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.

Brandon Keim writes a nice post on The Future Science of Altruism at Wired Science Blog, based on an interview with Jordan Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Brandon provides good context saying that “Scientists, said Grafman, are understanding how our brains are shaped by culture and environment, and a mechanism of these changes may involve fluctuation in our genes themselves, which we’re only beginning to understand”. (more on this in our post Richard Dawkins and Alfred Nobel: beyond nature and nurture).

And gives us some very nice quotes from Dr. Grafman, including

• “One of the ways we differentiate ourselves from other species is that we have a sense of future. We don’t have to have immediate gratification…. But how far can we go into the future? How much of our brain is aimed at doing that? [...]“
• “Other great apes have a frontal lobe, fairly well developed, but not nearly as well developed as our own. If you believe in Darwin and evolution, you argue that the area grew, and the neural architecture had to change in some way to accommodate the abilities associated with that behavior. There’s no doubt that didn’t occur overnight; probably a slow change, and it was one of the last areas of the brain to develop as well. It’s very recent evolutionary development that humans took full advantage of. What in the future? What in the brains can change?”
• “The issue becomes — do we teach this? Train people to do this? Children tend to be selfish, and have to be taught to share.”

The UC Berkeley magazine Greater Good tries to answer that question with a series of articles on Gratitude. I especially enjoyed A Lesson in Thanks, described as Read the rest of this entry »

Here is new brain teaser from puzzle master Wes Carroll. He found this one in the Mensa publication Number Puzzles for Math Geniuses by Harold Gale.

The Fork in the Road

Question:
Start at the center number and collect another four numbers by following the paths shown (and not going backwards). Add the five numbers together. What is the lowest number you can score?

This puzzle works your executive functions in your frontal lobes by using your planning skills, hypothesis testing, and logic.

Click here to get the Answer.