Did you read about the recent exper­i­ment where young chimps dis­played amaz­ing visual work­ing mem­ory capa­bil­ity, beat­ing humans?

- You can watch a short video here.

- Lumos Labs has released a very fun game to test your own skills: try out this Chimp Game!

Also, some very good recent news articles:

1) Is it worth going to the mind gym? (New Sci­en­tist). This is one of the best arti­cles we have read in a while (unfor­tu­nately requires subscription).

- “Bird­watch­ing is the brain­child of San Francisco-based Lumos Labs, just one of the dozens of com­pa­nies that have sprung up in recent months to cash in on the “brain-training” craze. Like most of its com­peti­tors, the the­ory behind …”

Com­ments: the arti­cle intro­duces read­ers to much of the research and sci­en­tists we dis­cuss in our blog, such as Torkel Kling­berg’s work and recent results from the IMPACT study. The arti­cle would have been even bet­ter had Daniel Gopher been inter­viewed on his work improv­ing cog­ni­tive per­for­mance of mil­i­tary pilots and bas­ket­ball players.

2) Inno­va­tion: Your Brain Needs Just as Much Exer­cise as Your Body (Fox Busi­ness Network)

- “The mar­ket, how­ever, is still small. Accord­ing to Alvaro Fer­nan­dez , who co-founded mar­ket research and con­sult­ing firm Sharp­Brains, which is focused solely on the field of brain fit­ness, in 2007 the mar­ket was val­ued at $225 mil­lion, which is up from $150 mil­lion in 2005. Fer­nan­dez thinks there is poten­tial for it to surge, reach­ing more than $2 bil­lion by 2016.”

Com­ments:  Very good arti­cle. Those esti­mates refer to the whole brain fit­ness soft­ware mar­ket to assess and train cog­ni­tive skills, includ­ing Read the rest of this entry »

As you may have noticed, we just changed a few things in our site, includ­ing prepar­ing a more solid Resources sec­tion. Please take a look at the nav­i­ga­tion bar at the top.

One of the new pages, that we will update often, is an expanded Books page. Here are the books that we are rec­om­mend­ing now.

Fas­ci­nat­ing books on neu­ro­plas­tic­ity (the abil­ity of the brain to rewire itself through experience):

Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Sci­ence Reveals Our Extra­or­di­nary Poten­tial to Trans­form Our­selves — by Sharon Begley.

 

The Brain That Changes Itself: Sto­ries of Per­sonal Tri­umph from the Fron­tiers of Brain Sci­ence — by Nor­man Doidge.

 

Great pop­u­lar sci­ence books by Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Mr or Mrs Next US President,

Thank you for vis­it­ing Grand Rounds, the weekly col­lec­tion of the best health and med­ical blog posts, in the midst of your very busy schedule.

The health and med­ical blo­gos­phere would like to make sure you and your team take into account the issues out­lined below as you and your aids for­mu­late your poli­cies and put together the team that will fur­ther define and imple­ment them.

With­out fur­ther ado, let me out­line these 40 ques­tions and topics.

Dear Mr or Mrs Next US Pres­i­dent, Read the rest of this entry »

Roundup of inter­est­ing news in this emerg­ing field:

1) Brain Health Lead­ers Team Up to Pre­vent Crashes.

2) Adults Improve Crit­i­cal Pro­fes­sional and Per­sonal Skills Through New Cog­ni­tive Train­ing Program.

3) Nature Neu­ro­science Pod­cast and Lon­don Taxi Drivers.

4) What Have You Changed Your Mind About, lately?.

5) The 2008 Mind & Life Sum­mer Research Insti­tute starts accept­ing applications.

6) The Mind & Life Insti­tute has announced the 2007 Fran­cisco J. Varela Research Award Recip­i­ents. Read the rest of this entry »

Har­riet Vines, Ph.D., an expe­ri­enced author and retired col­lege pro­fes­sor, sends us a few fun brain exer­cises to train our atten­tion and work­ing mem­ory (the abil­ity to keep infor­ma­tion cur­rent for a short period while using this infor­ma­tion). Given them a try! They are not as easy as they may sound…

1. Say the days of the week back­wards, then in alpha­bet­i­cal order.

2. Say the months of the year in alpha­bet­i­cal order. Easy? well, why don’t you try doing so back­wards, in reverse alpha­bet­i­cal order.

3. Find the sum of your date of birth, mm/dd/yyyy. Want more exer­cise? Do the same with friends’ and rel­a­tives’ date of birth.

4. Name two objects for every let­ter in your com­plete name. Work up to five objects, try­ing to use dif­fer­ent items each time.

5. Wher­ever you are, look around and within two min­utes, try to find 5 red things that will fit in your pocket, and 5 blue objects that are too big to fit.

– Har­riet Vines, Ph.D. is the Author of Age Smart-How to Age Well, Stay Fit and Be Happy, where she shares results from 15 years of con­sul­ta­tion, work­shops and lec­tures at Leisure World, Canyon Ranch, Inde­pen­dent Retire­ment Com­mu­ni­ties, and Adult Edu­ca­tion Programs.

Note: if you have brain teasers, news, or arti­cles you’d like to share, please email us at info@ sharpbrains.com. Look­ing for­ward hear­ing from you!

Last week, the US Car Care Coun­cil released a list of tips on how to take care of your car and “save big money at the pump in 2008.”

You may not have paid much atten­tion to this announce­ment. Yes, it’s impor­tant to save gas these days; but, it’s not big news that good main­te­nance habits will improve the per­for­mance of a car, and extend its life.

If we can all agree on the impor­tance of main­tain­ing our cars that get us around town, what about main­tain­ing our brains sit­ting behind the wheel?

A spate of recent news cov­er­age on brain fit­ness and “brain train­ing” has missed an impor­tant con­stituency: younger peo­ple. Recent advance­ments in brain sci­ence have as tremen­dous impli­ca­tions for teenagers and adults of all ages as they do for seniors.

In a recent con­ver­sa­tion with neu­ro­sci­en­tist Yaakov Stern of Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, he related how sur­prised he was when, years ago, a reporter from Sev­en­teen mag­a­zine requested an inter­view. The reporter told Dr. Stern that he wanted to write an arti­cle to moti­vate kids to stay in school and not to drop out, in order to start build­ing their Cog­ni­tive Reserve early and age more gracefully.

What is the Cog­ni­tive Reserve? Read the rest of this entry »

Neu­ro­sci­en­tists at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity Med­ical Cen­ter (see our pre­vi­ous inter­view with Yaakov Stern on the Cog­ni­tive Reserve) have asked for help in recruit­ing vol­un­teers for an excit­ing clin­i­cal trial. If you are based in New York City, and between the ages of 60 and 75, please con­sider join­ing this study.

More infor­ma­tion below:

—————————

Use it or Lose it?

Train your Brain! Healthy adults between the ages of 60 and 75 liv­ing in NYC are invited to join a study of men­tal fit­ness train­ing. Qual­i­fied indi­vid­u­als will play a scientifically-based video game in our lab­o­ra­tory, and will be tested to deter­mine the effects on atten­tion, mem­ory, and cog­ni­tive performance.

You will earn up to $600 plus trans­porta­tion costs if you com­plete the 3-month program.

This excit­ing study is being per­formed by the Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Divi­sion of the Sergievsky Cen­ter at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity Med­ical Center.

If inter­ested, con­tact us today: Read the rest of this entry »

The most pop­u­lar ques­tion we got when we announced that PBS had a great spe­cial on Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram and Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity in Decem­ber was, when will the DVD be available?

Well, finally here it comes. You can click on the image or the title to go over to PBS shop to learn more and buy it.

The Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram DVD ($24.95, shipped by 02/01/08). “This pro­gram presents a work­out to help view­ers get their brains in bet­ter shape. The Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram is based on neuro-plasticity, the abil­ity of the brain to change and adapt — even rewire itself. In the past two years, a team of sci­en­tists has devel­oped computer-based stim­u­lus sets that drive ben­e­fi­cial chem­i­cal, phys­i­cal and func­tional changes in the brain. Dr. Michael Merzenich of the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia San Fran­cisco and his col­leagues around the world have been lead­ing this effort; he brings the research find­ings, along with a sci­en­tif­i­cally based set of brain exer­cises, to PBS view­ers in this inno­v­a­tive and life-altering pro­gram. Peter Coy­ote narrates. ”

To pur­chase: click Here.

You can watch a 3-minute trailer: click here.

———-

Note: How can any­one take care of his or her brain when every week brings a new bar­rage of arti­cles and stud­ies which seem to con­tra­dict each other?

Do sup­ple­ments improve mem­ory? Do you need both phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cise –or is one of them enough? Why is man­ag­ing stress so impor­tant to atten­tion and mem­ory? Which brain train­ing approach, if any, is worth one’s time and money?

If you have these ques­tions, check out this new book, The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness:

Order Book at Amazon.com
	Click Here to order at Amazon.com. Print Edi­tion, $24.95

Order Kin­dle Edi­tion
	Click Here to order at Amazon.com, Kin­dle Edi­tion, $9.99

You can now check the last edi­tion of Grand Rounds blog car­ni­val. Grand Rounds brings, weekly, the best blog posts on health and med­ical issues.

We will host the next edi­tion in our blog, on Tues­day Jan­u­ary 15th.

Theme of the edi­tion: Brief­ing The Next US Pres­i­dent. You can choose to write about some issue very close to your heart, that you’d like to make sure the next US Pres­i­dent pays atten­tion to. Or sim­ply send us your best post this week: I will include all the good posts I receive, to pro­vide a win­dow into what health and med­i­cine pro­fes­sion­als are think­ing of in a typ­i­cal week.

Send sub­mis­sions to afer­nan­dez at gmail dot com, with Grand Rounds in the sub­ject line.

Look­ing for­ward your submissions!

Dr. Robert Syl­wester is an edu­ca­tor of edu­ca­tors, hav­ing received mul­ti­ple awards dur­ing his long career as a mas­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tor of the impli­ca­tions of brain sci­ence research for edu­ca­tion and learn­ing. He is the author of sev­eral books and many jour­nal arti­cles, and mem­ber of our Sci­en­tific Advi­sory Board. His most recent book is The Ado­les­cent Brain: Reach­ing for Auton­omy (Cor­win Press, 2007). He is an Emer­i­tus Pro­fes­sor of Edu­ca­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Oregon.

I am hon­ored to inter­view him today.

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez: Let’s start with that eter­nal source of debate. What do we know about the respec­tive roles of genes and our envi­ron­ment in brain devel­op­ment?

Robert Syl­wester: Genetic and envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors both con­tribute to brain mat­u­ra­tion. Genet­ics prob­a­bly play a stronger role in the early years, and the envi­ron­ment plays a stronger role in later years. Still the mother’s (envi­ron­men­tal) use of drugs dur­ing the preg­nancy could affect the genet­ics of fetal brain devel­op­ment, and some adult ill­nesses, such as Huntington’s Dis­ease, are genet­i­cally triggered.

Nature and nur­ture both require the sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions of the other in most devel­op­men­tal and main­te­nance func­tions. We typ­i­cally think of envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors as things that hap­pen to us, over which we have lit­tle control.

Can’t our own deci­sions have an effect in our own brain devel­op­ment? For exam­ple, what if I choose a career in invest­ment bank­ing, vs. one in jour­nal­ism or teaching?

We make our own career deci­sions in life, and most of us make a com­bi­na­tion of good and bad deci­sions, which influ­ence our brain’s maturation.

My father was very unusual in his career tra­jec­tory in that he worked at one place through­out his entire adult life, and died three months after he retired at 91. I’ve always thought that it’s a good idea to make a change every ten years or so and do some­thing dif­fer­ent either within the same orga­ni­za­tion or to move to another one.

It’s just as good for orga­ni­za­tions to have some staff turnover as it is for staff to move to new chal­lenges. The time to leave one posi­tion for another is while you and your employer are Read the rest of this entry »