Jacob’s mother writes that ‘Jacob, 10-years-old, still strug­gles with num­ber bonds to 10. Learn­ing to tell the time is still slow – he has not mas­tered half-past. Although he man­aged to learn his 5x tables because we prac­ticed all sum­mer, this has now gone’.

Jacob has dyscal­cu­lia, a math dis­abil­ity where stu­dents strug­gle to learn or under­stand math­e­mat­ics. Stu­dents Read the rest of this entry »

An impres­sive recent ref­er­ence book on the future of brain care is Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science and Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine, edited by Evian Gor­don and Stephen H. Koslow (Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press; $89.95).

Book descrip­tion: This book takes an in depth and hard look at the cur­rent sta­tus and future direc­tion of treat­ment pre­dic­tive mark­ers in Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine for the brain from the per­spec­tives of the researchers on the cut­ting edge and those involved in health­care imple­men­ta­tion. The con­tents pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive text suit­able as both a pithy intro­duc­tion to and a clear sum­mary of the “sci­ence to solu­tions” con­tin­uum in this devel­op­ing field of Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine and Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science. The sci­ence includes both mea­sures of genes using whole genome approaches and SNIPS as well as BRAIN­mark­ers of direct brain func­tion such as brain imag­ing, bio­phys­i­cal changes and objec­tive cog­ni­tive and behav­ioral mea­sure­ments. More infor­ma­tion below.

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36-Hour Offer

Dr. Evian Gor­don will speak at the upcom­ing 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit: Retool­ing Brain Health for the 21st Cen­tury (March 30th — April 1st) and his firm, Brain Resource, is among Sum­mit Spon­sors. Thanks to his sup­port, we are pleased to announce the fol­low­ing offer: TEN pro­fes­sion­als who reg­is­ter to attend the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit over the next 36 hours, from now until Fri­day March 4th, 7pm US Pacific Time, will each receive a com­pli­men­tary hard­copy of the book Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science and Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine. If more than ten peo­ple reg­is­ter by then, we will select ten names at random.

We are also pleased to announce the addi­tion of 12 new Speak­ers and Mod­er­a­tors to the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit — the result­ing agenda is turn­ing out to be noth­ing short of spec­tac­u­lar (in our, yes, a bit biased judgment):

• Alexan­dra More­house, CMO, AAA North California
• Dr. Evian Gor­don, CEO, Brain Resource
• Kath­leen Herath, Asst Vice Pres­i­dent, Nation­wide Insurance
• Dr. David Tal, Direc­tor, A.G.E. Mat­ters Clinic
• Paula Psyl­lakis, Senior Pol­icy Advi­sor, Ontario Min­istry of Research and Innovation
• Veronika Litin­ski, Advi­sor, MaRS Life Sci­ences and Health Care
• Dr. Joshua Stein­er­man, Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor, Albert Ein­stein Col­lege of Medicine
• Dr. Jef­frey Kaye, Direc­tor, NIA — ORCATECH
• Dr. John Rep­pas, Pol­icy Direc­tor, Neu­rotech­nol­ogy Indus­try Organization
• Dr. Justin Mar­ley, Chair Men­tal Health Infor­mat­ics Group, UK Royal Col­lege of Psychiatrists
• Dr. David Darby, Chief Med­ical Offi­cer, Cogstate
• Dr. John Hart, Med­ical Sci­ence Direc­tor, Cen­ter for Brain Health at UT-Dallas

-> Learn More and Reg­is­ter to Par­tic­i­pate in the Sum­mit Here, and get a chance at get­ting a com­pli­men­tary copy of the book Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science and Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine!

Read the rest of this entry »

In a  study pub­lished today in Sci­ence, func­tional mag­netic res­o­nance imag­ing (fMRI) was used to study the brains of 63 adults: 10 were illit­er­ate, 22 learned to read as adults, and 31  learned to read as chil­dren. Brain responses to spo­ken and writ­ten lan­guage, visual faces, houses, tools, and check­ers were examined.

The main dif­fer­ences found between lit­er­ate and illit­er­ate brains were: Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: what fol­lows is an excerpt from Dr. Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan’s new book, The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: A Psychiatrist’s Sto­ries of His Most Bizarre Cases)

CHAPTER TEN

Brain Fog

Sum­mer 1990

Gigi and I had moved to Stu­dio City, about a forty-minute com­mute to UCLA. On week­ends, we often went to the movies at Uni­ver­sal City­Walk, a repli­ca­tion of Los Ange­les within Los Ange­les. Why peo­ple couldn’t just walk down the real streets of Los Ange­les made no sense to me, yet there we were, on a Fri­day evening, eat­ing ice cream and strolling down a sim­u­lated street.

We had just seen Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new sci­encefic­tion film about a con­struc­tion worker who under­goes a false mem­ory trans­plant that takes him on an imag­i­nary trip to Mars. But things go wrong, and when he comes out of it, he can’t tell what’s real and what’s imagined.

“When he first got back from Mars, there were so many signs that he was from the future that I believed it,” I said.
“But honey, before he had that mem­ory implant done, he was per­fectly happy liv­ing in the present—on Earth. Then he got all para­noid.”
“Of course he did. How do you know what’s real­ity if you can’t trust your mem­ory?” I asked.
“I don’t know; you’re the mem­ory expert. I want to go into this shop for a minute.” Gigi dis­ap­peared into a record store.

As I ate my ice cream and watched the crowds, I kept think­ing about those ques­tions. If two real­i­ties seem equally true, how would you know which ver­sion to believe? Many of my patients strug­gled with sim­i­lar issues, whether they were psy­chotic, demented, or sim­ply hav­ing mem­ory problems.

Over the past few years, I had begun to con­cen­trate a large part of my prac­tice on mem­ory issues—not just in older patients with Alzheimer’s dis­ease but in middle-aged peo­ple who were wor­ried about their increas­ing for­get­ful­ness. My research was also focus­ing on early detec­tion of demen­tia and age-related mem­ory decline, and I was devel­op­ing brain imag­ing as a diag­nos­tic tool.

Gigi came back with a bag of CDs and said Read the rest of this entry »

Given the grow­ing media cov­er­age men­tion­ing the terms Cog­ni­tive Reserve and Brain Reserve, you may be ask­ing your­self, “What exactly is my Cog­ni­tive (or Brain) Reserve?”

The cog­ni­tive reserve hypoth­e­sis, tested in mul­ti­ple stud­ies, states that indi­vid­u­als with more cog­ni­tive reserve can expe­ri­ence more Alzheimer’s dis­ease pathol­ogy in the brain (more plaques and tan­gles) with­out devel­op­ing Alzheimer’s dis­ease symptoms.

How does that work? Sci­en­tists are not sure but two pos­si­bil­i­ties are con­sid­ered.
1. One is that more cog­ni­tive reserve means more brain reserve, that is more neu­rons and con­nec­tions (synapses) between neu­rons. Indi­vid­u­als with more synapses would then have more synapses to lose before the crit­i­cal thresh­old for Alzheimer’s Dis­ease is reached.
2. Another pos­si­bil­ity is that more cog­ni­tive reserve means more com­pen­satory processes. The brain of indi­vid­u­als with more cog­ni­tive reserve would use more alter­na­tive net­works to com­pen­sate for the dam­ages caused by the pathol­ogy in pre­vi­ously used networks.

In a newly pub­lished study, Roe and col­leagues from Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity in St. Louis, used the num­ber of years of edu­ca­tion as a mea­sure of cog­ni­tive reserve. Why years of edu­ca­tion? Because pre­vi­ous stud­ies have shown that peo­ple who have more edu­ca­tion also exhibit a greater resis­tance to Alzheimer’s symp­toms, even while patho­log­i­cal changes are occur­ring in the brain (see Ben­nett el al., 2003 or Roe, Xiong, et al., 2008).

Roe and her col­leagues stud­ied 198 indi­vid­u­als whose mean age was 67. Out of these 198 indi­vid­u­als, 161 were non­de­mented and 37 were diag­nosed with Alzheimer’s Disease.

All the par­tic­i­pants in the study took a Read the rest of this entry »

Have you heard of or read John Ratey’s book “Spark: The Rev­o­lu­tion­ary New Sci­ence of Exer­cise and The Brain”? Accord­ing to Har­vard Psy­chi­a­try Pro­fes­sor John Ratey noth­ing beats exer­cise for pro­mot­ing brain heath.

I am sure you have also heard that exer­cis­ing your mind pro­motes brain health.

What is the con­nec­tion between phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cises? Do they have addi­tive effects on brain health? Are they redundant?

Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Lende and Greg Downey run the though-provoking Neu­roan­thro­pol­ogy blog. Daniel also teaches a class at Uni­ver­sity of Notre Dame, and he asked his stu­dents to sub­mit group-based blog posts in lieu of the tra­di­tional final essays. He explains more on Why A Final Essay When We Can Do This?.

Below you have a spec­tac­u­lar post writ­ten by 4 of his stu­dents. They show how brain imag­ing is start­ing to pro­vide a win­dow into the plas­tic­ity (glos­sary here) of our brains, and how our very own actions impact them. For good and for bad.

Under­stand­ing Brain Imaging

— By Chris Dud­ley, Matt Gasperetti, Mikey Nar­vaez, and Sarah Walorski

Do you remem­ber the anti-drug pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment from the 1980s that showed an egg fry­ing in a hot pan which rep­re­sented your brain on drugs?

Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Yaakov Stern is the Divi­sion Leader of the Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Divi­sion of the Sergievsky Cen­ter, and Pro­fes­sor of Clin­i­cal Neu­ropsy­chol­ogy, at the Col­lege of Physi­cians and Sur­geons of Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, New York.

He is one of the lead­ing pro­po­nents of the Cog­ni­tive reserve the­ory, which aims to explain why some indi­vid­u­als with full Alzheimer’s pathol­ogy (accu­mu­la­tion of plaques and tan­gles in their brains) can keep nor­mal lives until they die, while oth­ers –with the same amount of plaques and tan­gles– dis­play the severe symp­toms we asso­ciate with Alzheimer’s Dis­ease. He has pub­lished dozens of peer-reviewed sci­en­tific papers on the subject.

The con­cept of a Cog­ni­tive Reserve has been around since 1989, when a post mortem analy­sis of 137 peo­ple with Alzheimer’s Dis­ease showed that some patients exhib­ited fewer clin­i­cal symp­toms than their actual pathol­ogy sug­gested. These patients also showed higher brain weights and greater num­ber of neu­rons when com­pared to age-matched con­trols. The inves­ti­ga­tors hypoth­e­sized that the patients had a larger “reserve” of neu­rons and abil­i­ties that enable them to off­set the losses caused by Alzheimer’s. Since then, the con­cept of Cog­ni­tive Reserve has been defined as the abil­ity of an indi­vid­ual to tol­er­ate pro­gres­sive brain pathol­ogy with­out demon­strat­ing clin­i­cal cog­ni­tive symp­toms. (You can check at the end of this inter­view a great clip on this).

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Key take-aways

- Life­time expe­ri­ences, like edu­ca­tion, engag­ing occu­pa­tion, and leisure activ­i­ties, have been shown to have a major influ­ence on how we age, specif­i­cally on whether we will develop Alzheimer’s symp­toms or not.

- This is so because stim­u­lat­ing activ­i­ties, ide­ally com­bin­ing phys­i­cal exer­cise, learn­ing and social inter­ac­tion, help us build a Cog­ni­tive Reserve to pro­tect us.

- The ear­lier we start build­ing our Reserve, the bet­ter; but it is never too late to start. And, the more activ­i­ties, the bet­ter: the effect is cumulative.

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The Cog­ni­tive Reserve

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez (AF): Dear Dr. Stern, it is a plea­sure to have you here. Let me first ask you this: the impli­ca­tions of your research are pretty astound­ing, pre­sent­ing major impli­ca­tions across sec­tors and age groups. What has been the most unex­pected reac­tion so far?

YS: well…I was pretty sur­prised when Read the rest of this entry »