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 »

CBS News and TIME mag­a­zine are team­ing up for a five-part series on the “The Com­pli­cated, Mes­mer­iz­ing World of the Brain”. The first report by CBS Evening News con­trib­u­tor Dr. San­jay Gupta focused on neu­ro­plas­tic­ity – “the brain’s abil­ity to reor­ga­nize itself by cre­at­ing new brain cells through men­tal and phys­i­cal exercises.”

Dr. Gupta inter­viewed Arthur Kramer, Ph.D., a pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois who stud­ied the effects of exer­cise, diet, and social and men­tal stim­u­la­tion on older adults. Accord­ing to Kramer, the break through anti-aging treat­ment is exercise.

We found in our study that walk­ing will increase the vol­ume of the brain, increase the effi­ciency of the brain and increase improve­ments in the num­ber of cog­ni­tive func­tions such as mem­ory and attention.

Kramer and McAuley’s research showed that aer­o­bic exer­cise led to increased brain vol­ume in the pre­frontal and tem­po­ral cor­tices – areas that show con­sid­er­able age-related deterioration.

To go beyond phys­i­cal exer­cise and look at men­tal exer­cise, Dr. Gupta also inter­viewed Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. of UCSF and Posit Sci­ence. Merzenich said, “The brain is actu­ally revis­ing itself. It is actu­ally plas­ti­cally chang­ing itself as you develop new skills and abil­i­ties, as you learn new things.” Merzenich has been study­ing neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and how the brain changes with expe­ri­ence since the 1980s.

To Catch the Series, Here’s the Sched­ule:
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A few heads up:

- Chris posted a new edi­tion of Encephalon at Mix­ing Mem­ory.

- We will be host­ing the new edi­tion of this neu­ro­science blog car­ni­val on Jan­u­ary 29th. Sub­mis­sions can be sent to encephalon.host@gmail.com.

- Neu­rophiloso­pher has posted a cou­ple great posts, one on how Bilin­gual­ism may delay onset of demen­tia (via the Cog­ni­tive Reserve the­ory), the other high­light­ing some of his best posts for his new read­ers (con­grat­u­la­tions!), with A warm wel­come to all my new readers

- Bora announced the release of a great ebook and book at The Sci­ence Blog­ging Anthol­ogy — the Great Unveiling!

- And Chris has been writ­ing a series on the Pre­Frontal Cor­tex, a bit tech­ni­cal but inter­est­ing to read The Ante­rior Fron­tier: Pre­frontal Cortex

Enjoy

News­wise released an arti­cle called “Want to Improve Mem­ory? Strengthen Your Synapses. Here’s How.” based on find­ings find­ings pub­lished in the Feb­ru­ary issue of Mind, Mood and Mem­ory, a newslet­ter from Mass­a­chu­setts Gen­eral Hos­pi­tal, a lead­ing cen­ter of excel­lence in the field of cog­ni­tive fit­ness. Essen­tially, they explain how a decline in the health of neu­ronal synapses can lead to a decline in mem­ory and gen­eral men­tal fit­ness.

For those you aren’t famil­iar with synapses, they are the spaces between neu­rons where the elec­tri­cal sig­nal trav­el­ing down from the tree-like den­drites at the top of the cell through the cell body and down the tubu­lar axon changes into a chem­i­cal sig­nal (neu­ro­trans­mit­ter) to talk to neigh­bor­ing cells. In this pic­ture from the arti­cle, the neu­ro­trans­mit­ter is rep­re­sented by the red dots. We have more than 100 bil­lion neu­rons that can be con­nected to hun­dreds of other cells by as many as 10,000 synapses.

Here are a few good quotes from the arti­cle … Read the rest of this entry »

We are tempted to drop it all, find a nice warm tree in the park or cof­fee­house table, and sim­ply read 2 books that have just been pub­lished. We haven’t read them since they have lit­er­ally just been released today, but we are cer­tain there will be a fun and illu­mi­nat­ing read for any­one inter­ested in the brain and the mind.

Change or Die: The Three Keys to Change at Work and in Life by Alan Deutschman. Alan, a jour­nal­ist for Fast Com­pany, turns the superb arti­cle Change or Die he wrote in May 2005 into a book. We liked the arti­cle so much, that it has been at the top of our rec­om­mended Arti­cles since then.

How many col­ors do you see in this image?

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Yeah, Yeah. Yeah. What­ever. Isn’t that just some­thing your mom always told you so that you wouldn’t be upset when your sib­lings got bet­ter gifts than you? Well, lo and behold, maybe Mom was right!

Researchers have found that the mesolim­bic path­way is acti­vated by char­i­ta­ble giv­ing. This area is one of the major path­ways where you find the neu­ro­trans­mit­ter dopamine, which is asso­ci­ated with the brain’s plea­sure sys­tem. Fur­ther­more, donat­ing also appears to increase the release of oxy­tocin, a hor­mone that acts as a neu­ro­trans­mit­ter and is involved in social bond­ing and build­ing trust between peo­ple.
Read the rest of this entry »

We are very excited to announce our newly released Brain Fit­ness for Sharp Brains: Your New New Year Res­o­lu­tion. We wrote it in order to pro­vide an intro­duc­tion to the con­cept, sci­ence, and prac­tice of brain fit­ness in plain Eng­lish, by answer­ing the Top 25 ques­tions we have received over the last four months. Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg, Alvaro Fer­nan­dez and myself (Car­o­line) have been work­ing hard on this.

You can click here to get your copy of the com­plete guide. Oth­er­wise, keep check­ing back this blog, as we will pub­lish a new ques­tion and its answer every Mon­day and Thurs­day before 9AM Pacific Stan­dard Time. If we missed your press­ing ques­tion, let us know!

Here is a sneak pre­view of the ques­tions we will be answering …

Read the rest of this entry »

and served with a great dose of humor at AlphaPsy blog. Enjoy

Today we are trav­el­ing to Japan. Go Hirano is a ser­ial Japan­ese entre­pre­neur who has been explor­ing neuroscience-based oppor­tu­ni­ties in Japan, hav­ing recently cre­ated the com­pany NeuWell (neu­ro­science for well­ness). NeuWell and Sharp­Brains are explor­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties together to bring world-class pro­grams to Japan, and we thought that Sharp­Brains’ blog read­ers may be inter­ested in learn­ing about trends in Japan.

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Key take-aways:

- Peo­ple in Japan devour any prod­uct with brain-related claims

- But there has been a recent back­lash against chil­dren videogames, so game devel­op­ers have started to focus on older audi­ences with (mostly unproven) brain-health-improving games

- The mar­ket is ripe for pro­grams with proven research and tan­gi­ble benefits

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AF: Hirano-san, tell us a bit about your­self and how you became inter­ested in applied neuroscience.

GH: after help­ing launch one of the first DSL providers in Japan, I started to won­der what the next big­ger value for soci­ety would be. I have always been fas­ci­nated by brain research, so I started to explore oppor­tu­ni­ties to help bring to mar­ket neuroscience-based pro­grams to help stu­dents do bet­ter in exams, and adults age in brain-friendly ways.

AF: what is the state of Brain Fit­ness and Brain Train­ing in Japan? what are the most pop­u­lar appli­ca­tions so far?

GH: I think peo­ple under­stand the con­cepts of Brain Fit­ness and Brain Train­ing. If one method or product/service sounds a bit sci­en­tific there are peo­ple who would try it for fun and curios­ity. How­ever, Read the rest of this entry »