Sev­eral months ago we came across an excel­lent resource for cognitive/ brain fit­ness aimed at help­ing com­pa­nies offer qual­ity brain health infor­ma­tion to their employees.

While it is true that we often tend to believe all this “brain fit­ness” stuff is most rel­e­vant to our par­ents and/ or grand­par­ents, trust me, if you are read­ing this, you need it. Every­one with a brain can ben­e­fit from learn­ing about how his or her brain works and how to main­tain it with proper care.

And, from a company’s point of view, aren’t “tal­ent” and “human cap­i­tal” really all about brain fit­ness and cog­ni­tive performance?

The Con­fer­ence Board and the Dana Alliance for Brain Ini­tia­tives (descrip­tions below) pub­lished in 2008 a 44-page book­let to “teach sim­ple, prac­ti­cal strate­gies for incor­po­rat­ing brain-friendly prac­tices into day-to-day life”.  Your Brain at work: Mak­ing the sci­ence of cog­ni­tive fit­ness to work for you is the first of three planned book­lets on cog­ni­tive fitness.

The Con­fer­ence Board and the Dana Alliance have allowed Sharp­Brains to share the fol­low­ing Action Plan with our read­ers, straight from Your Brain at work brochure. At the bot­tom of this post we also share instruc­tions on how indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies can get their own copies of this excel­lent brochure. Read the rest of this entry »

The Wall Street Jour­nal had a very inter­est­ing arti­cle yes­ter­day, titled To Be Young and Anxiety-Free, focused on the value of cog­ni­tive behav­ioral ther­apy to help chil­dren with high lev­els of anx­i­ety learn how too cope bet­ter and pre­vent the snow­ball sce­nario, when that anx­i­ety grows and spi­rals out of con­trol result­ing in depres­sion and similar

- “…new research show­ing that treat­ing kids for anx­i­ety when they are young may help pre­vent the devel­op­ment of more seri­ous men­tal ill­nesses, includ­ing depres­sion and more debil­i­tat­ing anx­i­ety disorders.”

- “Of course, most kids have fears with­out hav­ing a full-blown anx­i­ety dis­or­der. And some anx­i­ety is healthy: It makes sense, for exam­ple, to be a lit­tle ner­vous before a big test. Doc­tors and psy­chol­o­gists do cau­tion that the increased focus on child­hood anx­i­ety could lead to an over­diag­no­sis of the prob­lem. What makes anx­i­ety a true ill­ness is when it inter­feres with nor­mal func­tion­ing or causes seri­ous emo­tional and phys­i­cal distress.”

- “But the use of anti­de­pres­sants in chil­dren has come under fire because Read the rest of this entry »

We recently pre­pared a Direc­tory of Web Sites as part of our Resources sec­tion. You will find some gems here, in a vari­ety of areas:

» The Dana Foun­da­tion offers sev­eral excel­lent online resources:

- Brainy Kids Online offers chil­dren, teens, par­ents and teach­ers links to games, labs, edu­ca­tion resources and les­son plans.

- Brain­Web: gen­eral infor­ma­tion about the brain and cur­rent brain research, as well as links to val­i­dated sites related to more than 25 brain disorders.

- Brain Resources for Seniors pro­vides older adults and their care­tak­ers with links to sites related to brain health, edu­ca­tion and gen­eral information.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few updates and announcements:

- 1) My apolo­gies for slow blog­ging, due to travel. I par­tic­i­pated yes­ter­day in a fun panel dis­cus­sion at ETech on Use Your Head– The Future of Mind Hacks. You can read some take-aways (in Ital­ian, so this may be good brain exer­cise) here.

- 2) We will release our report The State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket 2008 next Mon­day (Update: Tues­day March 11th!), to coin­cide with Brain Aware­ness Week. Make sure to visit our blog next Mon­day if you want to learn more.

- 3) The National Museum of Health and Med­i­cine at Wal­ter Reed Army Med­ical Cen­ter is plan­ning some great activ­i­ties dur­ing Brain Aware­ness Week (Thank you, Tim). Learn more about their “Part­ners in Edu­ca­tion” activ­i­ties for stu­dents in the Wash­ing­ton DC area.

- 4) The Dana Foun­da­tion has released a great research report to address the ques­tion “Are smart peo­ple drawn to the arts or does arts train­ing make peo­ple smarter?” Enjoy the report and some excel­lent related resources Here.

- 5) Eric Jensen has writ­ten a great arti­cle on Brain-Based Edu­ca­tion for PDK Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Edu­ca­tion. Enjoy it!

Here you are have the bi-monthly Digest of our 10 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).

Very inter­est­ing new study, Crit­i­cal Period Plas­tic­ity of Adult-Born Neu­rons, pub­lished in the jour­nal Neu­ron by a team of Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity School of Med­i­cine researchers. The press release New Adult Brain Cells May Be Cen­tral To Life­long Learn­ing con­tains a good sum­mary (the bold for­mat is mine):

• “The steady for­ma­tion of new brain cells in adults may rep­re­sent more than merely a patch­ing up of aging brains, a new study has shown.”
• “The new adult brain cells may serve to give the adult brain the same kind of learn­ing abil­ity that young brains have while still allow­ing the exist­ing, mature cir­cuitry to main­tain stability.”
• “The researchers found that the new adult neu­rons showed a pat­tern of chang­ing plas­tic­ity very sim­i­lar to that seen in brain cells in new­born ani­mals. That is, the new adult brain cells showed a “crit­i­cal period” in which they were highly plas­tic before they set­tled into the less plas­tic prop­er­ties of mature brain cells. In new­born ani­mals, such a crit­i­cal period enables an impor­tant, early burst of wiring of new brain cir­cuitry with expe­ri­ence.”
• “The researchers also observed in the new adult neu­rons anatom­i­cal evi­dence of the same kind of for­ma­tion of new con­nec­tions that take place in the brains of new­borns as they wire new path­ways in response to expe­ri­ence.”
• “They con­cluded that “adult neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis may rep­re­sent not merely a replace­ment mech­a­nism for lost neu­rons, but instead an ongo­ing devel­op­men­tal process that con­tin­u­ously reju­ve­nates the mature ner­vous sys­tem by offer­ing expanded capac­ity of plas­tic­ity in response to expe­ri­ence through­out life.”

In short: not only do we know today that the adult brain is capa­ble of cre­at­ing new neu­rons, but this shows that our expe­ri­ence influ­ences what hap­pens to those neu­rons once cre­ated. Pretty rev­o­lu­tion­ary under­stand­ing, that still needs to per­me­ate through soci­ety and influ­ence our lifestyles and habits.

Some related posts:

• Brain Fit­ness Glossary
• Want to Improve Mem­ory? Strengthen Your Synapses.
• Brain Exer­cise FAQs
• Easy Steps to Improve Your Brain Health Now

Steven Edwards at Wired Blog writes a post titled Yoga Boosts Brain’s GABA Lev­els, say­ing that “Par­tic­i­pants in the yoga group had a 27% increase in GABA lev­els, while those in the read­ing group remained unchanged. Co-authors Chris Streeter from BUSM and Domenic Ciraulo pointed out that this research shows a method of treat­ing low GABA states. Fairly obvi­ous — yes — but this shows a non­phar­ma­co­log­i­cal method for increas­ing GABA lev­els that peo­ple can act on now, with­out wait­ing for a drug to go through FDA approval.”

Hav­ing attended last week a con­fer­ence where neu­ropharma exec­u­tives pre­sented all their future drugs against obe­sity, anx­i­ety, depression…I couldn’t agree more. The rates of seri­ous side effects of these drugs are astound­ing, yet as a soci­ety we seem to pre­fer to rely on tak­ing drugs when are sick rather than proac­tively tak­ing charge of our health and lifestyles and do our best (which not always is enough) to pro­tect our fit­ness and wellness.

The press release Steven talks about: Yoga and Ele­vated Brain GABA Lev­els [PhysOrg]. Quotes: Read the rest of this entry »