The next Learning & the Brain conference edition is April 26-29, 2008, in Cambridge, MA. We recommend it highly for educators interested in learning more about latest brain research findings and implications for teaching. See Detailed program.

Description: Cognitive neuroscience has discovered that the brain is not ‘hardwired’ from birth, but holds a remarkable lifelong power to change—a phenomenon called ‘plasticity.’ Positive or negative environments, exercise, nurturance, learning, and other experiences continue to change the brain throughout life.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the many Sharp Brains around, who is up to date of everything related to brain health and fitness (yes, Jeanne, that’s you! thanks for being such a great bureau chief!) has sent us a very interesting press note on how brain fitness and training can be applied in the sports performance world. I haven’t been able to track down the research behind the specific programs mentioned in the article, but the theoretical rationale makes sense based on similar programs we are familiar with: you can see below a summary of our interview with Prof. Daniel Gopher, scientific mind behind computer-based cognitive simulations for military pilots and for basketball players.

The note Sports Vision Training Takes Athletes to New Frontiers explains how

• “Specialty sports vision facilities are helping athletes train skills that many believed were “untrainable”; skills like anticipation, field vision, timing, sport intelligence, game tempo, reaction speed, focus and concentration.”
• “What has everyone all worked up is the knowledge that they can actually train athletic skills that many believed were “untrainable.” We’re talking about intangibles like anticipation, field vision, timing, sport intelligence, game tempo, reaction speed, focus and concentration. “One of the worst mistakes an athlete can make is to believe that you’re either born with or without these kinds of skills, and that they’re consequently not trainable,” says Brian Stammer, editor of SportsVision Magazine. “If you want to be the best athlete you can be, you must do exercises to condition and sharpen your sensory system, including visual, auditory and brain-processing speed.”
• This is the link to the magazine they mention: SportsVision Magazine

And here is the summary of my (AF) interview with Prof. Daniel Gopher (DG) on Cognitive Simulations and cognitive training:

• “AF: …Can you summarize your research findings across all these examples and fields, and how you see the field evolving?
• DG: In short, I’d summarize by saying that
• - Cognitive performance can be substantially improved with proper training. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to live long and strong, you’ve got to do more than work out your body; you’ve got to exercise your brain, insists Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg, clinical professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine. While we’ve heard for years that mental stimulation can stave off dementia and Alzheimer’s, Dr. Goldberg says scientists now know exactly how to keep our brains from turning to mush – by stimulating the growth of new neurons and interconnections between them that boost brain efficiency. If you don’t use your brain in new and novel ways, your brain won’t be fit to use.

As the chief scientific adviser for SharpBrains.com, Dr. Goldberg’s site offers an array of brain teasers and exercises that improve brain function. But online tests are not all you can do. Just do something different and challenging. Getting out of your middle-aged comfort zone is the difference in a high quality of life when you’re older than none at all.

Keep reading more of the Florida Today interview with Dr. Goldberg at Next Up, A Gym for the Mind.

You can also read our more detailed (and probably more precise) interview with Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg on Brain Fitness and Cognitive Training.

Tom alerts us (thanks!) of a fun book review in the New York Times today, by Abigail Zuger, titled The Brain: Malleable, Capable, Vulnerable, on the book The Brain That Changes Itself (Viking, $24.95) by psychiatrist Norman Doidge. Some quotes:

• “In bookstores, the science aisle generally lies well away from the self-help section, with hard reality on one set of shelves and wishful thinking on the other. But Norman Doidge’s fascinating synopsis of the current revolution in neuroscience straddles this gap: the age-old distinction between the brain and the mind is crumbling fast as the power of positive thinking finally gains scientific credibility.”
• “So it is forgivable that Dr. Doidge, a Canadian psychiatrist and award-winning science writer, recounts the accomplishments of the “neuroplasticians,” as he calls the neuroscientists involved in these new studies, with breathless reverence. Their work is indeed mind-bending, miracle-making, reality-busting stuff, with implications, as Dr. Doidge notes, not only for individual patients with neurologic disease but for all human beings, not to mention human culture, human learning and human history.”
• “Research into the malleability of the normal brain has been no less amazing. Subjects who learn to play a sequence of notes on the piano develop characteristic changes in the brain’s electric activity; when other subjects sit in front of a piano and just think about playing the same notes, the same changes occur. It is the virtual made real, a solid quantification of the power of thought.”
• “The new science of the brain may still be in its infancy, but already, as Dr. Doidge makes quite clear, the scientific minds are leaping ahead.”

Here you have some of our interviews with a few “scientific minds” that have, for years, been “leaping ahead” beyond “positive thinking” into “positive training”:

• Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg on Brain Fitness Programs and Cognitive Training. Dr. Goldberg is a neuropsychologist and clinical professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine. He was a student and close associate of the great neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, and has written The Executive Brain and The Wisdom Paradox.
• On Cognitive Simulations for Basketball Game-Intelligence: Interview with Prof. Daniel Gopher. Dr. Gopher is Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Human Factors Engineering at Technion, Israel’s Institute of Science, and scientific advisor for IntelliGym.
• Memory training and attention deficits: interview with Professor Bradley Gibson, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at University of Notre Dame, and Director of the Perception and Attention Lab there
• On Working Memory Training and RoboMemo: Interview with Dr. Torkel Klingberg, professor at Karolinska Institute, and director of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, part of the Stockholm Brain Institute. He is also the scientific advisor for Cogmed Working Memory Training program (RoboMemo).
• An ape can do this. Can we not? with Dr. James Zull, Professor of Biology and Biochemistry at Case Western University, and author of The Art of Changing the Brain.

And a couple of related blog posts:

• Can Thoughts and Action Change Our Brains?
• Books on neuroplasticity and memory training