We just received this very insightful essay on stress management and brain health written by Landon, a homeschooler and participant in Susan Hill’s writing workshop. Susan asked her students to write about implications of recent brain research.

Enjoy the article and the long weekend (at least here in the US) and Relax…

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Stress Management for Your Brain Health

– By Landon N

Thousands and thousands of web-like neurons linked together form a spongy mass inside a skull. This mass, called the brain, is what controls the body and the thoughts that run threw it have a notable effect on the heath of an individual. In addition to thoughts, fear, stress, and emotions also have a strong effect on health. So then, health depends on more than just eating right and exercising; it depends on our mental state as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)’s autobiography (full text free online) includes some very insightful refections on the evolution of his own mind during his middle-age, showcasing the power of the brain to rewire itself through experience (neuroplasticity) during our whole lifetimes-not just when we are youngest.

He wrote these paragraphs at the age of 72 (I have bolded some key sentences for emphasis, the whole text makes great reading):

“I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily– against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.

This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Yaakov Stern is the Division Leader of the Cognitive Neuroscience Division of the Sergievsky Center, and Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology, at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, New York.

He is one of the leading proponents of the Cognitive reserve theory, which aims to explain why some individuals with full Alzheimer’s pathology (accumulation of plaques and tangles in their brains) can keep normal lives until they die, while others -with the same amount of plaques and tangles- display the severe symptoms we associate with Alzheimer’s Disease. He has published dozens of peer-reviewed scientific papers on the subject.

The concept of a Cognitive Reserve has been around since 1989, when a post mortem analysis of 137 people with Alzheimer’s Disease showed that some patients exhibited fewer clinical symptoms than their actual pathology suggested. These patients also showed higher brain weights and greater number of neurons when compared to age-matched controls. The investigators hypothesized that the patients had a larger “reserve” of neurons and abilities that enable them to offset the losses caused by Alzheimer’s. Since then, the concept of Cognitive Reserve has been defined as the ability of an individual to tolerate progressive brain pathology without demonstrating clinical cognitive symptoms. (You can check at the end of this interview a great clip on this).

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Key take-aways

- Lifetime experiences, like education, engaging occupation, and leisure activities, have been shown to have a major influence on how we age, specifically on whether we will develop Alzheimer’s symptoms or not.

- This is so because stimulating activities, ideally combining physical exercise, learning and social interaction, help us build a Cognitive Reserve to protect us.

- The earlier we start building our Reserve, the better; but it is never too late to start. And, the more activities, the better: the effect is cumulative.

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The Cognitive Reserve

Alvaro Fernandez (AF): Dear Dr. Stern, it is a pleasure to have you here. Let me first ask you this: the implications of your research are pretty astounding, presenting major implications across sectors and age groups. What has been the most unexpected reaction so far?

YS: well…I was pretty surprised when Read the rest of this entry »

The Wall Street Journal has a great article today, Putting Brain Exercises to the Test (requires subscription), that compares 6 different computer-based brain exercise programs along ease-of-use, fun, and science behind. We at SharpBrains conducted a very similar exercise last year, coming to basically the same conclusions.

The article compares Nintendo Brain Age, MyBrainBuilder, MyBrainTrainer, HappyNeuron, (CogniFit Science) MindFit and Posit Science brain fitness 2.0, and ends up recommending Read the rest of this entry »

…a few questions: how did you find us, what we are doing well, what we can do better?

We have just found out that more than 600 people are receiving our feeds, but we only know-and just a bit- the 50-60 who leave comments and link to us. We enjoy having so many readers not just in the US but in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia…(thanks Google Analytics!).

Would you mind writing a comment to allow us to learn about you and your interests, and also include your feedback for us? If you have a blog, please write the URL so we can pay a visit.

Enjoy the weekend, and thanks a lot for your time and attention!

Caroline and Alvaro

“…across the country, brain health programs are springing up, offering the possibility of a cognitive fountain of youth.”

“From “brain gyms” on the Internet to “brain-healthy” foods and activities at assisted living centers, the programs are aimed at baby boomers anxious about entering their golden years and at their parents trying to stave off memory loss or dementia.”

Keep reading today’s New York Times article As Minds Age, What’s Next? Brain Calisthenics.

The article also refers to Posit Science, HappyNeuron, MyBrainTrainer, and other companies, insurers and residences offering brain fitness programs/brain exercise software.

And includes a note of caution: “This is going to be one of the hottest topics in the next five years — it’s going to be huge,” said Nancy Ceridwyn, co-director of special projects for the American Society on Aging. “The challenge we have is it’s going to be a lot like the anti-aging industry: how much science is there behind this?”

You can learn more by checking our longer post yesterday, New Research on How to Maintain a Sharp Brain, where we commented on yesterday’s NYT Editorial, the results from the JAMA study and an IHRSA newsletter to fitness and health clubs that we authored.

We are very excited to announce our newly released Brain Fitness for Sharp Brains: Your New New Year Resolution. We wrote it in order to provide an introduction to the concept, science, and practice of brain fitness in plain English, by answering the Top 25 questions we have received over the last four months. Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg, Alvaro Fernandez and myself (Caroline) have been working hard on this.

You can click here to get your copy of the complete guide. Otherwise, keep checking back this blog, as we will publish a new question and its answer every Monday and Thursday before 9AM Pacific Standard Time. If we missed your pressing question, let us know!

Here is a sneak preview of the questions we will be answering …

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Chris Chatman writes a good introduction to what we do, in his entry Cultivating Cognition: the “Brain Fitness” Movement. I really enjoy his use of the word “cultivating“, since we want to help inspire a cultural change that places nurturing, exercising, cultivating, our brains and minds at the same level as exercising and training our bodies.

He is as impressed as we were when we saw that “It’s notable that the effects of CogMed’s training seem to transfer or generalize beyond the specifics of their training paradigm“.

What does this mean? well, imagine you buy a game tomorrow. You get hooked. You spend hours and more hours playing. You become the world master at that game. Does that translate into a more “fit brain” or “fit mind”? Not necessarily. We always become better at what we train. The key is to know whether that training TRANSFERS into our overall cognitive abilities and mental faculties, as mesured independently from the game itself, and enables you to have a better improve memory, concentration, decision-making, planning skills, reaction time, capacity to learn, ability to manage stress, or other mental abilities.

You can read in more depth about a couple of areas he touches on, such as some highlights from the clinical work and books by Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg , and an interview with Cogmed’s Dr. Torkel Klingberg, the leading scientist behind RoboMemo.

Chris concludes by saying that “Brain fitness is a field where basic research is being put directly into real-world use. It’s important for both the users of these new products and for the field as a whole that these products are grounded in rigorous science.”

We agree. There is much new recent basic research around Neuroplasticity, Cognitive Reserve, Cognitive rehabilitation and Cognitive training, Cognitive Simulations, Biofeedback. Yet, that research is not enough to show the effect of specific Brain Fitness programs. Those specific Brain Fitness Programs need to be proven on their own, which is why we don’t develop our programs from scratch but work with research institutions and/ or affiliated companies worldwide who have a solid scientific team behind, studies on the specific impact on the interventions, and at least hundreds of users who have benefited from them.

For better context, let me know provide a brief overview of the Science of Brain Fitness:

Thanks to new neuroimaging techniques, described by Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg to be “as important for neuroscience as telescopes were for astronomy”, neuroscientists are finding that the brain has a number of “core capacities” and “mental muscles” that can be exercised through novelty, variety and practice, and that exercising our brain influences the generation of new neurons and their connections.

Previous beliefs about our brain and how it works have been proven false. Some beliefs that have been debunked include claims that adult brains can not create new neurons (proven false by Berkeley scientists Dr. Marian Diamond and Dr. Mark Rosenzweig and Salk Institute’s Fred Gage), notions that working memory has a maximum limit of 6 or 7 items (proven false by Karolinska Institute’s Dr. Torkel Klingberg), and assumptions that the brain’s basic processes can not be reorganized by repeated practice (proven false  by UCSF’s Drs.Paula Tallal and Michael Merzenich).

The “mental muscles” we can train include attention, stress and emotional management, memory, visual/ spatial, auditory processes and language, motor coordination and executive functions like planning and problem-solving.

Mental stimulation is important if done in the right supportive and engaging environment. Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky has proven that chronic stress and cortical inhibition, which may be aggravated due to imposed mental stimulation, may prove counterproductive. Having the right motivation is essential.