The MC at the Uni­ver­sity of Michigan’s reunion din­ner encour­aged audi­ence mem­bers to reveal the most sig­nif­i­cant take-away from their under­grad­u­ate nurs­ing edu­ca­tion. The great­est ben­e­fit was quickly clear to me — problem-solving think­ing. Mem­ory pro­duced a mind video: a short, dark-haired, nurs­ing instruc­tor lec­tur­ing a small group of first year stu­dents in an empty patient room. “Don’t mem­o­rize the steps of ster­ile tech­nique. Use a problem-solving think­ing process.” She described the sequen­tial, cycli­cal process: define the prob­lem, gather infor­ma­tion, develop a solu­tion strat­egy, allo­cate resources, mon­i­tor progress, and eval­u­ate the solu­tion. Read the rest of this entry »

Please Save these Dates if you are inter­ested in explor­ing and dis­cussing the lat­est on Opti­miz­ing Health Through Neuroplasticity-Driven Inno­va­tion; the theme for our third annual vir­tual Sharp­Brains Sum­mit (“vir­tual” means every­thing takes place online; no one has to travel):

• Pre-Summit work­shops: May 31st-June 1st, 2012
• Sum­mit: June 7-8th, 2012
• Expo Week: June 12-14th, 2012

17 Con­firmed Sum­mit Speak­ers include: Read the rest of this entry »

Blurry line in diag­nos­ing early Alzheimer’s: study (Reuters):

• “The revised def­i­n­i­tion of a brain con­di­tion called mild cog­ni­tive impair­ment means that many peo­ple now con­sid­ered to have mild or early Alzheimer’s dis­ease could eas­ily be given that diag­no­sis instead, sug­gests a new study.” Read the rest of this entry »

NO ROAD, NO trail can pen­e­trate this for­est. The long and del­i­cate branches of its trees lie every­where, chok­ing space with their exu­ber­ant growth. No sun­beam can fly a path tor­tu­ous enough to nav­i­gate the nar­row spaces between these entan­gled branches. All the trees of this dark for­est grew from 100 bil­lion seeds planted together. And, all in one day, every tree is des­tined to die.

This for­est is majes­tic, but also comic and even tragic. It is all of these things. Indeed, some­times I think it is every­thing. Every novel and every sym­phony, every cruel mur­der and every act of mercy, every love affair and every quar­rel, every joke and every sor­row — all these things come from the for­est. Read the rest of this entry »

This is an excel­lent (and free) “big pic­ture” eBook pub­lished by the World Eco­nomic Forum to con­tex­tu­al­ize why, and how, our soci­eties, poli­cies and sys­tems will need updat­ing in order to bet­ter man­age global pop­u­la­tion ageing.

EBook descrip­tion: Global age­ing, in devel­oped and devel­op­ing coun­tries alike, will dra­mat­i­cally alter the way that soci­eties and economies work. The issues include how indi­vid­u­als find ful­fil­ment, at what age they retire, and their qual­ity of life once they do retire; how gov­ern­ments devise social con­tracts to pro­vide finan­cial Read the rest of this entry »

We are the archi­tects and builders of our own brains.

For mil­len­nia, how­ever, we were obliv­i­ous to our enor­mous cre­ative capa­bil­i­ties. We had no idea that our brains were chang­ing in response to our actions and atti­tudes, every day of our lives. So we uncon­sciously and ran­domly shaped our brains and our lat­ter years because we believed we had an immutable brain that was at the mercy of our genes.

Noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth. Read the rest of this entry »

Kudos to Patri­cia Cohen for one of the best arti­cles I have read in The New York Times in a long time: A Sharper Mind, Mid­dle Age and Beyond, by Patri­cia Cohen. These are a few quotes — please do read the arti­cle in full, it is worth it.

• “Some peo­ple are much bet­ter than their peers at delay­ing age-related declines in mem­ory and cal­cu­lat­ing speed. What researchers want to know is why. Why does your 70-year-old neigh­bor score half her age on a mem­ory test, while you, at 40, have the mem­ory of a senior cit­i­zen? Read the rest of this entry »

Gif­fords May Get Bet­ter Brain-Injury Care Than Most of Her Con­stituents (ProPublica):

“Despite the need for more research, Gif­fords’ story shows the poten­tial of the treat­ments now avail­able. But accord­ing to Susan Con­nors, the pres­i­dent of the Brain Injury Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica, what treat­ment you receive depends heav­ily on your state, insur­ance plan (or lack of one), hos­pi­tal and the peo­ple advo­cat­ing for you.” Read the rest of this entry »

Neu­ro­feed­back — also known as EEG Biofeed­back — is an approach for treat­ing ADHD in which indi­vid­u­als are pro­vided real-time feed­back on their brain­wave activ­ity and taught to alter their typ­i­cal EEG pat­tern to one that is con­sis­tent with a focused and atten­tive state. Accord­ing to neu­ro­feed­back pro­po­nents, this often results in improved atten­tion and reduced hyperactive/impulsive behavior.

Sev­eral years ago I sum­ma­rized the sci­en­tific sup­port for neu­ro­feed­back treat­ment — see here - and noted that Read the rest of this entry »

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