Thank you for vis­it­ing us today. May we encour­age you to dis­con­nect from the World Wide Web for a few days, includ­ing clos­ing this web page, and to spend time con­nect­ing with your Loved Ones.

Hav­ing said that, if you really really need to read good infor­ma­tion on brain, cog­ni­tion, neu­ro­plas­tic­ity, learn­ing and life­long brain health, may we encour­age you to read some of our recent eNewsletters:

• Novem­ber 30th, 2011: Time to Invest in our Brains?
• Octo­ber 28th, 2011: How Stress and Emo­tions Impact Brain Performance
• Sep­tem­ber 30th, 2011: On Brain Train­ing, Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­ogy and the FDA

If you’re look­ing for a great book to read (yes, we’re biased, but we do think it is a great book), please take a look at The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness. If you are look­ing for brain teasers and games, look Here.

We’ll be back next week. In the mean­time, let us Wish You Happy Hol­i­days, Merry Christ­mas and Happy Hanukkah!

Do you remem­ber the IMPACT study pub­lished in 2009? It was a ran­dom­ized clin­i­cal trial with healthy older adults that com­pared a computer-based cog­ni­tive pro­gram that trains audi­tory pro­cess­ing (Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram, Posit Sci­ence) with edu­ca­tional video pro­grams (con­trol group). Peo­ple who used the pro­gram improved in the trained tasks, which was not that sur­pris­ing, but there was also a clear ben­e­fit in audi­tory mem­ory, which wasn’t directly trained.

A 2011 paper reports the 3-month follow-up results of the IMPACT study. The 487 par­tic­i­pants in the orig­i­nal study were 65 and older. Train­ing was 1 hour a day, 4 to 5 days a week, for a total of 40 hours in 8 to 10 weeks. There was no con­tact with the researchers between the ini­tial train­ing study and the follow-up study.

The results showed that 3 months after the ini­tial train­ing most of the improve­ment observed in the train­ing group was still present, although not as strongly. Read the rest of this entry »

In honor of Brain Aware­ness Week (March 14-20th), any­one who reg­is­ters to par­tic­i­pate in the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit BEFORE MARCH 20TH will obtain a com­pli­men­tary 207-page PDF copy of the full mar­ket report Trans­form­ing Brain Health with Dig­i­tal Tools to Assess, Enhance and Treat Cog­ni­tion Across the Lifes­pan — The State of the Brain Fit­ness Mar­ket 2010. Please note that the nor­mal price of this report is $1,295. This report includes pro­pri­etary sur­veys, mar­ket data and in-depth analy­sis of 32 com­pa­nies, 10 Inno­va­tion Case Stud­ies pre­pared by 2010 Inno­va­tion Awards Win­ners and Final­ists, and 23 Research Exec­u­tive Briefs pre­pared by lead­ing scientists.

Report Sum­mary

This 207-page report tracks devel­op­ments at over thirty pub­lic and pri­vate com­pa­nies offer­ing dig­i­tal tools to assess, enhance and repair brain-based cog­ni­tive and self-regulation func­tions and pro­vides impor­tant indus­try data, insights and analy­sis to help investors, exec­u­tives, entre­pre­neurs, and pol­icy mak­ers nav­i­gate the oppor­tu­ni­ties and risks of this rapidly grow­ing field. The report dis­cusses the impli­ca­tions of Read the rest of this entry »

Please Join us on Mon­day March 14th for the largest global and vir­tual book club dis­cus­sion ever focused on the brain.

An open dis­cus­sion on what new brain research means to each of us.

In honor of Brain Aware­ness Week.

.

Why March 14th?

Because we want to cel­e­brate Brain Aware­ness Week (BAW), the cam­paign founded by The Dana Alliance for Brain Ini­tia­tives to increase pub­lic aware­ness about the progress and ben­e­fits of brain research. BAW 2011 takes place March 14-20th, 2011.

Every March, Read the rest of this entry »

In Jan­u­ary 2010 Sharp­Brains suc­cess­fully orga­nized the inau­gural vir­tual, global Sharp­Brains Sum­mit, which fea­tured a dream team of over 40 speak­ers and gath­ered over 250 pro­fes­sion­als in 16 coun­tries. Right after the Sum­mit, 92% of par­tic­i­pants sur­veyed rated their over­all expe­ri­ence as “Very High” or “High”.

We are pleased to announce the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit, our sec­ond vir­tual annual con­fer­ence, which already fea­tures 23 con­firmed speak­ers. You can now Reg­is­ter to attend the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit at dis­counted early-bird rates AND obtain an addi­tional 15% dis­count when you enter dis­count code: sharp2011 Read the rest of this entry »

In the lat­est issue of Neu­rol­ogy a study by Erick­son et al. (2010) sug­gests that walk­ing reg­u­larly can increase brain vol­ume and reduce the risks of devel­op­ing cog­ni­tive impairment.

The researchers stared with 2 mains facts:

• Gray mat­ter vol­ume shrinks with age, often lead­ing to cog­ni­tive decline.
• Phys­i­cal exer­cise seems to be neuro-protector (see our pre­vi­ous post: Fit­ter bod­ies = fit­ter brains. True at all ages?)

They asked 2 questions:

• Can phys­i­cal activ­ity assessed ear­lier pre­dict gray mat­ter vol­ume 9 years later?
• Is greater gray mat­ter vol­ume asso­ci­ated with reduced risks of devel­op­ing cog­ni­tive impairment?

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re host­ing here at Sharp­Brains the Octo­ber 5th edi­tion of Grand Rounds blog car­ni­val, the weekly col­lec­tion of best health/ med­ical blog posts. You can sub­mit posts until end of Sun­day: alvaro at sharp­brains dot com, indi­cat­ing Grand Rounds in the sub­ject line. And don’t for­get to come back on Tuesday!

We will be host­ing the Sep­tem­ber 27th edi­tion of Sci­en­tia Pro Pub­lica, the biweekly blog car­ni­val that “show­cases the finest sci­ence, med­ical and envi­ron­ment writ­ing pub­lished in the blogosphere”.

If you write a blog about sci­ence, med­i­cine or the envi­ron­ment and would like to share your writ­ing or pho­tog­ra­phy with a large and appre­cia­tive audi­ence, please sub­mit a good recent blog post no later than end of Sep­tem­ber 25th, using this auto­mated sub­mis­sion form.

Remem­ber to visit us on Sep­tem­ber 27th!

Ask your­self the tough ques­tions: Do you mind your brain? Do you know your nog­gin’? Can you claim cere­bral own­er­ship or is your men­tal a rental?

Although these ques­tions are rel­e­vant at vir­tu­ally all lifes­pan stages, firm answers can some­times appear incon­ceiv­able.  Unfor­tu­nately with advanc­ing age, atten­tion to men­tal per­for­mance is often either aban­doned or framed in terms of per­ceived impair­ment and decline.  Now, I have pre­vi­ously shared my mes­sage on mind­ing the aging brain with Sharp­Brains read­ers.  As a cog­ni­tive neu­ropsy­chi­a­trist pri­mar­ily inter­ested in later-life phe­nom­ena, I tend to stick to my area of exper­tise.  Nev­er­the­less, whether you are elder or not, I implore you to take these ideas to heart…do you mind?

Just as brain fit­ness is for all, aging is sim­i­larly uni­ver­sal.  Every thought­ful indi­vid­ual rec­og­nizes the unavoid­able answer to “are you aging?”  How­ever, the answer to “how are you aging?” is less obvi­ous to most, and is even more obscure when con­sid­er­ing lifes­pan cog­ni­tive tra­jec­to­ries.  In fact, no con­sen­sus lex­i­con yet exists to describe the ways in which cog­ni­tion can be mod­u­lated to achieve desired lifestyle or clin­i­cal goals.

In my lat­est pub­li­ca­tion on technology-enabled cog­ni­tive train­ing for healthy elders, I out­line a pro­posed lex­i­con for pos­i­tive cog­ni­tion inter­ven­tions, as well as a frame­work for clas­si­fy­ing puta­tive ben­e­fits of cog­ni­tive train­ing.  Here, I will present these con­cepts with­out regard to age, as they apply equally well to all sapi­ent sapi­ens:

●      Cog­ni­tive stim­u­la­tion refers to non­tar­geted engage­ment that gen­er­ally enhances men­tal func­tion­ing.  Exam­ples might include edu­ca­tional endeav­ors or life review.

●      Cog­ni­tive train­ing refers to theory-driven inter­ven­tion, Read the rest of this entry »

For an excel­lent review of the most recent find­ings on learn­ing habits, check out The New York Times recent arti­cle: For­get What You Know About Good Study Habits. Tons of unex­pected and fas­ci­nat­ing results!

The find­ings can help any­one, from a fourth grader doing long divi­sion to a retiree tak­ing on a new lan­guage. But they directly con­tra­dict much of the com­mon wis­dom about good study habits, and they have not caught on. For instance, instead of stick­ing to one study loca­tion, sim­ply alter­nat­ing the room where a per­son stud­ies improves retention.

Take the notion that chil­dren have spe­cific learn­ing styles, that some are “visual learn­ers” and oth­ers are audi­tory; some are “left-brain” stu­dents, oth­ers “right-brain.” In a recent review of the rel­e­vant research, pub­lished in the jour­nal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence in the Pub­lic Inter­est, a team of psy­chol­o­gists found almost zero sup­port for such ideas.

Com­ment: The way we learn mat­ters for two rea­sons: a) we need to effi­ciently retain some infor­ma­tion for the var­i­ous tasks we have to per­form every day, but also b) learn­ing induces neu­ro­plas­tic changes in the brain, which  in turn may increase our brain reserve and brain health (see our prior arti­cle on Brain Plas­tic­ity: How learn­ing changes your brain).