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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here you have a few recent great blog car­ni­vals (col­lec­tions of selected blog posts focused on spe­cific topics):

- Grand Rounds: health and medicine

- Encephalon: neu­ro­science and psychology

- COTC: busi­ness and entrepreneurship

- Human Resources: arti­cles for HR professionals

- Edu­ca­tion: arti­cles for K12 teach­ers and staff

- Tan­gled Bank: gen­eral science 

- Books: good book reviews

 

We also just found a great overview of the brain fit­ness mar­ket in French, sum­ma­riz­ing many of the top­ics we have writ­ten about:

Des logi­ciels qui boos­t­ent le cerveau… et son marché

We had a very fun ses­sion titled Teach­ing Brain Fit­ness in Your Com­mu­nity at an Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging (ASA) con­fer­ence for health pro­fes­sion­als a cou­ple of weeks ago. Full house, with over 60 atten­dants and very good par­tic­i­pa­tion, show­ing great inter­est in the topic. I can’t wait to see the evaluations.

These are some of the resources I promised as a follow-up, which can be use­ful to every­one inter­ested in our field:

Good gen­eral arti­cles in the busi­ness and gen­eral media:

Change or Die

Want a sharp mind for your golden years? Start now

You’re Wiser Now

On how new neu­rons are born and grow in the adult brain:

Salk Sci­en­tists Demon­strate For The First Time That Newly Born Brain Cells Are Func­tional In The Adult Brain

Old Brains, New Tricks

On the sur­pris­ing plas­tic­ity and devel­op­ment poten­tial through­out life:

Brain Plas­tic­ity, Lan­guage Pro­cess­ing and Reading

Jug­gling Jug­gles the Brain

Suc­cess­ful Aging of the Healthy Brain

Other impor­tant aspects:

Stress and the Brain

Exer­cise and the Brain

Humor, Laugh­ter and The Brain

On the impor­tance and impact of men­tal stim­u­la­tion and train­ing: Read the rest of this entry »

Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity: the brain’s abil­ity to reor­ga­nize itself by form­ing new con­nec­tions through­out life. (see more con­cepts in our Glos­sary).

We coudn’t be hap­pier about the grow­ing num­ber of books pop­u­lar­iz­ing the key lessons about brain train­ing that Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg has been research­ing and writ­ing about for years, and that moti­vated us to embark our­selves in the Sharp­Brains adventure.

Dis­cover Mag­a­zine presents a great arti­cle, Rewiring the Brain, review­ing two recent books.

• The sub­ti­tle is “Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity can allow for treat­ment of senil­ity, post-traumatic stress, ­obsessive-compulsive dis­or­der, and depres­sion and Bud­dhists have been cap­i­tal­iz­ing on it for mil­lenia.” I would add that the strong value of life­long learn­ing present in jesuit and jew­ish tra­di­tions reflects the same wis­dom. Some quotes:
• “Two new books, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (Bal­lan­tine Books, $24.95) by sci­ence jour­nal­ist Sharon Beg­ley and The Brain That Changes Itself (Viking, $24.95) by psy­chi­a­trist Nor­man Doidge, offer mas­ter­fully guided tours through the bur­geon­ing field of neu­ro­plas­tic­ity research. Each has its own style and empha­sis; both are excellent.”
• “Finally, both authors con­clude that adult neu­ro­plas­tic­ity is a vastly under­tapped resource, one with which West­ern med­i­cine and psy­chol­ogy are just now com­ing to grips. An impor­tant emerg­ing research agenda is to Read the rest of this entry »

The Dana Alliance for Brain Ini­tia­tives is keep­ing up its great out­reach initiatives:

1- Check their blog with posts such as Resolve to be good to your brain, too. Tip: “Brain change takes time; allow your brain time to get used to new cir­cum­stance” (from the Dana Guide to Brain Health). 

You can read our The Dana Guide to Brain Health book review.

2– The Brain Aware­ness Week 2007, March 12-18th, with many activ­i­ties around the world to “advance pub­lic aware­ness about the progress and ben­e­fits of brain research. The Dana Alliance is joined in the cam­paign by part­ners in the United States and around the world, includ­ing med­ical and research orga­ni­za­tions; patient advo­cacy groups; the National Insti­tutes of Health, and other gov­ern­ment agen­cies; ser­vice groups; hos­pi­tals and uni­ver­si­ties; K-12 schools; and pro­fes­sional organizations.”

Learn how you can participate! 

 

(Note: the fol­low­ing is inspired by real events but not quite. Car­o­line is a col­league, not my grandma!)

Over the week­end, I dropped by to say Hi to my grandma Car­olina, the Wise Neu­ro­sci­en­tist every fam­ily should have. She always helps me out. Imag­ine, then, my relief when she hap­pily spent a few hours with me going over the printed sub­mis­sions for Encephalon #15. The con­ver­sa­tion went so well, that we are adding it to our Neu­ro­science Inter­view Series on learn­ing and “brain gyms”.

Alvaro: Thanks again! I have heard organ­isms have some­thing called a bio­log­i­cal clock — what is that?

Car­olina: Accord­ing to Bora of A Blog Around The Clock, a bio­log­i­cal clock is a struc­ture that times reg­u­lar re-occurrence of bio­chem­i­cal, phys­i­o­log­i­cal and behav­ioral events in an organ­ism in con­stant envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions. The word “clock” is a metaphor, and the con­cept tries to exclude direct responses to the envi­ron­ment. Make sure to under­stand this prop­erly, oth­er­wise Bora sug­gests explain­ing it to you this way: “If I give you an elec­troshock every two hours, you will exhibit a 2-hour cycle of convulsions…but that’s not a bio­log­i­cal clock”.

Alvaro: Crys­tal clear. Hmmm, I am think­ing of noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar right now, my mind wan­ders, like a river stream…what may be hap­pen­ing in my brain?

Car­olina: Noth­ing spe­cial, as The Neu­r­o­critic seems to argue in his series Default Mode or Detri­tus?, Day­dream­ing and Thought-Sampling, and Resist­ing a rest­ing state. Don’t be eas­ily seduced by sexy neu­roimag­ing into believ­ing that “default” con­sti­tutes some kind of baseline.

Alvaro: I wouldn’t dare do so, by no means. Read the rest of this entry »

What a month. We promised you with our blog title 7 months ago that we would be your “Win­dow into the Brain Fit­ness Rev­o­lu­tion”, but we couldn’t have pre­dicted that CBS, Time Mag­a­zine, WSJ, NYT and other main­stream media would be such great allies in this neu­ro­plas­tic­ity effort.

Spe­cial Offer: For a lim­ited time, you can receive a com­pli­men­tary copy of our Brain Fit­ness 101 e-Guide: Answers to your Top 25 Ques­tions, writ­ten by Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg and Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, by sub­scrib­ing to our monthly newslet­ter. You can sub­scribe Here.

Brain Fit­ness for All

Let’s start with (Wall Street Jour­nal Sci­ence Edi­tor) Sharon Begley’s arti­cle titled How The Brain Rewires Itself, based on her Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain book. She pro­vides a fas­ci­nat­ing overview, sum­ma­rized as

FOR DECADES, THE PREVAILING DOGMA IN neu­ro­science was that the adult human brain is essen­tially immutable, hard­wired, fixed in form and func­tion, so that by the time we reach adult­hood we are pretty much stuck with what we have. Yes, it can cre­ate (and lose) synapses, the con­nec­tions between neu­rons that encode mem­o­ries and learn­ing… . The doc­trine of the unchang­ing human brain has had pro­found ram­i­fi­ca­tions. …But research in the past few years has over­thrown the dogma. In its place has come the real­iza­tion that the adult brain retains impres­sive pow­ers of “neu­ro­plas­tic­ity” — the abil­ity to change its struc­ture and func­tion in response to expe­ri­ence. These aren’t minor tweaks either.

In short, the brain is not that dif­fer­ent from a mus­cle (bet­ter said, a group of mus­cles). It can be trained. At any age. Not with mag­i­cal pills or cures, but with focus and dis­ci­plined train­ing.
Read the rest of this entry »

Wel­come to the inau­gural edi­tion of the Brain Fit­ness Blog Car­ni­val. The tim­ing couldn’t be bet­ter  you have prob­a­bly seen the fea­tured CBS News/TIME Series on Brain Neuroplasticity.

Thanks to the over 40 peo­ple who sub­mit­ted posts. We have had to select the posts we enjoyed the most to help facil­i­tate an engag­ing and informed conversation.

Learn­ing is phys­i­cal. Our expe­ri­ence lit­er­ally shapes our brains. And vice versa. The media seems to be focus­ing mostly on brain fit­ness for seniors, but its impli­ca­tions go beyond that, as you will see in this post by Car­o­line: What is Brain Fit­ness?, and the arti­cles in this carnival.

Science-based under­stand­ing is evolv­ing from “Use it or Lose It” to “Use It and Improve It.”  As Fast Company’s Alan Deutschman provoca­tively puts it in his last book, Change or Die. We couldn’t agree more with his sum­mary rec­om­men­da­tion: “Relate. Repeat. Reframe.” Alan presents a blog arti­cle announc­ing his book (here is his orig­i­nal arti­cle). Read the rest of this entry »

The Finan­cial Times has a fun inter­view today as part of their “Lunch with the FT” series.

Daniel Gole­man is the author of best­seller Emo­tional Intel­li­gence and is now pro­mot­ing his recent book Social Intel­li­gence.

An quote from the interview:

- The jour­nal­ist asks, “So how do the rest of us get better?”.

- The answer, he says, is very sim­ple: by listening.

Lis­ten­ing poorly is the com­mon cold of social intel­li­gence. And it’s being made worse by tech­nol­ogy. To have a human moment, you need to be fully present. You have to be away from your lap­top, you put down your Black­Berry, you end your day­dream and you pay full atten­tion to the per­son you’re with. It may sound rudi­men­tary, but think about how often we just keep mul­ti­task­ing and half pay atten­tion. You can over­come that by becom­ing mind­ful of what is happening.

Keep read­ing the FT arti­cle Poetry in emo­tion.

And Social Intel­li­gence and Mir­ror Neurons