Very intense week, and very fun. I will be writ­ing more about this week’s 3 speak­ing events, but let me say now that our key messages

1) our brains remain flex­i­ble dur­ing our lifetimes,

2) we can refine our brains with tar­geted practice,

3) good brain exer­cise, or “men­tal cross-training”, requires nov­elty, vari­ety, and increas­ing level of chal­lenge (but with­out cre­at­ing too much stress),

are being very well accepted from both healthy aging and work­place pro­duc­tiv­ity points of view. We have ONE brain: health and pro­duc­tiv­ity are 2 sides of the same coin.

If you want to make sure we learn more about our brains, you can help fel­low blog­ger Shel­ley Batts get a col­lege schol­ar­ship by voting here. She has a great neu­ro­science blog, is now final­ist in a com­pe­ti­tion to win a nice schol­ar­ship, and needs out help.

Have some more time? You can watch this excellent 90-second video of cog­ni­tive neu­ro­sci­en­tist Dr Lisa Sak­sida doing yoga in front of the fire while explain­ing the nature of Brain and Mind (via Mind­Hacks). Quotes:

“I wish peo­ple under­stood that there is no mind/brain dual­ity. Specif­i­cally, I wish peo­ple under­stood that there is no such thing as a purely psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­der. Every event in your psy­cho­log­i­cal life, and there­fore every psy­cho­log­i­cal change, is reducible in the­ory to events and changes in your brain. We should there­fore not judge peo­ple dif­fer­ently, accord­ing to whether they are con­sid­ered to have a ‘psy­cho­log­i­cal’ as opposed to a ‘neu­ro­log­i­cal’ problem.”

“Of course, a lack of mind/brain split does not mean that we should aban­don all talk of psy­chol­ogy. Psy­chol­ogy and neu­ro­science are two ways of study­ing the same thing, and both are essen­tial for under­stand­ing the human condition.”

For more, check the posts in these always great blog car­ni­vals (selected col­lec­tions of blog posts by a num­ber of blog­gers around spe­cific topics)

Tan­gled Bank (sci­ence in general)

Encephalon (neu­ro­science)

Credit: Photo of Neu­rons by sym­pha­nee via flickr

Be Socia­ble, Share!

•