Research-based information on Brain Fitness and Cognitive Health, authored by Alvaro Fernandez and over 10 Expert Contributors.
How many differences can you spot?
You have seen and maybe tried that exercise or game in the Sunday paper many times: find 5 differences between the two images.
You may like it or not. You may think it is only for kids. But it is a GREAT brain exercise!
Let’s see what cognitive processes and which brain areas are involved in this exercise:
Language in the brain is processed in the temporal lobes. These are on the sides of your brain, next to you temples.
Different areas in the temporal lobe (mostly on the left side of your brain) deal with different aspects of language. For instance, the Wernicke area is the one that allows you to understand words. The Broca area, on the other hand, is the one that allows you to produce language or articulate words.
Damage to Wernicke's area causes Wernicke's aphasia, a condition in which people can hear language being spoken, but cannot understand it. Damage to Broca's area causes Broca's aphasia, a condition in which people have trouble producing language.
Below you will find a brain exercise that targets the neurons in your language areas. Continue Reading »
Here you are have the bi-monthly Digest of our most Popular blog posts. (Also, remember that you can subscribe to receive our blog RSS feed, or to our newsletter at the top of this page if you want to receive this digest by email).
Brain Fitness News and Events
Upcoming Events: I will be speaking at five Health, Education and Gaming events over the next couple of months to introduce findings from our recent market report. Please introduce yourself if you attend any of these events.
Preventing Memory Loss-Special Issue: Congressional Quarterly Researcher, one of the main publications on Capitol Hill, published an impressive 24-page special issue titled Preventing Memory Loss. Highly recommended if you want to be on top of the latest research trends and their policy implications.
We human beings are social animals. It seems intuitive (even for introverts!) that social contact has benefits. Obviously we need other people to fulfill basic needs such making sure that our genes outlive. Maybe less obviously we seem to need other people to maintain 
adequate levels of mental well being and motivation.
Even less obviously, social contact may help us improve our brain functions…
Mental fitness seems to depend on a large part on being connected with other people. For instance people with low social support seem to be more prone to mental illness (McGuire & Raleigh, 1986). In 2007, Gladstone and colleagues studied 218 patients with major depression and found out that low social support, especially coming from the family, was associated with chronic depression.
Merely imagining loneliness can negatively affect our behavior…
Boost your visuospatial skills and learn about your brain
-- By Dr. Pascale Michelon
Visuospatial skills are used everyday in many ways, ranging from going from one room to another in your house to solving a jigsaw puzzle and navigating in a new city. 
One specific visuospatial skill has to do with moving spatial information around in your head. It is called mental rotation.
Let’s take an example. Can you picture in your head an arrow pointing to the right? Now, turn this arrow so it points to the left. Done?
Do you want to change your brain? (for the better, we all hope!). Keep reading Dr. Pascale Michelon's blog post...
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You may have heard that the brain is plastic. As you know the brain is not made of plastic! Neuroplasticity or brain plasticity refers to the brain’s ability to CHANGE throughout life. The brain has the amazing ability to reorganize itself by forming new connections between brain cells (neurons).
In addition to genetic factors, the environment in which a person lives, as well as the actions of that person, play a role in plasticity.
Neuroplasticity occurs in the brain:
Do you know where words are stored in your brain...?
In your temporal lobe! Here is a drawing of the brain so you can see where your temporal lobe is (in green) on a profile view of the right side of your brain.
As you know your brain has two sides (two hemispheres) connected by the corpus callosum. So you have one temporal lobe on each side of the brain.
If you are right-handed, your language is stored mostly in your left temporal lobe. If you are left-handed, you are not so lateralized and your language is stored a bit on both sides of your brain in the temporal lobes.
Words in the brain are not stored randomly. They seemed to be quite organized. Research has shown that words that are often heard together (such as salt and pepper) or words that share some meaning (such as nurse and doctor) are connected or associated in the brain. Once you hear one, the other is activated.
Here is a brain exercise whose aim is to stimulate the connections or associations between words in your temporal lobe.
In the left column you have a Continue Reading »
Today we have the pleasure to have Dr. Pascale Michelon, one of our new Expert Contributors, write her first article here. Enjoy, and please comment so we hear your thoughts and engage in a nice conversation.
(Btw, if you notice some similarity between the colors in the fMRI scan below and the look & feel of this site...well, the reason is that those orange-grey fMRI colors were our inspiration! the orange color denotes the most brain activation).
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You have probably heard about CAT and MRI scans (produced thanks to machines like the one to the top right). So you know that these are techniques that doctors and scientists use to look inside the brain.
You have probably also heard about brain fitness and how important it is to keep a healthy brain to be protected against age-related and disease-related brain damages.
The question we ask here is the following: Can we use brain scans to evaluate how fit the brain is? Before we try to answer this question let’s start with the basics and try to understand how brain scans work.
Brain imaging, also called neuroimaging, allows one to Continue Reading »
Starting this week, you will start seeing a growing number of Expert Contributors writing in our blog and website, so that we can collectively discuss the latest research and trends on cognitive and emotional training, brain fitness and health, and the implications of brain research in general for our everyday lives. All of it, spiced up by stimulating brain teasers.
So, if you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter (above) and our RSS feed (on the right).
Let me introduce, In alphabetical order, the Expert Contributors who will share their knowledge with us in January and February.
- Wes Carroll, SB in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT, and Puzzle Master for Ask a Scientist lecture series.
- Simon Evans, PhD., and Paul Burghardt, PhD., who collaborate in the University of Michigan’s Department of Psychiatry and the Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute, to study the effects of nutrition and exercise on brain function.
- Greater Good Magazine, a quarterly magazine published by a UC-Berkeley center to "highlights ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism."
- Gregory Kellett, a recent graduate from the Cognitive Neurology/Research Psychology Masters program at SFSU.
- Eric Jensen, author of Enriching the Brain: How to Maximize Every Learner's Potential, and well-known synthesizer of brain research information with implications for K12 education.
- Pascale Michelon, Ph. D., an Adjunct Faculty at Washington University in Saint Louis, Psychology Department.
- Tom O'Brien, professor emeritus in mathematics education, Southern Illinois University, and author of prize-winning games.
- Joshua Steinerman, M.D., Postdoctoral Clinical Fellow in the Department of Neurology at Columbia University Medical Center.
- David Rabiner, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Duke University. Dr. Rabiner maintains the highly-regarded Attention Research Update.
Please Note: if you would like to become an Expert Contributor, Continue Reading »
There has been an interesting discussion about the issues related to the aging of the legal profession. Stephanie introduced us to the article "the Graying Bar: let's not forget the ethics" by David Giacalone.
In short: statistics about the increasing ratio of lawyers over 70 in active practice, on the one hand, and the general incidence of Alzheimer's and other dementias, on the other, lead David to point out an increasing likelihood that some lawyers may be practicing in less than ideal conditions for their clients, beyond a reasonable "brain age". The question then becomes: who and how can solve this problem, which is only going to grow given demographic trends?.
We are not legal experts, but would like to inform the debate by offering 10 considerations on healthy aging and job performance from a neuropsychological point of view, that apply to all occupations:
1- We should talk more about change than about decline, as Sharon Begley wrote recently in her great article on The Upside of Aging - WSJ.com (subscription required).
We discussed some of these effects with Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg, who wrote his great book The Wisdom Paradox precisely on this point, at The Executive Brain and How our Minds Can Grow Stronger.
2- Some skills improve as we age: In our "Exercising Our Brains" Classes, we typically explain how some areas typically improve as we age, such as self-regulation, emotional functioning and Wisdom (which means moving from Problem solving to Pattern recognition). As a lawyer accumulates more cases under his/ her belt, he or she develops an automatic "intuition" for solutions and strategies. As long as the enviroment doesn't change too rapidly, this growing wisdom is very valuable.
3- ...whereas, yes, others typically decline: Continue Reading »
