Round-up of April articles and news on neuroscience, brain development and cognitive health:

Games for Health Conferences to host new Cognitive Health Track:

For the first time, a new Cognitive Health track -Powered by SharpBrains- will cover eleven brain fitness and cognitive health topics during the 5th Annual Games for Health Conference. The current price is $379, with a 15% discount if you use code “sharp09″ (without quotation) when you register Here. Details: June 11-12th at the Hyatt Harborside Hotel in Boston, MA.

Bilingual Babies Get Head Start — Before They Can Talk:

- “Unlike the monolingual group, the bilingual group was able to successfully learn a new sound type and use it to predict where each character would pop up…The bilingual babies’ skill applies to more than just switching between languages. Mehler likened this apparently enhanced cognitive ability to a brain selecting “the right tool for the right operation”—also called executive function.”

- “In this basic process, the brain, ever flexible, nimbly switches from one learned response to another as situations change…Monolingual babies hone this ability later in their young lives, Mehler suggests.”

Study shows how kids’ stress hurts memory:

“Now, research is providing what could be crucial clues to explain how childhood poverty translates into dimmer chances of success: Read the rest of this entry »

Several recent articles and news:

Brain Gain: the underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs‎ (The New Yorker)

- “Alex remains enthusiastic about Adderall, but he also has a slightly jaundiced critique of it. “It only works as a cognitive enhancer insofar as you are dedicated to accomplishing the task at hand,” he said. “The number of times I’ve taken Adderall late at night and decided that, rather than starting my paper, hey, I’ll organize my entire music library! I’ve seen people obsessively cleaning their rooms on it.” Alex thought that generally the drug helped him to bear down on his work, but it also tended to produce writing with a characteristic flaw. “Often, I’ve looked back at papers I’ve written on Adderall, and they’re verbose. They’re belaboring a point, trying to create this airtight argument, when if you just got to your point in a more direct manner it would be stronger. But with Adderall I’d produce two pages on something that could be said in a couple of sentences.” Nevertheless, his Adderall-assisted papers usually earned him at least a B. They got the job done. As Alex put it, “Productivity is a good thing.”

Eschew Enhancement: Memory-boosting drugs should not be made available to the general public (Technology Review)

- “Who might use them? Students will be tempted, as might players of any game involving counting or remembering (chess, bridge, and even poker and blackjack). Certain professionals might desire a boost in attention or memory”

- “But these potentially powerful medicines should not be made available to everyone, for two reasons. The first is safety. The last several years have provided many examples of side effects, some life-threatening…The second reason is that we still know relatively little about learning and memory and how they are integrated to make judgments and decisions.”

Kellogg Settles with FTC over Health Claims on Cereal (Promo Magazine)

- “The FTC said that Kellogg promoted the cereal as “clinically shown to improve kids’ attentiveness by nearly 20%,” when in fact the study referred to in the ads showed different results.”

- “The study found that only about half the children who ate Frosted Mini-Wheats for breakfast showed any improvement in attentiveness, and only about one in nine improved by 20% or more, the FTC said.”

Brain shock: The new Gulf War syndrome (New Scientist)

- “The US army also screens for symptoms of mTBI when soldiers return from a tour of duty, and again three months later. The army is also carrying out neurocognitive tests on recruits before they are sent into combat so that doctors can check for deterioration in later tests.”

- “When it comes to combat trauma, unpicking the physical from the psychological is bound to be highly complex. As Barth says, perhaps the greatest danger could be in trying to simplify the picture too much. “I recommend that we get comfortable with the complexity,” he says, “and treat it as a challenge.”

If you are interested in education reform, social entrepreneurship and venture philantropy, grab a nice cap of tea or coffee and enjoy today’s spectacular edition of the New York Times Magazine.

Must read: insightful expert discussion on How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System?

Also: excellent pieces titled Self-Made Philanthropists, on how ProPublica was conveived and launched, and For Good, Measure, on the importance and challenges of measuring the return on social investments.

Bonus: the newspaper’s Week in Review section brings a throught-provoking article on Brain Enhancement Is Wrong, Right?, on the use of drugs for boosting brain performance. Am happy to report that no one in the Education articles suggested giving these drugs to millions of kids…

A fun article from the BBC highlights some of the latest entries to the 2.5 billion-word database of words in the Collins English Dictionary, 9th edition.

We were of course biased and happy to see “brainfood” as a newly minted word. According to Webster’s New Millennium™ Dictionary of English, they define “brain food“:

Part of Speech: n
Definition: any food that is considered to aid intelligence, memory, or creativity; by extension, any intellectual sustenance

We’d like to add SharpBrains to the list of brain foods! If you need some puzzles to pick up your mental metabolism, see how you do on these. Or maybe delve into some science and see if that expands your mental waistline a bit. Just save room for dessert!