SharpBrains

James Zull is a professor of Biology. He is also Director Emeritus of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. These roles most assuredly coalesced in his 2002 book, The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning.

This is a book for both teachers and parents (because parents are also teachers!) Written with the earnestness of first-person experience and reflection, and a lifetime of expertise in biology, Zull makes a well-rounded case for his ideas. He offers those ideas for your perusal, providing much supporting evidence, but he doesn’t try to ram them into your psyche. Rather, he practices what he preaches by engaging you with stories, informing you with fact, and encouraging your thinking by the way he posits his ideas.

I have read a number of books that translate current brain research into practice while providing practical suggestions for teachers to implement. This is the first book I have read that provides a biological, and clearly rational, overview of learning and the brain. Zull provokes you into thinking Continue Reading »

Here you have the twice-a-month newsletter with our most popular blog posts. Please remember that you can subscribe to receive this Newsletter by email, simply by submitting your email at the top of this page.

Quick, Are videogames good or bad?

That's an impossible question. Good or bad for what? What  specific games are we talking about? More importantly, what are they substituting for, given time is a limited resource?  Contributor Jeremy Adam Smith, managing director of Greater Good magazine, offers an in-depth review on the trade-offs videogames present in: Playing the Blame Game.

News Round-Up

Math Innovation in UK Schools: a recent (and unpublished) study seems to support the potential role for "Serious Games" in education. Learning and Teaching Scotland reports significant improvements in pupils' concentration and behavior, on top of math skills, after using Nintendo Brain Training game.

With summer drawing to a close and schools starting up for a new season, what better time to take a look at how schools utilize research about the brain in determining the timing of the flow of school. Not only current brain research, but common sense, tells me the following areas need tweaking.

• - School start times and sleep
• - Exposure to natural light
• - Scheduling of classes

SCHOOL START TIMES AND SLEEP
Left to your own devices, what time would you go to sleep each evening and what time would you wake up? Continue Reading »

Here you have the twice-a-month newsletter with our most popular blog posts. Please remember that you can subscribe to receive this Newsletter by email, simply by submitting your email at the top of this page.

Major Implications from Brain Research

Should Social-Emotional Learning Be Part of Academic Curriculum?: It is clear by now that our brains are more than cognitive machines. For example, emotions can either enhance or inhibit our ability to learn. Daniel Goleman explores the implications of "new studies that reveal how teaching kids to be emotionally and socially competent boost their academic achievement." Brought to you in partnership with Greater Good Magazine.

Retain older workers beyond retirement: BusinessWeek covers a best practice in a topic of growing importance: how large companies, such as American Express, can retain older workers in productive ways beyond a set arbitrary retirement age. As Dr. Art Kramer told us recently, "as a society, it is a massive waste of talent not to ensure older adults remain active and productive."

BrainTech and Sustainable Brains: Building on a recent quote by John Doerr about clean technology trends, we wonder... "If Energy is the mother of all markets...who would be the father of all markets?" The Human Brain, perhaps?

Health and Research

What You Can do to Improve Memory (and Why It Deteriorates in Old Age): Is there anything we can do besides "exercise like crazy, eat healthy foods that you don't like all that much, pop your statin pills, and take up yoga?" Yes: focus, focus, focus, suggests Dr. Bill Klemm.

News and Events

Cognitive Health News August 2008: This is a roundup of recent brain health news and our commentary, including the growing adoption of Dakim and Nintendo products, the cognitive impact of videogames, and the cognitive dimension of the obesity crisis.

Exercise your brain at these events: Alvaro will present the main findings from our market research at multiple conferences in the US, Canada and Dubai during the rest of  the year.

Where does the "Feeling of Knowing" comes from?: Dr. Ginger Campbell shares some insights from her recent interview with neurologist Robert Burton (author of On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not)."While it might be true that one can learn to become more aware of the emotional signals coming from one’s body, Dr. Burton argues that “gut feelings” or intuition should not be assumed to be true without testing."

Resources for Brain Health Across the Lifespan: Laurie Bartels shares a list of interviews, video, articles, and books that go hand-in-hand with the brain-related topics we cover.

Brain teaser

Can you use mental self rotation to read a map?: please check out this teaser by Dr. Pascale Michelon, one of our favorites so far.

We hope you have enjoyed this newsletter. We encourage you to stay tuned for our September editions, since great content is coming. We will soon publish an interview with Lee Woodruff, co-author of the book In An Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing, and discuss the spectacular cognitive recovery of her husband, ABC reporter Bob Woodruff, who experienced a traumatic brain injury in Iraq in 2006. We will also interview Dr. Mike Posner, eminent cognitive neuroscientist, to explore recent findings on attention and attention training and their implications.

Here you have the twice-a-month newsletter with our most popular blog posts. Please remember that you can subscribe to receive this Newsletter by email, simply by submitting your email at the top of this page.

News and Events

Brain Health Promotion by the American Society on Aging: You may be interested in the excellent agenda the American Society on Aging has put together for health professionals, from September 2-5th in San Francisco, devoting a full day to Brain Health. Alvaro will participate in 3 of the sessions, including giving a keynote on the Future of Brain Health.

Can Google Kill Neurons and Rewire Your Whole Brain?: The Atlantic Monthly published an article titled Is Google Making Us Stupid, which basically blamed Google for literally rewiring our brains into more stupid brains (not being able to pay attention, read deep books...). We are not very impressed by the superficial treatment given to this very important topic.

Mobile Brain Training, Scientific Learning, and More News: Overview of cognitive health and fitness news, including recent research on how physical exercise can help diagnosed Alzheimer's patients, the new Mac version of Posit Science's auditory processing training program, and more.

Market Analysis

Top 10 Brain Health Predictions: In an emerging market, like brain health and training, it is difficult to make precise projections. Here we point out a number of trends that executives, consumers, public policy makers, and the media should watch closely in the coming years. Your feedback is very welcome...we will give a complimentary copy of our market report to the person who provides the most insightful additional prediction by August 10th.

Cognitive Health Pioneers: Thank You! The quality and variety of our client list brings up the cross-sector demand for quality information in the emerging brain fitness/ cognitive health category. And it helps us prioritize efforts and coverage of market and research news and trends.

Research Analysis

Encephalon blog carnival: Brain & Mind Research: We hosted Encephalon´s 50th edition, where you will find a selection of superb blog posts on all things Brain and Mind. Examples? you may enjoy Facebook Ate My Psychiatrist or perhaps the Compulsive Collecting of Toy Bullets and Televisions.

Attention Deficits At Work: Dr. Pascale Michelon provides an in-depth overview of a recent study by Ron de Graaf and colleagues,  in which they found that an average of 3.5% of workers (in ten countries) meet the criteria for adult ADHD, In the US, the percentage increased to 4.5%. This has clear effects on productivity.

Education and Learning

Learning & the Brain: Resources for Educators: Educator Laurie Bartels reviews her favorite brain resources for teaching and learning: books, conferences, and websites.

Brain Teasers

Top 25 Brain and Mind Haikus. Yours?: Readers have contributed a good number of haikus on brain-related topics. You can follow the link to check out our Favorite 7, and many other fun ones...which ones do you like the most?

Welcome to Encephalon´s 50th edition, where you will find another superb collection of blog posts on all things Brain and Mind.

Enjoy these contributions:

Science & Technology

Mind Hacks reports that Facebook ate my psychiatrist. We can learn about the benefits of social networking sites like Facebook, bringing great perspective to recent and misguided media speculation (fuelled by a recent talk at the Royal College of Psychiatrists). Vaughan, will you please report on the benefits of participating (and, better, hosting) Encephalon?.

Dungeons And Dragons - Or Mazes And Monsters?: PodBlack Cat offers a thought-provoking review of the therapy (including self-therapy) applications of role-playing games such as the classic Dungeons And Dragons and the more recent massively multiplayer online games.

Cognitive Daily covers another type of game. Continue Reading »

There are whole markets (think crosswords, herbal supplements, drugs, brain fitness software) aimed at helping us improve our memory.

Now, what is ¨memory¨? how does the process of memory work? 

Dr. Bill Klemm, Professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University, explains a very important concept below.

- Alvaro

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Getting from Here to There:
Making Memory Consolidation Work

By Bill Klemm,  Ph. D.

Until consolidation has occurred, a short-term memory is very vulnerable, as all of us have experienced from looking up a phone number only to have some distraction cause us to lose the number before we can get it dialed.

What is "consolidation"? 

Brain researchers use the term “consolidation” for the process whereby short-term memory gets made more permanent.

Here, I would like to discuss some aspects of consolidation that many people may not know about: why sleep is so important, why memory must be practiced, and how testing promotes consolidation.   Continue Reading »

We sometimes neglect to mention a very basic yet powerful method of cognitive and emotional development, for children and adults alike: Play.

Dr. David Elkind, author of The Power of Play: Learning That Comes Naturally, discusses the need to build a more "playful culture" in this great article brought to you thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine.

- Alvaro

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Can We Play?

-- By Dr. David Elkind

Play is rapidly disappearing from our homes, our schools, and our neighborhoods. Over the last two decades alone, children have lost eight hours of free, unstructured, and spontaneous play a week. More than 30,000 schools in the United States have eliminated recess to make more time for academics. From 1997 to 2003, children's time spent outdoors fell 50 percent, according to a study by Sandra Hofferth at the University of Maryland. Hofferth has also found that the amount of time children spend in organized sports has doubled, and the number of minutes children devote each week to passive leisure, not including watching television, has increased from 30 minutes to more than three hours. It is no surprise, then, that childhood obesity is now considered an epidemic.

But the problem goes well beyond obesity. Decades of research has shown that play is crucial to physical, intellectual, and social-emotional development at all ages. This is especially true of the purest form of play: the unstructured, self-motivated, imaginative, independent kind, where children initiate their own games and even invent their own rules.

Continue Reading »

A recent scientific study is being welcomed as a landmark that shows how fluid intelligence can be improved through training. I interviewed one of the researchers recently (Can Intelligence Be Trained? Martin Buschkuehl shows how), and contributor Dr. Pascale Michelon adds her own take with the great article that follows. Enjoy!

Reference: Jaeggi, S. M., Buschkuehl, M., Jonides, J., & Perrig, W. J. (2008). Improving Fluid Intelligence With Training on Working Memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(19), 6829-6833

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What is intelligence?

Intelligence is a concept difficult to define as it seems to cover many different types of abilities.

One definition dissociates between crystallized intelligence or abilities and fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence refers to the knowledge acquired throughout life such as vocabulary. Fluid intelligence is the ability that allows us to adapt to new situations or problems.

Continue Reading »

We concluded our Top 50 Brain Teasers post with the challenge:

- Next »