for knowl­edge trans­fer and train younger employ­ees as soon as pos­si­ble (inter­view notes of the con­ver­sa­tion between Accenture’s CEO Bill Green and William J. Hol­stein, edi­tor in chief of Chief Exec­u­tive magazine.)

3) And the mar­ket for Tal­ent Man­age­ment and Suc­ces­sion Plan­ning solu­tions has been grow­ing steadily, and Read the rest of this entry »

1) Are you attend­ing the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion Con­ven­tion in San Fran­cisco next week? if you are, please let us know!

2) NYT Arti­cle: Men­tal Abil­i­ties: Good Read­ers Bet­ter Able to Retain Brain Skills

3) SF Chron­i­cle arti­cle: Zen and the art of lawyer­ing 

4) Med­ical News arti­cle: ADHD Seems To Be Linked To Low Dopamine Brain Activ­ity Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Gin­ger Camp­bell just pub­lished a nice pod­cast inter­view with our co-founder and chief sci­en­tific advi­sor Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg, whom we also inter­viewed some months ago on brain improve­ment research and ideas.

The first half of the 30-minute inter­view is a bit tech­ni­cal, includ­ing a nice intro­duc­tion to the field of neu­ropsy­chol­ogy as the con­ver­gence of neu­rol­ogy and psy­chol­ogy. It starts focus­ing on the role of life­long learn­ing and cog­ni­tive exer­cise at minute 15 or so. Some of the take-aways from the sec­ond half:

• Given that the brain’s right hemi­sphere seems more focused on deal­ing with nov­elty than the left one (more focused on pat­tern recog­ni­tion based on pre-wired neural net­works due to pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ences), and that the right hemi­sphere typ­i­cally declines first as we age…we need to ensure a good sup­ply of novel chal­lenges to main­tain our brain, includ­ing the right hemi­sphere, sharp.
• The field of Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness is now emerg­ing because Baby Boomers are more edu­cated, proac­tive and computer-savvy than pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions (as a broad gen­er­al­iza­tion), and Read the rest of this entry »

Some of the blog car­ni­vals, and other post col­lec­tions, we have con­tributed to this week. Enjoy these col­lec­tions of posts on a vari­ety of top­ics, where we have added a cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science perspective.

Favorites:

• Blog­ging on the Brain (neuroscience)
• Mendel’s Gar­den (genetics)
• Med­i­cine 2.0
• COTC (busi­ness)
• Non-Profit Lead­er­ship
• Fam­ily Life

Other good ones are Read the rest of this entry »

Researchers at Yale Uni­ver­sity have just released a good paper show­ing the impor­tance of both phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cise to main­tain good mem­ory (full text of research paper Sin­gle Enrich­ment Vari­ables Reduce Aged-related Mem­ory Decline in Female Mice).

Some quotes from the Sci­ence Daily release Exer­cise And Men­tal Stim­u­la­tion Both Boost Mouse Mem­ory Late In Life:

• “The results sug­gest that as we get old and maybe less able to exer­cise, cog­ni­tive stim­u­la­tion can help to com­pen­sate. If the trend holds, write the authors, “These data may sug­gest that enrich­ment ini­ti­ated at any age can sig­nif­i­cantly improve mem­ory func­tion. And exer­cise plus men­tal chal­lenge in mid­dle age — when many peo­ple start to notice sub­tle mem­ory changes — may offer the strongest, most wide­spread ben­e­fits for mem­ory function.”
• The authors note that exer­cise was cen­tral to mem­ory rein­force­ment in all age groups. Says lead author Karyn Frick, PhD, “It is impor­tant for peo­ple of all ages to do 20 to 30 min­utes of aer­o­bic exer­cise sev­eral times a week. Keep­ing a healthy and active brain may pre­vent mem­ory decline in old age, but only a lon­gi­tu­di­nal study that fol­lows mice over time could con­firm this possibility.”

We dis­cussed this topic in more depth in my inter­view on Build­ing Your Cog­ni­tive Reserve with Dr. Yaakov Stern and in the dia­logue with Dr. Michael Merzenich that included fea­tur­ing the pio­neer­ing work of Dr. Mar­ian Dia­mond.

In short, if you want to pro­tect and improve your mem­ory, get ready to exer­cise both body and brain!

Ellen recently wrote a nice post titled Top Ten Tips for Men Who Lead Women, and asked for vol­un­teers to offer a com­ple­men­tary per­spec­tive. I hope you enjoy!

1. We men know we are hard to lead, and that can be stress­ful for you and for us. You should know that stress affects short term mem­ory, so it is impor­tant to be able to man­age stress well, with med­i­ta­tion or other meth­ods. Check here your level of stress to see how much this point applies to you. Please remem­ber, laugh­ing is good for your brain.
2. Don’t think too much–we don’t. If we do, we try to find ways to self-talk us out of that uncom­fort­able state.
3. Please remem­ber our hum­ble ori­gins. We are tool-using ani­mals, which is why we like play­ing with all kinds of toys, from a car to that blackberry.
4. When we are stub­born, you are enti­tled to remind us that even apes can learn–if you help us see the point. Show us that change is pos­si­ble at any age. Believe it or not, we can lis­ten.
5. Espe­cially if we can find com­mon ground: what about chat­ting about sports psy­chol­ogy?.
6. Please moti­vate us to lis­ten and be open minded to learn with wise words. If that doesn’t work, please per­se­vere with nice words. Please don’t ever say that we are worse than pink dol­phins–if we feel attacked, we’ll just disengage.
7. Some­times we don’t coop­er­ate enough?. Please give us time for our brains to fully evolve, we have been try­ing for a while!
8. You can help us grow. For the next lead­er­ship work­shop, buy us copies of the Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain book. You may think we don’t need this… but at our core we really want to get bet­ter at Grat­i­tude and Altru­ism. We want to be able to play with the ulti­mate toy: our genes!
9. If that book is sold out, we could also ben­e­fit from read­ing Damasio’s Descartes Error and dis­cover how emo­tions are impor­tant for good decision-making. Or help us improve our abil­ity to read emo­tional mes­sages. As long as we believe we can some­how ben­e­fit from it, we’ll try!
10. If you lead some­one with Bill Gates-like Frontal Lobes, con­grat­u­late him for his brain. If you don’t, encour­age him to fol­low track. Please be patient…

Now, any tak­ers for Top Ten Tips for Women Who Lead Women or Men Who Lead Men?

We often are told that we offer too much con­tent for you to read given var­i­ous time pres­sures… but it is tough for us to write less given the wealth of areas we cover around cog­ni­tive and emo­tional training.

To make your life eas­ier (and please feel free to give us feed­back!), what we will do is to offer a Monthly Digest of Most Pop­u­lar Blog Posts. Today, August 1st, we will list the most pop­u­lar July posts. Con­sider it your monthly Brain Exer­cise Mag­a­zine

(Also, remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive our RSS feed, check our Top­ics sec­tion, and sub­scribe to our monthly newslet­ter at the top of this page).

News you can use

Trad­ing per­for­mance psy­chol­ogy and self-talk

Stress Man­age­ment for Lawyers

Men­tal Train­ing for Grat­i­tude and Altruism

Brain Fitness/ Train­ing Mar­ket News

Mar­ket­Watch on Beat­ing for­get­ful­ness and boost­ing the brain

Nin­tendo BrainAge, Lumos­ity, Happy Neu­ron, MyBrainTrainer…

Brain Health through Seri­ous Games and Brain Exercise

Brain Fit­ness Workshops

Osher Life­long Learn­ing Insti­tute Brain Fit­ness class at UC Berkeley

Healthy Aging

Inter­view with Neu­ro­sci­en­tist Yaakov Stern: Build Your Cog­ni­tive Reserve

Jud­son Laipply’s Danc­ing Brain

Jack and Elaine LaLanne and Brain Health

Exer­cise Your Brain! Enjoy Learning!

Atten­tion Deficits

Read the rest of this entry »