Zack Lynch asks for sup­port to Write Con­gress Today in Sup­port of the National Neu­rotech­nol­ogy Ini­tia­tive Act, explain­ing:

“With the recent intro­duc­tion of the National Neu­rotech­nol­ogy Ini­tia­tive (NNTI) Act in the House (H.R. 5989) and the Sen­ate (S.2989) ear­lier this month, the time has come to ramp up a national grass­roots cam­paign in sup­port of the NNTI and I would like to ask for your help. It is imper­a­tive that we get a sub­stan­tive amount of Con­gres­sional sup­port as quickly as pos­si­ble as we are tar­get­ing Con­gres­sional hear­ings prior to the August break.

Take action: We need to flood Con­gres­sional fax machines and mail boxes with indi­vid­ual let­ters of sup­port from key con­stituents like you over the next four weeks. I urge you to visit NIO’s Take Action web­page.

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Here you are have the twice-a-month newslet­ter with our 10 most pop­u­lar blog posts. Please remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive this Newslet­ter by email, sim­ply by sub­mit­ting your email at the top of this page.

A cru­cial topic we cover is, “How can we use emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies to keep our brains healthy and pro­duc­tive as long as pos­si­ble?” The Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging asked Alvaro to exer­cise his brain…and here are his thoughts on the cur­rent state and future of the brain fit­ness mar­ket: Brain Health Busi­ness Grows With Research and Demand

Announce­ments

Brain Train­ing Pre­sen­ta­tion and Sem­i­nars: We had an infor­ma­tive webi­nar this Tues­day. Click here to view the pre­sen­ta­tion and learn about upcom­ing events.

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We had an infor­ma­tive webi­nar this Tues­day, dis­cussing the State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware mar­ket today, based on the find­ings in our Mar­ket Report. In case you missed it, you can find below a link to check out and down­load the Pow­er­Point slides I pre­sented (just the visu­als, with­out audio) to cover these areas:

1– The Four Pil­lars for Brain Health

2– Cog­ni­tive Abil­i­ties can Be Ass­esed and Trained

3– An emerg­ing field, and poised to grow

4– A con­fus­ing player land­scape. Think “What For”, not “Best”.

Link: State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket 2008

Please remem­ber that we have 2 upcom­ing webi­nars, and you can still register!:

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Sev­eral recent NYT arti­cles focus on sev­eral fas­ci­nat­ing fron­tiers of brain sci­ence. We know much more about brain and mind than only 20 years ago, yet expo­nen­tially less than 20 years from now.

A few wor­thy explo­rations on mind­ful­ness, per­cep­tual capac­i­ties, and the power of placebo: Read the rest of this entry »

Quck heads up: Two excel­lent edi­tions of these ongo­ing blog carnivals.

- Encephalon 46th Edi­tion: selec­tion of neu­ro­science and psy­chol­ogy blog. posts

- Grand Rounds 36th Edi­tion: all things med­ical and healthy.

Hello, I hope you have been enjoy­ing the long week­end (for folks in the US).

Cre­at­ing a Sharp­Brains Wid­get was in my To Do list for a good while, to make it eas­ier to share our con­tent via other blogs and social sites (Face­book…). Finally, it is done!. And sur­pris­ingly easy.

What it is: A wid­get is basi­cally a box you can embed in your blog or web­page. For exam­ple, after cre­at­ing our Exer­cise Your Brain wid­get, I just embed­ded it into our own blog: you can see it in the right col­umn, titled Share Our Blog. There are sev­eral options (size, color…), very easy to customize.

Descrip­tion: Exer­cise Your Brain. Research-based infor­ma­tion on Brain Fit­ness and Cog­ni­tive Health, authored by Sharp­Brains staff and over 10 neu­ro­sci­en­tists, spiced up with fun Brain Teasers.

What you can do: if you have any web­site or blog where you’d like the wid­get to appear, you can sim­ply Get your Wid­get by click­ing Here. Choose the options (box size, color theme, arti­cle text…) that bet­ter fit your site, and copy and paste the HTML. It lit­er­ally takes 3–5 minutes.

Thank you. I hope we’ll see it appear in a vari­ety of blogs and web­sites inter­ested in brain top­ics, so we can expand the conversation!

Cog­ni­tive train­ing is show­ing a tremen­dous poten­tial to expand work­ing mem­ory, a capac­ity once thought lim­ited and untrainable.

If you have enough work­ing mem­ory to both be pro­cess­ing this infor­ma­tion and devel­op­ing your own thoughts, you may be think­ing now, a) what exactly is Work­ing Mem­ory?, and b) why do we even care?. Well, Dr. Bill Klemm answers those ques­tions, and more, below. Please enjoy one of the most insight­ful arti­cles on the sub­ject we have seen in a long while, which we are proud to bring to Sharp­Brains readers.

- Alvaro

How Well Peo­ple Think Depends On Work­ing Memory

- By  Dr. Bill Klemm

Imag­ine dial­ing a phone num­ber by hav­ing to look up each digit one at a time in the phone book. Nor­mally, you look up the num­ber and remem­ber all seven dig­its long enough to get it dialed. Even with one digit at a time, you would have to remem­ber each digit long enough to get it dialed. What if your brain could not even do that! We call this kind of remem­ber­ing, “work­ing mem­ory,” because that is what the brain works with. Work­ing mem­ory is crit­i­cal to every­day living.

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We just received this very insight­ful essay on stress man­age­ment and brain health writ­ten by Lan­don, a home­schooler and par­tic­i­pant in Susan Hill’s writ­ing work­shop. Susan asked her stu­dents to write about impli­ca­tions of recent brain research.

Enjoy the arti­cle and the long week­end (at least here in the US) and Relax…

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Stress Man­age­ment for Your Brain Health

– By Lan­don N

Thou­sands and thou­sands of web-like neu­rons linked together form a spongy mass inside a skull. This mass, called the brain, is what con­trols the body and the thoughts that run threw it have a notable effect on the heath of an indi­vid­ual. In addi­tion to thoughts, fear, stress, and emo­tions also have a strong effect on health. So then, health depends on more than just eat­ing right and exer­cis­ing; it depends on our men­tal state as well.

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We have talked about the value of med­i­ta­tion before (see Mind­ful­ness and Med­i­ta­tion in Schools), as a form of well-directed men­tal exer­cise than can help train atten­tion and emo­tional self-regulation.  Which other stud­ies have shown how it strength­ens spe­cific parts of the brain, mainly in the frontal lobe.

Dr. Rabiner shares with us, below, an excel­lent review of a new study that ana­lyzes the ben­e­fits of mind­ful­ness for ado­les­cents and adults with atten­tion deficits. He writes that “although this is clearly a pre­lim­i­nary study, the results are both inter­est­ing and encouraging.”

- Alvaro

Does Mind­ful­ness Med­i­ta­tion Help Adults & Teens with ADHD

– By Dr. David Rabiner

Although med­ica­tion treat­ment is effec­tive for many indi­vid­u­als with ADHD, includ­ing ado­les­cents adults, there remains an under­stand­able need to explore and develop inter­ven­tions that can com­ple­ment or even sub­sti­tute for med­ica­tion. This is true for a vari­ety of rea­sons includ­ing:
1) Not all adults with ADHD ben­e­fit from med­ica­tion.
2) Among those who ben­e­fit, many have resid­ual dif­fi­cul­ties that need to be addressed via other means.
3) Some adults with ADHD expe­ri­ence adverse effects that pre­vent them from remain­ing on medication.

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I wrote this arti­cle for the March/ April edi­tion of the pub­li­ca­tion Aging Today, pub­lished by the Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging, and received per­mis­sion to repro­duce it here.

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In recent years, most pro­fes­sion­als in aging have become aware of the grow­ing sci­en­tific evi­dence show­ing that human brains retain the abil­ity to gen­er­ate neu­rons and change over a life­time, dis­cov­er­ies that have bro­ken the sci­en­tific par­a­digm preva­lent dur­ing the 20th cen­tury. Fur­ther­more, neu­roimag­ing and cog­ni­tive train­ing stud­ies are show­ing how well-directed exer­cise presents peo­ple major oppor­tu­ni­ties for healthy brain aging.

How can peo­ple use emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies to keep their brains healthy and pro­duc­tive as long as pos­si­ble? An emerg­ing mar­ket for brain health– $225 mil­lion mar­ket in 2007, in the United States alone, of which con­sumers account for $80 million–is try­ing to address that ques­tion in a way that com­ple­ments other impor­tant more tra­di­tional pil­lars (and multi-billion indus­tries) of brain health, such as phys­i­cal exer­cise, bal­anced diet, stress man­age­ment (stress has been shown to actu­ally kill neu­rons and reduce the rate of cre­ation of new ones) and over­all men­tal stim­u­la­tion and life­long learning.

2007 AN ACTIVE YEAR

A series of impor­tant events took place in 2007, a sem­i­nal year for the brain health field, begin­ning in Jan­u­ary when many main­stream media pub­li­ca­tions, such as Time Mag­a­zine and CBS News, started to pub­lish major sto­ries on neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and brain exer­cise. This media cov­er­age fol­lowed the pub­li­ca­tion of the long-awaited results from national clin­i­cal tri­als show­ing that sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­ages of the par­tic­i­pants age 65 and older who trained for five weeks improved their mem­ory, rea­son­ing and information-processing speed. Find­ings from the Advanced Cog­ni­tive Train­ing for Inde­pen­dent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) Study appeared in the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion (Dec. 20, 2006) and revealed that even after five years, par­tic­i­pants in the ACTIVE computer-based pro­gram showed less of a decline in information-processing skills than those in a con­trol group that received no cog­ni­tive training.

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