Here you have a round-up of recent news on how cog­ni­tive and affec­tive neu­ro­science find­ings are start­ing to inform edu­ca­tion and health across the lifespan:

Pedi­a­tri­cians issue a call to aid chil­dren fac­ing ‘toxic stress’ (LA Times)

Teach­ers as Brain-Changers: Neu­ro­science and Learn­ing (EdWeek) Read the rest of this entry »

Vet­er­ans learn to use yoga and med­i­ta­tion exer­cises to recon­nect with their emo­tions (Wis­con­sin State Journal):

“Rich Low of Madi­son served as an infantry offi­cer in the Army in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, lead­ing some 280 com­bat mis­sions. When he came back from the ser­vice, he didn’t think his expe­ri­ence affected him in any major way. He had night­mares, and he star­tled eas­ily, but he chalked that up to just some­thing vet­er­ans live with. Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s note: below you have part 5 of the 6-part The Neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy of Stress series. If you are join­ing the series now, you can read the pre­vi­ous part Here.)

Stayin’ Alive

The Human Brain Likes to Be in Balance

For­tu­nately, the brain has some built — in safety sys­tems. Too much cor­ti­sol in the blood sig­nals the brain and adrenal glands to decrease cor­ti­sol pro­duc­tion. And under nor­mal con­di­tions, when the stress is over­come or brought under con­trol (by fight­ing, flee­ing, or turn­ing into an immo­bile statue, or by mas­ter­ing the threat), the hypo­thal­a­mus starts send­ing out the orders to stand down. Stop pro­duc­ing cor­ti­sol!  Event over!  Under con­tin­u­ous stress, how­ever, this feed­back sys­tem breaks down. The hypo­thal­a­mus keeps read­ing the stress as a threat, furtively send­ing mes­sages to the pitu­itary gland, which screams out to the adrenal glands to keep pump­ing out cor­ti­sol, which at this point begins to be neu­ro­toxic — poi­son to the brain. Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: we are pleased to bring you this arti­cle thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with Greater Good Sci­ence Cen­ter).

A Course Cor­rec­tion for Pos­i­tive Psychology

A review of Mar­tin Seligman’s lat­est book, Flour­ish: A Vision­ary New Under­stand­ing of Hap­pi­ness and Well-Being.

- By Jill Suttie

As pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion in 1998, Mar­tin Selig­man chal­lenged the psy­cho­log­i­cal com­mu­nity to rad­i­cally change its approach. For too long, he charged, psy­chol­ogy had been pre­oc­cu­pied solely with reliev­ing symp­toms of men­tal ill­ness; instead, he believed it should explore how to thrive in life, not just sur­vive it. He called for a psy­chol­ogy that would uncover what makes peo­ple cre­ative, resilient, opti­mistic, and, ulti­mately, happy. The “pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy” move­ment was born.

Yet in his lat­est book, Flour­ish, Selig­man tries to pro­vide some­thing of a course cor­rec­tion for pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy. Read the rest of this entry »

Very inter­est­ing new data rein­forc­ing two main themes we have been ana­lyz­ing for a while:
1) We bet­ter start pay­ing seri­ous atten­tion (and R&D dol­lars) to lifestyle-based and non-invasive cog­ni­tive and emo­tional health inter­ven­tions, which are mostly ignored in favor of inva­sive, drug-based options
2) Inter­ven­tions will need to be per­son­al­ized. The study below ana­lyzes data at the coun­try level, but the same logic applies to the indi­vid­ual level

Many fear Alzheimer’s, want to be tested: sur­vey (Reuters):

- “The tele­phone sur­vey of 2,678 adults aged 18 and older in the United States, France, Ger­many, Spain and Poland was con­ducted by researchers at the Har­vard School of Pub­lic Health and Read the rest of this entry »

We’re delighted to add Brain Resource to the ros­ter of Spon­sors of the upcom­ing 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit, and the Cen­ter for  Tech­nol­ogy and Aging and the Brain Injury Asso­ci­a­tion of Canada to the ros­ter of Part­ners. Thank you for your sup­port! Read the rest of this entry »

8% of Amer­i­cans suf­fer from PTSD and this rate increases up to 15% as far as vet­er­ans are con­cerned. PTSD or Post Trau­matic Stress Dis­or­der is a type of anx­i­ety dis­or­der that occurs after see­ing or expe­ri­enc­ing a trau­matic event. Peo­ple with PTSD have per­sis­tent fright­en­ing thoughts and mem­o­ries of the event. They may expe­ri­ence sleep prob­lems, feel detached or numb, or be eas­ily startled.

This arti­cle from the Dana Foun­da­tion asks a very inter­est­ing question:

Can we dis­rupt the recon­sol­i­da­tion of trau­matic mem­o­ries that con­tribute to PTSD and bring relief to patients suf­fer­ing from this disorder?

This com­plete and stim­u­lat­ing read tells us how mem­o­ries are formed and con­sol­i­dated. The authors dis­cuss the dif­fer­ent tech­niques used or under research that can help PTSD patients. Since avail­able ther­a­pies have suc­cess rates of only 60%, this is a press­ing topic these days. The eth­i­cal ques­tion of whether it is okay to look for solu­tions to erase mem­o­ries is also raised.

Related arti­cle: Can Brain Fit­ness Inno­va­tion Enhance Cog­ni­tive Rehab?

Excel­lent arti­cle about an emerg­ing “small rev­o­lu­tion” in men­tal health care:

Mari­entina Got­sis, media lab man­ager at USC, started think­ing about design­ing apps with ther­a­peu­tic poten­tial when she real­ized that her phone had joined her wal­let and keys on the small list of things she never left home with­out. “It’s what keeps peo­ple con­nected, func­tional, feel­ing safe and enter­tained. So why not use what peo­ple hold on to close to deliver behav­ioral interventions?”

It’s the kind of inno­va­tion that Kath­leen Car­roll, a psy­chol­ogy pro­fes­sor at Yale, says may be a “small rev­o­lu­tion” in men­tal health care. These apps are part of the “brain fit­ness” indus­try, a cat­e­gory that includes com­put­er­ized mem­ory exer­cises and cognitive-impairment assess­ment pro­grams, and that Sharp­Brains, a com­pany that ana­lyzes the indus­try, esti­mates to have grown 35 per­cent in 2009, to $295 million.

The idea of get­ting coun­sel­ing from a com­puter or smart­phone may seem strange, but it’s been in the works for years. In 2006, the British National Insti­tute for Health and Clin­i­cal Excel­lence rec­om­mended two pro­grams, Fear Fighter and Beat­ing the Blues, as first-line treat­ments for mild-to-moderate anx­i­ety and depression.

Full arti­cle deserves read­ing: Get Ther­apy through your iPhone (The Daily Beast)

Work­ing mem­ory is our abil­ity to store and manip­u­late infor­ma­tion for a brief time. It is typ­i­cally mea­sured by dual-tasks, where the indi­vid­ual has to remem­ber an item while simul­ta­ne­ously pro­cess­ing a some­times unre­lated piece of infor­ma­tion. A widely used work­ing mem­ory task is the read­ing span task where the indi­vid­ual reads a sen­tence, ver­i­fies it, and then recalls the final word. Indi­vid­ual dif­fer­ences in work­ing mem­ory per­for­mance are closely related to a range of aca­d­e­mic skills such as read­ing, spelling, com­pre­hen­sion, and math­e­mat­ics. Cru­cially, there is emerg­ing research that work­ing mem­ory pre­dicts learn­ing out­comes inde­pen­dently of IQ. One expla­na­tion for the impor­tance of work­ing mem­ory in aca­d­e­mic attain­ment is that because it appears to be rel­a­tively unaf­fected by envi­ron­men­tal influ­ences, such as parental edu­ca­tional level and finan­cial back­ground, it mea­sures a student’s capac­ity to acquire knowl­edge rather than what they have already learned.

How­ever lit­tle is known about the con­se­quences of low work­ing mem­ory capac­ity per se, inde­pen­dent of other asso­ci­ated learn­ing dif­fi­cul­ties. In par­tic­u­lar, it is not known either what pro­por­tion of stu­dents with low work­ing mem­ory capac­i­ties has sig­nif­i­cant learn­ing dif­fi­cul­ties or what their behav­ioral char­ac­ter­is­tics are. The aim of a recent study pub­lished in Child Devel­op­ment (ref­er­ence below) was to pro­vide the first sys­tem­atic large-scale exam­i­na­tion of the cog­ni­tive and behav­ioral char­ac­ter­is­tics of school-aged stu­dents who have been iden­ti­fied solely on the basis of very low work­ing mem­ory scores.

In screen­ing of over 3000 school-aged stu­dents in main­stream schools, 1 in 10 was iden­ti­fied as hav­ing work­ing mem­ory dif­fi­cul­ties. There were sev­eral key find­ings regard­ing their cog­ni­tive skills. The first is that the major­ity of them per­formed below age-expected lev­els in read­ing and math­e­mat­ics. This sug­gests that Read the rest of this entry »

My apolo­gies for not writ­ing in a few days…the Global Agenda Sum­mit in Dubai has required all my atten­tion — I will sum­ma­rize the great expe­ri­ence when I land back in San Fran­cisco tomor­row night.

The con­cepts of night and day do become chal­leng­ing when work­ing for a few days in a place with a 12-hour time dif­fer­ence with one’s home base. Sleep is indeed very impor­tant to main­tain top cog­ni­tive shape…which leads me to a fas­ci­nat­ing news announcement:

Health insur­ance firms offer­ing online cog­ni­tive ther­apy for insom­nia (Los Ange­les Times)

- “help­ing con­sumers get a good night’s sleep has become a pri­or­ity for most of the top-tier U.S. health insur­ance com­pa­nies, includ­ing Well­Point, Aetna, Cigna, Kaiser Per­ma­nente and sev­eral Blue Cross plans. Their new pro­grams don’t involve sleep­ing pills. Instead, insur­ers are advo­cat­ing the use of cog­ni­tive behav­ior ther­apy. Tra­di­tion­ally, the ther­apy has been done largely through face-to-face ses­sions, but many of the pro­grams are now avail­able online.”

- “And use of sleep­ing pills has sky­rock­eted. A study this year Read the rest of this entry »