We are host­ing here at Sharp­Brains the next edi­tions of sev­eral great blog car­ni­vals. If you blog about these top­ics, please sub­mit your best recent posts using our Con­tact Us form:

- August 27th: Car­ni­val of Education.

- Sep­tem­ber 9th: Car­ni­val of Biogerontology.

- Sep­tem­ber 17th: Car­ni­val of HR.

Enjoy the  weekend!

Good arti­cle on the August edi­tion of Mil­i­tary Offi­cer magazine:

Men­tal Floss (August 2008) (link opens a PDF-life doc­u­ment, you can read the text by Zoom­ing In).

My 2 favorite quotes, both by Dr. Molly Wag­ster, chief of the Neu­ropsy­chol­ogy of Aging Branch, National Insti­tute on Aging (NIA) in Bethesda, Md:

- “Cer­tainly as we age there are declines with brain func­tions and cog­ni­tion. But there’s evi­dence that the aging brain can adapt and change more than we ever thought”.

- “We don’t know how it hap­pens or how long changes last, but even in the face of these unan­swered ques­tions, there is the chance to main­tain our cog­ni­tive function”.

Let me add a  reflec­tion: who among us won’t be tomor­row one day older than he/she is today? The good news about the “aging brain” doesn’t only refer to adults over 70!

To explore these con­cepts in more depth, you may enjoy vis­it­ing our Neu­ro­science Inter­view Series.

A cou­ple of quick notes about our blog:

1– We have just added a Search box to allow you eas­ily find con­tent in our 600+ arti­cle archive. Take a look at the top of the right side­bar, and let us know if you have any feed­back! Btw, feel free to say Thank You to our reader Luc…whose feed­back gave a new impe­tus to this Search option.

2–  You will also find a but­ton named BOOKMARK at the bot­tom of all blog posts, includ­ing this one. This allows you to eas­ily sub­mit blog posts to the social media sites where you have accounts: Face­book, Digg, Red­dit, Stum­ble­Upon, Del.ic.ious, you name it. We appre­ci­ate your help in let­ting more peo­ple know about our arti­cles and teasers!

As always, any feed­back is welcome.

After about age 50, most peo­ple begin to expe­ri­ence a decline in mem­ory capa­bil­ity. Why is that? One obvi­ous answer is that the small arter­ies of the brain begin to clog up, often as a result of a life­time of eat­ing the wrong things and a lack of exer­cise. If that life­time has been stress­ful, many neu­rons may have been killed by stress hor­mones. Given the most recent sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture, reviewed in my book Thank You, Brain, For All You Remem­ber. What You For­got Was My Fault, dead neu­rons can’t be replaced, except in the hip­pocam­pus, which is for­tu­nate for mem­ory because the hip­pocam­pus is essen­tial for mak­ing cer­tain kinds of mem­o­ries per­ma­nent. Another cause is incip­i­ent Alzheimer’s dis­ease; autop­sies show that many peo­ple have the lesions of the dis­ease but have never shown symp­toms, pre­sum­ably because a life­time of excep­tional men­tal activ­ity has built up a “cog­ni­tive reserve.

So is there any­thing you can do about it besides exer­cise like crazy, eat healthy foods that you don’t like all that much, pop your statin pills, and take up yoga?

Yes. In short: focus, focus, focus.

Chang­ing think­ing styles can help. Research shows that Read the rest of this entry »

Inter­est­ing mar­ket news:

Dakim’s [m]Power Adopted by 150 Senior Liv­ing Com­mu­ni­ties … (Busi­ness Wire)

- “Dakim Inc. announced today that its [m]Power® Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness Sys­tem has now been adopted by more than 150 senior liv­ing communities”

- “Users include Sun­rise Senior Liv­ing, Front Porch Com­mu­ni­ties, Diakon Lutheran Ser­vices, Ecu­men, Eska­ton, Bench­mark Assisted Liv­ing, and Los Ange­les Jew­ish Home for the Aging. Sev­eral neu­rol­o­gists and a local Alzheimer’s Asso­ci­a­tion chap­ter office have also pur­chased the system.”

- “Other prod­ucts are sta­tic. You buy a CD, put it Read the rest of this entry »

Just read an arti­cle on clean tech, includ­ing a cou­ple of quotes by Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr sug­gest­ing that

“Remem­ber the Inter­net? Green tech is big­ger… This could be the biggest eco­nomic oppor­tu­nity of the 21st century”

because

“Energy is the mother of all markets”.

Well, if Energy is the mother of all markets…who would be the father of all markets?

The Human Brain, perhaps?

So, I may both agree and dis­agree with John Doerr: yes, clean tech should be big­ger than the Inter­net, and per­haps the biggest eco­nomic oppor­tu­nity in the next 10–15 years…but Brain­Tech, tech­nolo­gies aimed at help­ing our brains be more pro­duc­tive and sus­tain­able through­out their lifes­pans, may become the biggest oppor­tu­nity of the 21st cen­tury. We’ll see.

Where does our “Feel­ing of Know­ing” come from? Have you ever felt cer­tain that you knew an answer even though you couldn’t think of it right off? Where does that “feel­ing of know­ing” come from? The answer to this ques­tion is the focus of neu­rol­o­gist Robert Burton’s new book On Being Cer­tain: Believ­ing You Are Right Even When You’re Not.

I recently reviewed Dr. Burton’s book on the Brain Sci­ence Pod­cast and last week I had the oppor­tu­nity to inter­view him for the show. He explained that one of the ori­gins for his book was his expe­ri­ence with patients with con­di­tions like Cotard’s syn­drome (where the patient thinks he is dead or does not exist). What Dr. Bur­ton calls the “feel­ing of know­ing” is so strong that peo­ple con­sis­tently trust it even when their beliefs con­tra­dict the evi­dence. At first it might seem sur­pris­ing that this feel­ing is gen­er­ated at an uncon­scious level in our brain, yet the same sort of pro­cess­ing cre­ates the world we see and hear. It is well-known that what we see is not what enters our eyes, but Read the rest of this entry »

Chris hosts a superb edi­tion of Encephalon, pre­sent­ing the arti­cles as an engag­ing and pretty com­pre­hen­sive Q&A ses­sion. If you want to read the answers, to the ques­tions below, by some of the best neu­ro­science and psy­chol­ogy blog­gers, sim­ply visit Encephalon 52: Q&A.

Q: What is the rela­tion­ship between neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis and depres­sion?

Q: For that mat­ter, is there a rela­tion­ship between depres­sion and dia­betes?

Q: What is the mol­e­c­u­lar basis of bipo­lar dis­or­der?

Q: Can brain stim­u­la­tion make you a bet­ter dri­ver? Read the rest of this entry »

The arti­cle Clumsy kids more likely to become obese adults: study (CBC)…

- “The study was based on tests of about 11,000 peo­ple in Britain who were tested for hand con­trol, co-ordination and clum­si­ness at age seven and 11, and were then fol­lowed until age 33.”

- “Prof. Scott Mont­gomery of the Karolin­ska Insti­tutet in Stock­holm and his col­leagues at Impe­r­ial Col­lege Lon­don in Eng­land said they pur­posely chose mea­sure­ments of fine hand con­trol such as pick­ing up matches, rather than those likely to be influ­enced by par­tic­i­pat­ing in sports, such as catch­ing balls.”

- “While it is often assumed that the cog­ni­tive impair­ments seen in adult obe­sity are a con­se­quence of excess weight, that could be putting the chicken before the egg, the researchers say”

…reminds me of Judith Beck’s words on how to “Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person”

- “The main mes­sage of cog­ni­tive ther­apy over­all, and its appli­ca­tion in the diet world, is straight-forward: prob­lems los­ing weight are not one’s fault. Prob­lems sim­ply reflect lack of skills–skills that can be acquired and mas­tered through prac­tice. Read the rest of this entry »

From a recent article:

Brain Train­ing dom­i­nates ’08 Euro sales (CVG Online)

- “Over­all, four of the ten best­selling DS games in both coun­tries dur­ing the first six months of 2008 were in the brain train­ing genre.”

- “Accord­ing to data released by sales mon­i­tor Media Con­trol GfK Inter­na­tional, the DS’s heavy­weight sta­tus in the Euro­pean con­sole mar­ket is closely tied to the pop­u­lar­ity of Nintendo’s Brain Train­ing series and other brain train­ing titles.”

- “The biggest demand for brain games is in Ger­many and Hol­land”, the com­pany said. More Brain Train­ing was the best­selling title in Ger­many dur­ing the first six months of the year, while Brain Train­ing topped the Dutch chart dur­ing the same period.

Fas­ci­nat­ing. Will brain-training-induced employee-productivity-increase help turn around the loom­ing reces­sion? we’ll track closely the per­for­mance of Ger­man and Dutch economies!