Here you are have the Monthly Digest of our Most Pop­u­lar Blog Posts. You can con­sider it your monthly Brain Exer­cise Magazine.

Grat­i­tude is a very impor­tant emo­tion to cul­ti­vate, as Pro­fes­sor Robert Emmons tells us in this inter­view, based on his last book. Please take some time to read it, and to find at least one thing you are thank­ful for-it will be good for your health.

We are grate­ful about a very stim­u­lat­ing November:

Brain Fit­ness Mar­ket News

10 Neu­rotech­nol­ogy Trends: a lead­ing indus­try orga­ni­za­tion released their Top 10 Neu­roTrends for 2007, and brain fit­ness mat­ters appeared in 3 of them.

Thank Boomers for Buff­ing Up Brain Mar­ket: great overview of the mar­ket from a tech­nol­ogy point of view, quot­ing our mar­ket pro­jec­tions. To clar­ify the num­bers men­tioned: we project $225m in the US alone for the brain fit­ness soft­ware mar­ket (grow­ing from $70m in 2003), broken-down as fol­lows: $80m for the Con­sumer seg­ment, $60m in K12 Edu­ca­tion, $50m in Clin­i­cal appli­ca­tions, and $35m in the Cor­po­rate seg­ment. The Con­sumer seg­ment, with a healthy aging value propo­si­tion, is the most recent one but the most rapidly grow­ing.

Exer­cise On the Brain: a NYT OpEd: a widely read opin­ion piece in the New York Times, writ­ten by 2 neu­ro­sci­en­tists, that some­how seems to miss the research behind the value of men­tal stim­u­la­tion and cog­ni­tive train­ing. Other neu­ro­science teams and us write let­ters to the edi­tor that go unpub­lished. Should you have any con­tacts with jour­nal­ists, please ask them to con­tact us: we are always happy to serve as a resource to the media.

Posit Sci­ence @ GSA: well-designed Brain Train­ing Works: a timely heads up on how well-designed computer-based pro­grams can be a great com­ple­ment to other inter­ven­tions. We will be inter­view­ing the lead­ing researcher behind that study dur­ing the next 2 weeks, so keep tuned!

Brain and Mind News and Arti­cles: a vari­ety of links to good media reports, includ­ing a spec­tac­u­lar spe­cial on mem­ory in National Geographic.

News You Can Use

Mar­ian Dia­mond on the brain: lead­ing neu­ro­sci­en­tist Mar­ian Dia­mond, now 81, shares her pre­scrip­tion for life­long brain health– diet, exer­cise, chal­lenge, new­ness and ten­der lov­ing care.

From Med­i­ta­tion to MBSR (Mind­ful­ness Based Stress Reduc­tion): a report on the ben­e­fits of med­i­ta­tion and how it is becom­ing more main­stream in medicine.

Teasers

50 Mind and Brain Games for adults: you may have seen these teasers, but we want to alert you we have opened a new sec­tion in the site where you can eas­ily find our grow­ing col­lec­tion of teasers

Your Haiku, please?: a friendly chal­lenge to your brain.

Edu­ca­tion and Life­long Learning

Carol Dweck on Mind­sets, Learn­ing and Intel­li­gence: we found a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view on the impor­tance on hav­ing a growth and learn­ing ori­ented mind­set. Both for kids and adults.

Is Intel­li­gence Innate and Fixed?: some reflec­tions based on biology.

Cor­po­rate Train­ing, Well­ness and Leadership

Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness and The Future of Work: an excel­lent con­cept map on how neu­ro­science may influ­ence the work­place of the future, drawn in real time as I spoke at an Insti­tute for the Future event.

Emo­tional Intel­li­gence and Faces: how many uni­ver­sal emo­tions and facial expres­sions are there?

Events

Use It or Lose It, and Cells that Fire together Wire together: I spoke at the Ital­ian Con­sulate in San Fran­cisco, where we explored some of the basic con­cepts we should all know about how our brains and mind work.

Let me prac­tice the Grat­i­tude concept…Thank You for your atten­tion and participation!

You can also enjoy our pre­vi­ous edi­tions of this monthly digest:

- Octo­ber

- Sep­tem­ber

- August

- July

(Dear reader: Here you have a lit­tle gift to con­tinue the Thanks­giv­ing spirit. Enjoy the inter­view, and thank you for vis­it­ing our site.)

Prof. Robert Emmons stud­ies grat­i­tude for a liv­ing as Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chol­ogy at UC Davis and is Editor-In-Chief of the Jour­nal of Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­ogy. He has just pub­lished Thanks: How the New Sci­ence of Grat­i­tude Can Make You Hap­pier, an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary book that pro­vides a research-based syn­the­sis of the topic as well as prac­ti­cal suggestions.

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez: Wel­come. Prof. Emmons, could you please pro­vide us an overview of the Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­ogy field so we under­stand the con­text for your research?

Robert Emmons: Sure. Mar­tin Selig­man and col­leagues launched what was called “pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy in the late 90s as an anti­dote to the tra­di­tional nearly exclu­sive empha­sis of “neg­a­tive psy­chol­ogy” focused on fix­ing prob­lems like trauma, addic­tion, and stress. We want to bal­ance our focus and be able to help every­one, includ­ing high-functioning indi­vid­u­als. A num­ber of researchers were inves­ti­gat­ing the field since the late 80s, but Selig­man pro­vided a new umbrella, a new cat­e­gory, with cred­i­bil­ity, orga­nized net­works and fund­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for the whole field.

And where does your own research fit into this over­all picture?

I have been research­ing grat­i­tude for almost 10 years. Grat­i­tude is a pos­i­tive emo­tion that has tra­di­tion­ally been the realm of human­ists and philoso­phers, and only recently the sub­ject of a more sci­en­tific approach. We study grat­i­tude not as a merely aca­d­e­mic dis­ci­pline, but as a prac­ti­cal frame­work to bet­ter func­tion­ing in life by tak­ing con­trol of hap­pi­ness lev­els and prac­tic­ing the skill of emo­tional self-regulation.

What are the 3 key mes­sages that you would like read­ers to take away from your book?

First, the prac­tice of grat­i­tude can increase hap­pi­ness lev­els by around 25%. Sec­ond, this is not hard to achieve — a few hours writ­ing a grat­i­tude jour­nal over 3 weeks can cre­ate an effect that lasts 6 months if not more. Third, that cul­ti­vat­ing grat­i­tude brings other health effects, such as longer and bet­ter qual­ity sleep time.

What are some ways to prac­tice grat­i­tude, and what ben­e­fits could we expect? Please refer to your 2003 paper in the Jour­nal of Per­son­al­ity and Social Psy­chol­ogy, where I found fas­ci­nat­ing quotes such as that “The abil­ity to notice, appre­ci­ate, and sav­ior the ele­ments of one life has been viewed as a cru­cial ele­ment of well-being.

The most com­mon method we use in our research is to ask peo­ple to keep a “Grat­i­tude Jour­nal”  where you write some­thing you feel grate­ful for. Doing so 4 times a week, for as lit­tle as 3 weeks, is often enough to cre­ate a mean­ing­ful dif­fer­ence in one level of hap­pi­ness. Another exer­cise is to write a “Grat­i­tude Let­ter” to a per­son who has exerted a pos­i­tive influ­ence on one’s life but whom we have not prop­erly thanked in the past, and then to meet that per­son and read the let­ter to them face to face.

The ben­e­fits seem to be very sim­i­lar using both meth­ods in terms of enhanced hap­pi­ness, health and well­be­ing. Most of the out­comes are self-reported, but there is an increas­ing empha­sis on mea­sur­ing objec­tive data such as cor­ti­sol and stress lev­els, heart rate vari­abil­ity, and even brain acti­va­tion pat­terns. The work of Richard David­son is exem­plary in that respect, show­ing how mind­ful­ness prac­tice can rewire some acti­va­tion pat­terns in Read the rest of this entry »

Just wanted to let you know that we have cre­ated this new, Teasers sec­tion to serve as a repos­i­tory of the best Mind and Brain Games we offer through the blog. If you need to quickly exer­cise your brain after Thanks­giv­ing holiday…you can go ahead and find a selec­tion of 50 Brain Teasers. Enjoy!

Visit: Teasers section

Just came across an excel­lent Inter­view with Carol Dweck. Thank you Coert!

Carol Dweck is a pro­fes­sor of Psy­chol­ogy at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity. Last year she pub­lished a great book called Mind­set: The New Psy­chol­ogy of Suc­cess, where she elab­o­rates on her (and ours) key mes­sage: the way you view your own intel­li­gence largely deter­mines how it will develop. And no mat­ter how you define “intel­li­gence”. In this inter­view Coert asks Carol Dweck about the book and about what the prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions of her work are for man­agers. See a cou­ple of quotes below:

- “In my book I iden­tify two mind­sets that play impor­tant roles in people’s suc­cess. In one, the fixed mind­set, peo­ple believe that their tal­ents and abil­i­ties are fixed traits. They have a cer­tain amount and that’s that; noth­ing can be done to change it. Many years of research have now shown that when peo­ple adopt the fixed mind­set, it can limit their suc­cess. They become over-concerned with prov­ing their tal­ents and abil­i­ties, hid­ing defi­cien­cies, and react­ing defen­sively to mis­takes or setbacks-because defi­cien­cies and mis­takes imply a (per­ma­nent) lack of tal­ent or abil­ity. Peo­ple in this mind­set will actu­ally pass up impor­tant oppor­tu­ni­ties to learn and grow if there is a risk of unmask­ing weak­nesses. This is not a recipe for suc­cess in busi­ness, as ulti­mately shown by the folks at Enron, who rarely admit­ted any mis­takes. What is the alter­na­tive?“
– “In the other mind­set, the growth mind­set, peo­ple believe that their tal­ents and abil­i­ties can be devel­oped through pas­sion, edu­ca­tion, and per­sis­tence. For them, it’s not about look­ing smart or groom­ing their image. It’s about a com­mit­ment to learning–taking informed risks and learn­ing from the results, sur­round­ing your­self with peo­ple who will chal­lenge you to grow, look­ing frankly at your defi­cien­cies and seek­ing to rem­edy them. Most great busi­ness lead­ers have had this mind­set, because build­ing and main­tain­ing excel­lent orga­ni­za­tions in the face of con­stant change requires it.”

Enjoy the whole Inter­view with Carol Dweck

And this related blog post, where we posited that “In short: there is much that each of us can do to improve our brain fit­ness, no mat­ter our age, occu­pa­tion or start­ing point. There are some fun­da­men­tal capac­i­ties that we can train. And we have to care for good phys­i­cal exer­cise and stress man­age­ment on top of men­tal exercise.”

Who has not heard “Use It or Lose It”. Now, what is “It”? Last week I gave a talk at the Ital­ian Con­sulate in San Fran­cisco, and one of the areas atten­dants seemed to enjoy the most was learn­ing about what our brains are and how they work, peak­ing into the “black box” of our minds. With­out under­stand­ing at least the basics, how can we make good deci­sions about our own brain health and fitness?

Let’s review at a glance:

.

The brain is com­posed of 3 main sub-systems

The brain is com­posed of 3 “brains” or main sub-systems, each named after the evo­lu­tion­ary moment in which the sub-system is believed to have appeared. Read the rest of this entry »

In our Top 50 Brain Teasers post, we con­cluded with the challenge:

#50. Can you write a haiku describ­ing your expe­ri­ence doing some of the pre­vi­ous teasers? The sim­ple rules: write 3 lines, which don’t need to rhyme, con­tain­ing 5,7, and 5 syl­la­bles. You can leave your haiku as a com­ment for extra points…

There has been a num­ber of great and fun tak­ers so far…enjoy their haikus below! And Happy Thanksgiving.

- Terry says:

New infor­ma­tion
Syn­the­siz­ing my knowl­edge
A for­ward movement

- Frank says:

Painfully easy
Sig­nif­i­cantly harder
Men­tal stimulus

- Mark says:

I thought I did well
Then I reviewed my answers
I am retarded

- Chuck says: Read the rest of this entry »

Newsweek’s Sharon Beg­ley writes a great note on Brain Train­ing: How It Works based on ini­tial data pre­sented at the Geron­to­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica over the week­end. Some quotes:

- With the nation’s 78 mil­lion baby boomers approach­ing the age of those dreaded “where did I leave my keys? moments, it’s no won­der the mar­ket for computer-based brain train­ing has shot up from essen­tially zero in 2005 to $80 mil­lion this year, accord­ing to the con­sult­ing firm SharpBrains.

- Now comes the largest and most rig­or­ous study of a commercially-available train­ing pro­gram, and it shows that there is hope for aging brains. This morn­ing, at the meet­ing of the Geron­to­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica, sci­en­tists are pre­sent­ing data show­ing that after eight weeks of daily one-hour ses­sions with Brain Fit­ness 2.0 from Posit Sci­ence, elderly vol­un­teers got mea­sur­ably bet­ter in their brain’s speed and accu­racy of pro­cess­ing. And unlike every other train­ing pro­gram tested before, the improve­ments “gen­er­al­ize to broad mea­sures of cog­ni­tion and are notice­able in every­day life,” Eliz­a­beth Zelin­ski of the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, who led the IMPACT (Improve­ment in Mem­ory with Plasticity-based Adap­tive Cog­ni­tive Train­ing) Study, reports.

- For the IMPACT study, 468 par­tic­i­pants, all healthy adults 65 and over, were divided into two groups. One received an hour a day of train­ing on Brain­Fit­ness for eight to ten weeks, and the other (the con­trol group) got the same amount of computer-based learn­ing. That choice of con­trol group is sig­nif­i­cant. It means that Brain Fit­ness was being com­pared not to star­ing into space or some sim­i­larly unhelp­ful activ­ity, but to one that might rea­son­ably be expected to improve men­tal ability.

- Because the Brain Fit­ness group showed greater improve­ments than the con­trols, includ­ing on tasks that the computer-based exer­cises did not explic­itly tar­get, it sug­gests that the audi­tory train­ing has altered some­thing fun­da­men­tal in the brain and not just spe­cific cir­cuits for, say, memory.

Read full post: Brain Train­ing: How It Works

The Geron­to­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica press release includes

- Researchers released ini­tial data today at the 60th Annual Meet­ing of The Geron­to­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica (GSA) that showed that doing the right kind of brain exer­cise can enhance mem­ory and other cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties of older adults.

- “We pre­sented these impor­tant results at the Annual Meet­ing of GSA, because aging experts need to spread the word that cog­ni­tive decline is not an inevitable part of aging, said Dr. Zelin­ski. “Doing the prop­erly designed cog­ni­tive activ­i­ties can actu­ally enhance abil­i­ties as you age.”

I will be inter­view­ing Eliz­a­beth Zelin­ski as part of our Neu­ro­science Inter­view Series, so keep tuned.

One clar­i­fi­ca­tion: this is not the first study to show how cog­ni­tive train­ing can gen­er­al­ize beyond the tasks directly trained. Oth­ers have already shown an effect on cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties and even on real-world tasks, on a vari­ety of age groups and trained func­tions. But the size of it (468 par­tic­i­pants) makes it by far the largest that does so, and the effects are very sig­nif­i­cant and promising.

Some weeks ago we explained how use­ful Con­cept Maps can be to quickly visu­al­ize the key ideas in a field, and their relationships.

Let me show you this fan­tas­tic exam­ple. A few weeks ago I was inter­viewed by David Pescovitz of the Insti­tute for the Future (blog) to dis­cuss The Future of Work and Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness trends. They had an artist who drew the graph below IN REAL TIME, AS WE SPOKE. Very impressive.

Please open the full image by click­ing on it, and spend a few min­utes read­ing around, top-down, left-to right.

You will learn much about what the future may bring (will Human Resources staff become “Cog­ni­tive Resources Man­agers”?), and also how to dis­play com­plex infor­ma­tion in beau­ti­ful visual form.

 

”

 

Kudos to the Insti­tute for the Future, an inde­pen­dent non­profit research group,  for a fas­ci­nat­ing event on The Future of Work.

Credit for the Map: Anthony Weeks, from Grove Con­sul­tants.

(Dear RSS read­ers: I’d really appre­ci­ate if you could Digg this post. You can find the Digg but­ton if you visit this post in our blog. Thanks!)

Paul Ekman has con­ducted exten­sive research on iden­ti­fy­ing emo­tions through facial expres­sions. As part of that research, and as part of the power of dis­ci­pline and train­ing, he learned how to con­sciously manip­u­late 42 facial mus­cles, includ­ing many that in most of us are beyond our con­trol, and even awareness.

In the 60s and 70s when Ekman began look­ing into the uni­ver­sal­ity of facial expres­sions, all the major con­tem­po­rary social sci­en­tists, like Mar­garet Mead, believed that expres­sions were cul­tur­ally learned, not innate. He pro­ceeded trav­eled all over the world with pic­tures of peo­ple mak­ing dis­tinct facial expres­sions and found peo­ple in cul­tures every­where, from mod­ern to stone age, agreed on the emo­tion behind the expres­sion. He then turned to study­ing the pro­duc­tion of these expres­sions and the 43 facial mus­cles that can cre­ate 10,000 expres­sions, which form the basis of his training.

He found seven uni­ver­sal emo­tions with unique facial expres­sion. The emo­tions are: anger, fear, sad­ness, dis­gust, hap­pi­ness, sur­prise, and con­tempt. At least five of these are shared with non-human pri­mates as well. Inter­est­ingly, the smile is the eas­i­est expres­sion to rec­og­nize, and the eas­i­est to iden­tify from afar. These emo­tions have a spe­cific Read the rest of this entry »

Here you have a col­lec­tion of recent news cov­er­age on brain heath, fit­ness and train­ing topics:

1– Great Mem­ory Spe­cial in National Geo­graphic, including

- Inter­ac­tive 3D map of the brain

- Mem­ory Game

2– Fas­ci­nat­ing What the Bea­t­les Gave Sci­ence, by Sharon Beg­ley at Newsweek

- “Even in novices, med­i­ta­tion leaves its mark. An eight-week course in com­pas­sion med­i­ta­tion, in which vol­un­teers focus on the wish that all beings be free from suf­fer­ing, shifted brain activ­ity from the right pre­frontal cor­tex to the left, a pat­tern asso­ci­ated with a greater sense of well-being.”

3– One of the best edi­tions of Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can Mind

- Solv­ing the IQ Puz­zle “The 20th cen­tury saw the Flynn effect: mas­sive gains in IQ from one gen­er­a­tion to another. Now Flynn explains why”

- Anx­i­ety and Alzheimer- A life­time of stress could lead to mem­ory prob­lems and dis­ease: “Over a period of up to 12 years, vol­un­teers who were anxiety-prone had a 40 per­cent higher risk of devel­op­ing mild cog­ni­tive impair­ment than more easy­go­ing indi­vid­u­als did. Mild cog­ni­tive impair­ment is thought to be a pre­cur­sor for Alzheimer’s.”

4– Exer­cise builds strong brains, too — USATODAY.com

- “Phillip Tom­porowski, a study co-author and exer­cise psy­chol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­sity of Geor­gia in Athens, says exer­cise “may well improve the under­ly­ing men­tal processes that are involved in a lot of behav­iors and aca­d­e­mic tasks.”

5– Daily com­puter game boosts maths– BBC, report­ing pre­lim­i­nary results from a small pilot

- “Play­ing a daily com­puter game has helped a class of pri­mary school chil­dren improve their maths and con­cen­tra­tion, a study says.”

6– ADHD and Brain Devel­op­ment– Wash­ing­ton Post

- “Devel­op­ing more slowly in ADHD young­sters — the lag can be as much as three years — are brain regions that sup­press inap­pro­pri­ate actions and thoughts, focus atten­tion, remem­ber things from moment to moment, work for reward, and con­trol movement.”