Ado­les­cence can be a chal­lenging time for both the ado­les­cents and the sig­nif­i­cant adults (par­ents, teach­ers) in their lives. Teenagers them­selves do not always under­stand why they behave the way they do. Why is it dif­fi­cult being a teenager or inter­act­ing with one? Why do teenagers have these typ­i­cal behav­iors: Risk-taking, strange sleep­ing habits, addic­tion, impul­siv­ity, etc.?

As look­ing at what is hap­pen­ing in a teenage brain can pro­vide answers to these ques­tions, we selected the Top 10 Resources to help you bet­ter under­stand the teenage brain. The major thread to nav­i­gate these resources is the con­cept of a brain still matur­ing. Read the rest of this entry »

You have heard that phys­i­cal exer­cise is good for the brain. How much exer­cise are we talk­ing about? Can the ben­e­fits be seen both for chil­dren and adults? In Fit­ter bod­ies = fit­ter brains. True at all ages? Dr. Pas­cale Mich­e­lon answers these ques­tions for you, based on lat­est sci­en­tific studies.

We need fun ways to get out the couch more and exer­cise both phys­i­cally and cog­ni­tively. What about set­ting up community-based adult play­grounds, such as this one in Beijing?

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Peo­ple of all ages read SharpBrains.com and this monthly update, so we are prepar­ing a series of arti­cles on Brain Health across the Lifes­pan. The series will include 4 parts:

Each part will include sur­pris­ing facts on how the brain works, debunk com­mons myths about cog­ni­tion and brain health, and link to resources such as books and doc­u­men­taries. If you want to read these arti­cles as we pub­lish them via SharpBrains.com, you can fol­low us in Face­book and Twit­ter. Tell your friends and col­leagues about the series!

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Walk­ing increases Brain Vol­ume: A recent neuro-imaging study shows that walk­ing reg­u­larly can increase brain vol­ume and reduce the risks of devel­op­ing cog­ni­tive impairment.

Move to another Coun­try, to another Occu­pa­tion: A cou­ple recent stud­ies rein­force the Cog­ni­tive Reserve frame­work that sug­gests we can pro­tect our brains by speak­ing more than one lan­guage and by not retir­ing early.

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Take that Nap - It May Boost Your Learn­ing Capac­ity: Scott Barry Kauf­man tells us why sleep is good for the brain. It turns out that sleep is tied to a bet­ter immune sys­tem, meta­bolic con­trol, mem­ory, learn­ing, cre­ativ­ity and emo­tional func­tion­ing.

Boost your Atten­tion with Med­i­ta­tion: Another way to slow down is to med­i­tate. Through sum­maries of stud­ies and an inter­view with Dr. New­berg, we dis­cuss how med­i­ta­tion can improve your con­cen­tra­tion skills.

Train your Brain to Focus on Pos­i­tive Expe­ri­ences: In this arti­cle by the Greater Good Mag­a­zine, Rick Han­son explains the “neg­a­tiv­ity bias” of the brain and what steps we can take to rewire our brains for last­ing happiness.

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Eric Jensen alerted me to a research study pub­lished in the Feb­ru­ary 4th Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science — Trans­gen­er­a­tional Res­cue of a Genetic Defect in Long-Term Poten­ti­a­tion and Mem­ory For­ma­tion by Juve­nile Enrich­ment. We both had the same ini­tial WOW! feel­ing that we had expe­ri­enced when we first read about the dis­cov­ery of mir­ror neu­rons a decade+ ago.

The study’s find­ings seemed to sug­gest that acquired char­ac­ter­is­tics can be genet­i­cally trans­mit­ted, a Lamar­ck­i­nan belief that had long been dis­carded by biol­o­gists. This seemed improb­a­ble, so we decided to check out what the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity thought. It’s the kind of research that edu­ca­tors cer­tainly need to under­stand because the poten­tial edu­ca­tional impli­ca­tions are pro­found, no mat­ter how this par­tic­u­lar study sorts out.

I’ve thus appended the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion below: (1) the abstract and ref­er­ence of the orig­i­nal sttudy, (2) a link to a non-technical report in the cur­rent issue of New Sci­en­tist, (3) a link to a non– tech­ni­cal expla­na­tion of the research in Med­ical News Today, and (4) a link to a recent extended non-technical New Sci­en­tist arti­cle on the issue of non-genetic inher­i­tance. Eric will post his com­men­tary on the research in the March edi­tion of his Brighter Brain Bul­letin newsletter.

THE STUDY:

To put it sim­ply: The researchers stud­ied long-term poten­ti­a­tion (LTP), in which longer and more robust synap­tic acti­va­tion occurs. LTP is the basic mech­a­nism for learn­ing and mem­ory formation.

Juve­nile mice placed into an enriched envi­ron­ment (EE) devel­oped enhanced LTP capa­bil­i­ties that they later trans­mit­ted to their own off­spring dur­ing embryo­ge­n­e­sis (rather than through later mater­nal instruc­tion), and these effects per­sisted even when the off­spring weren’t in an EE. The study con­cluded that a stim­u­lat­ing juve­nile envi­ron­ment can thus influ­ence the com­po­si­tion of sig­nal­ing net­works that influ­ence synap­tic plas­tic­ity and mem­ory for­ma­tion in the enriched mouse, and also in its future offspring.

The prob­lem with this research appears to be over whether the trans­mit­ted effects occurred via genetic changes or through some­thing else in the mother’s uter­ine envi­ron­ment. A female’s eggs develop early in life to be dis­trib­uted later, so it’s improb­a­ble that a female’s juve­nile expe­ri­ences would alter the DNA in her eggs. A more prob­a­ble expla­na­tion may be that any changes in the mother’s brain that occur via an EE are rep­re­sented as cur­rently ill– under­stood sig­nal­ing mol­e­cules that pass through the pla­cen­tal bar­rier into the embry­onic brain.

THE SIGNIFICANCE:

For edu­ca­tors, this research sim­ply adds to our own strong belief that long-term ben­e­fits accrue from a stim­u­lat­ing early envi­ron­ment that encour­ages curios­ity and explo­ration. The research builds on Read the rest of this entry »

We are work­ing on improv­ing sev­eral sec­tions of our web­site, espe­cially our Resources sec­tion. It will look much bet­ter in a few days. Our first step has been to re-organize our Neu­ro­science Inter­view Series, and below you have how it looks today.

Bran­don Keim writes a nice post on The Future Sci­ence of Altru­ism at Wired Sci­ence Blog, based on an inter­view with Jor­dan Graf­man, chief of cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science at the National Insti­tute of Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders and Stroke.

Bran­don pro­vides good con­text say­ing that “Sci­en­tists, said Graf­man, are under­stand­ing how our brains are shaped by cul­ture and envi­ron­ment, and a mech­a­nism of these changes may involve fluc­tu­a­tion in our genes them­selves, which we’re only begin­ning to under­stand”. (more on this in our post Richard Dawkins and Alfred Nobel: beyond nature and nur­ture).

And gives us some very nice quotes from Dr. Graf­man, including

• “One of the ways we dif­fer­en­ti­ate our­selves from other species is that we have a sense of future. We don’t have to have imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion.… But how far can we go into the future? How much of our brain is aimed at doing that? […]”
• “Other great apes have a frontal lobe, fairly well devel­oped, but not nearly as well devel­oped as our own. If you believe in Dar­win and evo­lu­tion, you argue that the area grew, and the neural archi­tec­ture had to change in some way to accom­mo­date the abil­i­ties asso­ci­ated with that behav­ior. There’s no doubt that didn’t occur overnight; prob­a­bly a slow change, and it was one of the last areas of the brain to develop as well. It’s very recent evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­ment that humans took full advan­tage of. What in the future? What in the brains can change?”
• “The issue becomes — do we teach this? Train peo­ple to do this? Chil­dren tend to be self­ish, and have to be taught to share.”

The UC Berke­ley mag­a­zine Greater Good tries to answer that ques­tion with a series of arti­cles on Grat­i­tude. I espe­cially enjoyed A Les­son in Thanks, described as Read the rest of this entry »