We have planned a number of fun posts, starting tomorrow, to celebrate Brain Awareness Week (March 10-16th). We hope you will enjoy them.

Let me share a taste of a few articles you will find here during the week:

- Dr. Adrian Preda, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at UC Irvine School of Medicine, will help us exercise our brains by challenging us to exercise more…our bodies.

- We will release our report The State of the Brain Fitness Software Market 2008 on Tuesday March 11th, sharing its 10 Highlights. This is a project where we have spent many many energies over the last 9 months…so we are happy to finally be able to deliver it!

- An article by UCSF’s Gregory Kellet (who wrote this great article on why managing stress is important for our brains) helping us identify ways to precisely do that.

- An in-depth interview with Eric Jensen, brain-based education expert and author of this great recent article.

- Eduwonkette, a superb (and anonymous) education blogger, will expand the conversation by asking, “Do we, as a society, have a clear goal of what the K12 system is supposed to accomplish?”

- Dr. Larry McCleary, one of our esteemed contributors, will speak at the Aspen Center for Integral Health to present his latest book, and will blog about the event.

So, please bookmark our URL, or subscribe to our newsletter (above) or join our blog RSS feed.

And, of course, visit the Brain Awareness Week’s International Calendar of events to find if there are some stimulating events near you. If you live in Washington DC, take a look at the “Partners in Education” activities organized by the National Museum of Health and Medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

A few updates and announcements:

- 1) My apologies for slow blogging, due to travel. I participated yesterday in a fun panel discussion at ETech on Use Your Head- The Future of Mind Hacks. You can read some take-aways (in Italian, so this may be good brain exercise) here.

- 2) We will release our report The State of the Brain Fitness Software Market 2008 next Monday (Update: Tuesday March 11th!), to coincide with Brain Awareness Week. Make sure to visit our blog next Monday if you want to learn more.

- 3) The National Museum of Health and Medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is planning some great activities during Brain Awareness Week (Thank you, Tim). Learn more about their “Partners in Education” activities for students in the Washington DC area.

- 4) The Dana Foundation has released a great research report to address the question “Are smart people drawn to the arts or does arts training make people smarter?” Enjoy the report and some excellent related resources Here.

- 5) Eric Jensen has written a great article on Brain-Based Education for PDK International Journal of Education. Enjoy it!

The great MIT OpenCourseWare initiative offers a lot of free materials on Brain and Cognitive Sciences. You can browse lecture notes, readings, and more on a variety of psychology and neuroscience courses.   

• “The human brain is the most complex, sophisticated, and powerful information-processing device known. To study its complexities, the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology combines the experimental technologies of neurobiology, neuroscience, and psychology, with the theoretical power that comes from the fields of computational neuroscience and cognitive science.”
• “The Department was founded by Hans-Lukas Teuber in 1964 as a Department of Psychology, with the then-radical vision that the study of brain and mind are inseparable. Today, at a time of increasing specialization and fragmentation, our goal remains to understand cognition- its processes, and its mechanisms at the level of molecules, neurons, networks of neurons, and cognitive modules. We are unique among neuroscience and cognitive science departments in our breadth, and in the scope of our ambition. We span a very large range of inquiry into the brain and mind, and our work bridges many different levels of analysis including molecular, cellular, systems, computational and cognitive approaches.”

There is a fascinating new course titled A Clinical Approach to the Human Brain, Fall 2006, including Topics and Lecture Summaries such as

• “Neurogenesis: Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks. A surprising discovery in the last few years in neurobiology has been that neurons are born, neurogenesis, in the adult mammalian brain. Initially, this had been shown in animals and, more recently, in the humans hippocampus, the site of declarative memory formation. (See Greenough). Furthermore, the rate of neurogenesis in animals has been enhanced by experience, both physical activity and living in enriched environments (See Read the rest of this entry »