SharpBrains

Fyi, I will be teaching this workshop soon, as part of our collaboration with several Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes: 

San José State University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (website) presents

Title: Brain Fitness: The Science and Practice.

When: Saturday, February 2, 2008 9:30-3:30

What: Neuroscientists have shown how the human brain retains neuroplasticity (the ability to rewire itself) and neurogenesis (creation of new neurons) during its full lifetime, leading to a new understanding of what aging means. In this class, we will review the science behind some of the key concepts in this field and explore their implications on our lifestyles in a fun and engaging way. We have all heard "Use it or lose it.” Latest research suggests, "Use it and improve it!” Continue Reading »

I hope you are having a joyful holiday season, and wish you a Happy and Prosperous 2008. The Brain Fitness field has made a great deal of progress in 2007, and we are looking forward the New Year.

Here you are have the Monthly Digest of our Most Popular Blog Posts. You can consider it your monthly Brain Fitness/ Exercise Newsletter.

Let me first of all introduce you to our new "Author Speaks Series", where we will give leading scientists and experts a forum to present their new brain-related books. We are honored to kickstart the series with Larry McCleary, former acting Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Denver Children's Hospital. You can read Here his article on how to keep a brain-friendly lifestyle. This series will complement our ongoing Neuroscience Interview Series.

Brain Fitness in the News

Brain Fitness @ PBS: PBS featured a fantastic special program on neuroplasticity and brain fitness during the month of December. Before you ask: as of today, the DVD of the program is still not available in PBS online shop. We expect to see it there in 2-3 weeks. We will keep you informed.

The Huffington Post started featuring a column written by me: you may enjoy taking a look at Alvaro Fernandez - Living on The Huffington Post.

Jogging our Brains for Brain Vitality, Healthy Aging-and Intelligence!: a roundup of several great recent articles on memory, aging, IQ and cognitive abilities such as self-control.

Health & Wellness

Brain Training: No Magic Bullet, Yet Useful Tool. Interview with Elizabeth Zelinski: Dr. Zelinski, leading researcher of the IMPACT study, shares fascinating insights. For example: "...cognitive enhancement requires the engagement in a variety of activities, those activities must be novel, adaptive and challenging-which is why computer-based programs can be helpful. But even at a more basic level, what matters is being engaged with life, continually exposed to stimulating activities, always trying to get out of our comfort zones, doing our best at whatever we are doing. A major typical misconception is that there is only one general intelligence to care about. In reality, we have many different cognitive abilities, such as attention, memory, language, reasoning, and more, so it makes sense to have different programs designed to train and improve each of them."

How to Evaluate and Choose a Brain Fitness Program: To help you navigate the growing number of computer-based programs and games, we published this 10-Question Checklist, based on dozens of interviews with scientists, experts and consumers.

Travel and Engagement as Good Brain Exercise: As we've seen, novelty, variety and challenge are the key guidelines for "brain exercise" that help build new neural connections, force one to be mindful and pay attention, improve abilities such as pattern-recognition, and generally contribute to lifelong brain health. In this post we feature the brain building / mind expanding experience of a SharpBrains friend working in Namibia.

Alzheimer's Prevention and Diagnostic Tests: analysis of several recent articles on emerging research behind Alzheimer's diagnostic and prevention.

Corporate Wellness and Training

Cognitive Reserve and Intellectually Demanding Jobs: a recent study shows how "Intellectually demanding work was associated with greater benefit to cognitive performance in later life independent of related factors like education and intelligence."

Cognitive Health and Baby Boomers- 6 Points to Keep in Mind: based upon an excellent McKinsey report titled Serving Aging Baby Boomers, we discuss a variety a news articles, including interesting numbers, some bad news, and some good news.

Lifelong Learning Is Changing My Brain: Andreas, the neuroscience PhD student who spent last summer working with SharpBrains, writes some reflections on his experience and on how scientists and business professionals can learn from each other.

Brain Teasers

Traveler IQ Game: Check out this stimulating online game...

Events

Learning & The Brain Conference, February 5-7 2008, San Francisco: Sign up now for this great conference for educators who want to learn about the latest brain research findings and implications. I will be speaking at the conference giving an overview of innovative cognitive training programs. The organizers are offering a Special Discount for SharpBrains readers until January 25th 2008, so click here if interested.

If we don't talk beforehand...Happy New Year!

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You can also enjoy our previous editions of our Brain Fitness Newsletter:

- November Edition

- October Edition

- September Edition

- August Edition

- July Edition

Hi!
This is Andreas, the Norwegian MD/PhD in neuroscience candidate who worked as an intern at SharpBrains a few months ago. Now I’m back in chilly Oslo where I’ve just begun my PhD program on cognitive training for patients with memory problems.

Today I felt it was time to reflect upon my 3 month stay in San Francisco earlier this year. It all started when in April when the Norwegian school of entrepreneurship said: You’ve got a ticket to San Francisco, now you got to find the perfect start-up company to work for.

Being interested in brain training, I googled “Brain fitness San Francisco” and guess what I found? I got in touch with Alvaro Fernandez, the co-founder of SharpBrains.com and two months later I started working with him and his team.

As a scientist, being placed in an exciting start-up company in a novel market like brain fitness was a huge learning experience that gave me hands-on knowledge of business and entrepreneurial culture. Being a neuroscience student, I know that learning physically changes my brain, strengthening it.

Here’s a list of some of the key things I’ve learned:

1) First of all, one of key rules for brain fitness is learning. In SharpBrains I immediately got to experience what a great learning culture can be all about – from key insights in entrepreneurship to how to make creative videos and writing for the web. The urge for constant learning is both fun and stimulating – and I appreciate Alvaro’s suggestion to write this post.
Continue Reading »

Great news: I have been invited to be one of the bloggers at that fun news and blogging experiment called The Huffington Post. I appreciate very much the opportunity to engage a broader community around the latest research on brain fitness and the brain fitness market, and around how to "exercise our brains" for happiness, health, lifelong learning and peak performance.

You can take a look at the first post: How "Saying Thanks" Will Make You Happier.

SharpBrains.com/blog will keep being our main blog. Thank you for all your support!

Quick post for my UC-Berkeley OLLI students: here are the links I promised.

- Collection of 50 Brain Teasers.

- Neuroscience Interview Series including in-depth notes of interviews with leading scientists and practitioners.

- Build Your Cognitive Reserve-Yaakov Stern: which talks about the Cognitive Reserve and Alzheimer's symptoms, and includes a great clip on the famous "nun study".

- Articles and Papers: a collection of good reading materials.

- Books: the selection of books we discussed.

- YouTube Channel: some clips you will enjoy to refresh your class memories.

Enjoy!

Dr. Ginger Campbell just published a nice podcast interview with our co-founder and chief scientific advisor Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg, whom we also interviewed some months ago on brain improvement research and ideas.

The first half of the 30-minute interview is a bit technical, including a nice introduction to the field of neuropsychology as the convergence of neurology and psychology. It starts focusing on the role of lifelong learning and cognitive exercise at minute 15 or so. Some of the take-aways from the second half:

• Given that the brain's right hemisphere seems more focused on dealing with novelty than the left one (more focused on pattern recognition based on pre-wired neural networks due to previous experiences), and that the right hemisphere typically declines first as we age...we need to ensure a good supply of novel challenges to maintain our brain, including the right hemisphere, sharp.
• The field of Cognitive Fitness is now emerging because Baby Boomers are more educated, proactive and computer-savvy than previous generations (as a broad generalization), and Continue Reading »

We often are told that we offer too much content for you to read given various time pressures... but it is tough for us to write less given the wealth of areas we cover around cognitive and emotional training.

To make your life easier (and please feel free to give us feedback!), what we will do is to offer a Monthly Digest of Most Popular Blog Posts. Today, August 1st, we will list the most popular July posts. Consider it your monthly Brain Exercise Magazine

(Also, remember that you can subscribe to receive our RSS feed, check our Topics section, and subscribe to our monthly newsletter at the top of this page).

News you can use

Trading performance psychology and self-talk

Stress Management for Lawyers

Mental Training for Gratitude and Altruism 

Brain Fitness/ Training Market News

MarketWatch on Beating forgetfulness and boosting the brain

Nintendo BrainAge, Lumosity, Happy Neuron, MyBrainTrainer...

Brain Health through Serious Games and Brain Exercise

Brain Fitness Workshops

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute Brain Fitness class at UC Berkeley

Healthy Aging

Interview with Neuroscientist Yaakov Stern: Build Your Cognitive Reserve 

Judson Laipply's Dancing Brain

Jack and Elaine LaLanne and Brain Health 

Exercise Your Brain! Enjoy Learning!

Attention Deficits

Continue Reading »

I have just read the best blog post I have read in a loooong while, so let me share it here now. Brett Steenbarger is a Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and a Trading Psychology expert who I had the pleasure to interview a while back. He is a master at trading, learning, teaching and coaching. 

And has written this superb post: When Traders Lose Confidence - Part Three: Structuring Your Experience. We talk in this blog a lot about neuroplasticity and cognitive and emotional training, but what Brett outlines is, in summary, a very healthy attitude to life, lifelong brain plasticity, brain health, and success. Not bad!

See below a few of his quotes-but please read the full article here:

• What we call the "self"--how we experience ourselves--is the result of all that we internalize from people and events.
• Because we are always having new experiences--and can internalize these--we are always, to some degree, remaking who we are.
• Every activity we engage in provides us with feedback about ourselves: our abilities, how we're perceived by others, our character. In selecting what we do, who we do it with, and how we do it, we can structure our experience to create mirrors of success and mastery.
• Experience is our psychological food; it's vital that we feed ourselves well. But what does it mean to structure our experience and feed ourselves well psychologically?
• The reason I'm effective as a psychologist, I believe, is not because I'm all that more educated than others or utilize such better techniques. Rather, I have an uncanny ability to see the best in people; to push aside the problems of the moment and see through to qualities of greatness that are present within most of us, however fleetingly. It's because I see the best in people that I can be a good mirror--and help others see in themselves what they otherwise cannot appreciate on their own Confidence comes from the right kind of mirroring--and we can choose our mirrors.

Please enjoy When Traders Lose Confidence - Part Three: Structuring Your Experience.

Dr. Yaakov Stern is the Division Leader of the Cognitive Neuroscience Division of the Sergievsky Center, and Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology, at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, New York.

He is one of the leading proponents of the Cognitive reserve theory, which aims to explain why some individuals with full Alzheimer's pathology (accumulation of plaques and tangles in their brains) can keep normal lives until they die, while others -with the same amount of plaques and tangles- display the severe symptoms we associate with Alzheimer’s Disease. He has published dozens of peer-reviewed scientific papers on the subject.

The concept of a Cognitive Reserve has been around since 1989, when a post mortem analysis of 137 people with Alzheimer's Disease showed that some patients exhibited fewer clinical symptoms than their actual pathology suggested. These patients also showed higher brain weights and greater number of neurons when compared to age-matched controls. The investigators hypothesized that the patients had a larger "reserve" of neurons and abilities that enable them to offset the losses caused by Alzheimer's. Since then, the concept of Cognitive Reserve has been defined as the ability of an individual to tolerate progressive brain pathology without demonstrating clinical cognitive symptoms. (You can check at the end of this interview a great clip on this).

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Key take-aways

- Lifetime experiences, like education, engaging occupation, and leisure activities, have been shown to have a major influence on how we age, specifically on whether we will develop Alzheimer's symptoms or not.

- This is so because stimulating activities, ideally combining physical exercise, learning and social interaction, help us build a Cognitive Reserve to protect us.

- The earlier we start building our Reserve, the better; but it is never too late to start. And, the more activities, the better: the effect is cumulative.

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The Cognitive Reserve

Alvaro Fernandez (AF): Dear Dr. Stern, it is a pleasure to have you here. Let me first ask you this: the implications of your research are pretty astounding, presenting major implications across sectors and age groups. What has been the most unexpected reaction so far?

YS: well...I was pretty surprised when Continue Reading »

A collection of recent announcement in the "brain games" or "brain training games" space:

The Wii sets new generational standards for the videogame industry

• "The ageing of the Japanese population compelled gamemaker Nintendo to widen its audience. Now, the Wii is leading the industry standards. But hardcore gamers are still too important to be neglected."

Strain your brain the smart way

• "George Harrison, Nintendo's senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications, has said that more than half of the company's marketing for Wii is aimed at adults. And the system has been presented at conventions for the aging "gray gamer" population." and talks about sudoku, Brain Age, Big Brain Academy, and more.

SBT Announces the Acquisition of Quixit

• "Scientific Brain Training ("SBT"), based in Lyon, France, today has announced that Continue Reading »