A few updates and announcements:

- 1) My apologies for slow blogging, due to travel. I participated yesterday in a fun panel discussion at ETech on Use Your Head- The Future of Mind Hacks. You can read some take-aways (in Italian, so this may be good brain exercise) here.

- 2) We will release our report The State of the Brain Fitness Software Market 2008 next Monday (Update: Tuesday March 11th!), to coincide with Brain Awareness Week. Make sure to visit our blog next Monday if you want to learn more.

- 3) The National Museum of Health and Medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is planning some great activities during Brain Awareness Week (Thank you, Tim). Learn more about their “Partners in Education” activities for students in the Washington DC area.

- 4) The Dana Foundation has released a great research report to address the question “Are smart people drawn to the arts or does arts training make people smarter?” Enjoy the report and some excellent related resources Here.

- 5) Eric Jensen has written a great article on Brain-Based Education for PDK International Journal of Education. Enjoy it!

The great MIT OpenCourseWare initiative offers a lot of free materials on Brain and Cognitive Sciences. You can browse lecture notes, readings, and more on a variety of psychology and neuroscience courses.   

• “The human brain is the most complex, sophisticated, and powerful information-processing device known. To study its complexities, the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology combines the experimental technologies of neurobiology, neuroscience, and psychology, with the theoretical power that comes from the fields of computational neuroscience and cognitive science.”
• “The Department was founded by Hans-Lukas Teuber in 1964 as a Department of Psychology, with the then-radical vision that the study of brain and mind are inseparable. Today, at a time of increasing specialization and fragmentation, our goal remains to understand cognition- its processes, and its mechanisms at the level of molecules, neurons, networks of neurons, and cognitive modules. We are unique among neuroscience and cognitive science departments in our breadth, and in the scope of our ambition. We span a very large range of inquiry into the brain and mind, and our work bridges many different levels of analysis including molecular, cellular, systems, computational and cognitive approaches.”

There is a fascinating new course titled A Clinical Approach to the Human Brain, Fall 2006, including Topics and Lecture Summaries such as

• “Neurogenesis: Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks. A surprising discovery in the last few years in neurobiology has been that neurons are born, neurogenesis, in the adult mammalian brain. Initially, this had been shown in animals and, more recently, in the humans hippocampus, the site of declarative memory formation. (See Greenough). Furthermore, the rate of neurogenesis in animals has been enhanced by experience, both physical activity and living in enriched environments (See Read the rest of this entry »