Several recent NYT articles focus on several fascinating frontiers of brain science. We know much more about brain and mind than only 20 years ago, yet exponentially less than 20 years from now.

A few worthy explorations on mindfulness, perceptual capacities, and the power of placebo: Read the rest of this entry »

In the ETech panel a few days ago, we discussed some futuristic and some emerging ways in which we can “hack our minds”, mostly from a technology point of view.

Neither myself nor the other panelists thought of suggesting the most obvious and inexpensive method, proven in thousands of research studies.

The secret compound?: Belief. Also called “the placebo effect”. Let’s see what Wikipedia says:

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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 »