Welcome to the 61st edition of Encephalon, the blog carnival that offers some of the best neuroscience and psychology blog posts every other week.

We do have an excellent set of articles today. covering much ground. Enjoy the reading:

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Neuroscience and Society

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Alzheimer’s Disease and Neurocognitive Health Read the rest of this entry »

Here you have a collection of recent news coverage on brain heath, fitness and training topics:

1- Great Memory Special in National Geographic, including

- Interactive 3D map of the brain

- Memory Game

2- Fascinating What the Beatles Gave Science, by Sharon Begley at Newsweek

- “Even in novices, meditation leaves its mark. An eight-week course in compassion meditation, in which volunteers focus on the wish that all beings be free from suffering, shifted brain activity from the right prefrontal cortex to the left, a pattern associated with a greater sense of well-being.”

3- One of the best editions of Scientific American Mind

- Solving the IQ Puzzle “The 20th century saw the Flynn effect: massive gains in IQ from one generation to another. Now Flynn explains why”

- Anxiety and Alzheimer- A lifetime of stress could lead to memory problems and disease: “Over a period of up to 12 years, volunteers who were anxiety-prone had a 40 percent higher risk of developing mild cognitive impairment than more easygoing individuals did. Mild cognitive impairment is thought to be a precursor for Alzheimer’s.”

4- Exercise builds strong brains, too – USATODAY.com

- “Phillip Tomporowski, a study co-author and exercise psychologist at the University of Georgia in Athens, says exercise “may well improve the underlying mental processes that are involved in a lot of behaviors and academic tasks.”

5- Daily computer game boosts maths- BBC, reporting preliminary results from a small pilot

- “Playing a daily computer game has helped a class of primary school children improve their maths and concentration, a study says.”

6- ADHD and Brain Development- Washington Post

- “Developing more slowly in ADHD youngsters — the lag can be as much as three years — are brain regions that suppress inappropriate actions and thoughts, focus attention, remember things from moment to moment, work for reward, and control movement.”

Meme: “The term “meme” (rhyming with “theme”), coined in 1976 by the biologist Richard Dawkins, refers to a “unit of cultural information” which can propagate from one mind to another in a manner analogous to genes.

If you haven’t read Dawkins’ classic book The Selfish Gene…it is never too late to enjoy it!

There are some “memes” floating now around bloggers and I have been “tagged” (included) by 2 of them. So here you have:

1) On good daily habits: this is the original post, and here are Hueina’s My Simply Successful Secrets.

My “Simply Sucessful Secrets” habits that I follow close to every day, in more or less that sequence:

• Perform 10-15 minutes of Read the rest of this entry »

What an event yesterday night. My wife and I were fortunate to visit the Google Campus and attend the Sixth Annual North American Fellowship Induction Program of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, a social venture fund where we have been involved for a number of years, and thanks to which (thanks Michele!) my wife and I met in the first place.

18 new Ashoka Fellows/ social entrepreneurs were elected, and after a fun cocktail reception the ceremony began. Sergei Brin (Google Co-founder), Sheryl Sandberg (who helped launch Google Foundation and google.org), Salar Kamangar (the mind behind AdWords) gave introductory remarks. Salar explained how he first heard of Ashoka (through the book How to Change the World, by David Bornstein) and how he saw tremendous similarities between Ashoka and Google: both Read the rest of this entry »