Here you have the twice-a-month newslet­ter with our most pop­u­lar blog posts. Please remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive this Newslet­ter by email, sim­ply by sub­mit­ting your email at the top of this page.

First, I am pleased to report that have been invited to par­tic­i­pate in a new ini­tia­tive by the World Eco­nomic Forum. Described as “In a global envi­ron­ment marked by short-term ori­en­ta­tion and silo-thinking, Global Agenda Coun­cils will fos­ter inter­dis­ci­pli­nary and long-range think­ing to address the pre­vail­ing chal­lenges on the global agenda”, my spe­cific Coun­cil will focus on the Chal­lenges of Geron­tol­ogy. More infor­ma­tion on the Global Agenda Coun­cils here. Will keep you updated via this blog.

In the News

Yes, It is Smart to Learn New Tricks: a recent Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle presents a good overview of brain health trends, but framed around a highly arti­fi­cial choice for con­sumers: either you a) do phys­i­cal exer­cise, or b) take part in social inter­ac­tions, or c) engage in men­tal exer­cise. What about switch­ing off those TVs and hav­ing time for all a, b, c, and more?

Mind Games: the August issue of Ven­ture Cap­i­tal Jour­nal brings a very good piece on the emerg­ing brain fit­ness soft­ware cat­e­gory (sub­scrip­tion required), which we enhance by pro­vid­ing a quick overview of the field.

Cog­niFit raises USD 5 mil­lion: if 2007 was the year of brain fit­ness media cov­er­age, 2008 seems to be the year of seri­ous invest­ments. This Cog­niFit round fol­lows other recent ven­ture invest­ments: Dakim ($10.6m), Lumos Labs ($3m). We hear all these com­pa­nies are devot­ing part of these resources to fund clin­i­cal trials…never too late.

Brain Sci­ence and Life­long Learning

Schools as Brain Train­ing Hubs?: in a recent post we asked for sug­ges­tions to refine our pre­dic­tions for the 2007–2015 period. A good num­ber of read­ers con­tributed, and the win­ner of this infor­mal con­test is… Scott Spears, retired pub­lic schools super­in­ten­dent, for his thoughts on the future impli­ca­tions of cog­ni­tive research on schooling.

Neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis and Brain Plas­tic­ity in Adult Brains: while “adults may have a ten­dency to get set in their ways I’ve been doing it this way for a long time and it works, so why change?”, change itself is an excel­lent prac­tice for healthy brain aging, as Lau­rie Bar­tels explains.

A Farewell to Demen­tia?: a fas­ci­nat­ing recent edi­to­r­ial in Archives of Neu­rol­ogy, titled Demen­tia: A Word to be For­got­ten, calls for more con­struc­tive ter­mi­nol­ogy. Dr. Joshua Stein­er­man weighs in.

Other Thought-Provoking Articles

To Think or to Blink?: should Ham­let be liv­ing with us now and read­ing best­sellers, he might be won­der­ing: To Blink or not to Blink? To Think or not to Think? We are pleased to present an arti­cle by Madeleine Van Hecke, offer­ing the “on the other hand” to Mal­colm Gladwell’s Blink argument.

The impact of web 2.0 on health­care: we hosted Med­i­cine 2.0, a bi-weekly col­lec­tion of arti­cles that ana­lyze the cur­rent and poten­tial impact of web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies on med­i­cine and healthcare.

Brain Teasers

Brain Teasers: Spot the Dif­fer­ence: how many dif­fer­ences can you spot (and how many cog­ni­tive func­tions can you engage with this sim­ple exercise?)

I hope you are hav­ing a great August!

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

A Span­ish friend and neu­ro­sci­en­tist just reminded me of a great quote by San­ti­ago Ramon y Cajal (1852–1934): “todo hom­bre puede ser, si se lo pro­pone, escul­tor de su pro­pio cere­bro”.

Which means: “Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculp­tor his own brain”.

Which really means: “Each of us can lit­er­ally refine the struc­ture and func­tion of our brains, the same way we can do so with the rest of our body mus­cles” (my 2 cents…).

Our daily thoughts and actions, learn­ings, med­i­ta­tion, cog­ni­tive ther­apy, the grow­ing num­ber of software-based pro­grams, and more, are “sculpt­ing” tools…no more no less than tools. Good for some goals and con­texts, like improv­ing con­cen­tra­tion and mem­ory, becom­ing “sharper”, help­ing pro­tect our minds from decline, or man­age stress better.

I just bought Cajal’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy, titled Rec­ol­lec­tions of My Life (thanks, Mind Hacks). Will be writ­ing about it in a month or so-I have too many books on the table now, and only one brain.

If you want to read some good neu­ro­science blog posts, you can find a nice col­lec­tion in the lat­est edi­tion of Encephalon, hosted by Dr Deb­o­rah Serani.

For gen­eral sci­ence ones, try Tan­gled Bank. For edu­ca­tion, enjoy The Edu­ca­tion Car­ni­val.

Finally, I will be host­ing the next edi­tion of Car­ni­val of the Cap­i­tal­ists (I don’t really love the name…but it is the old­est and best blog car­ni­val for busi­ness and eco­nom­ics). If you have some good posts, please sub­mit them here.

For some addi­tional thoughts on sculpt­ing brains, intel­li­gence, and becom­ing smarter, you can check this post.

Here is ques­tion 22 from Brain Fit­ness 101: Answers to Your Top 25 Ques­tions.

Ques­tion:

Are there spe­cific brain fit­ness pro­grams for kids? My kids have prob­lems with math-why should they do these things that may dis­tract them?

Key Points:

• Learn­ing stress man­age­ment skills can reduce test anx­i­ety and improve learn­ing readiness.
• If stress lev­els are too high, con­cen­tra­tion and focus are neg­a­tively impacted.

Answer:

Read the rest of this entry »

Here is ques­tion 21 from Brain Fit­ness 101: Answers to Your Top 25 Ques­tions.

Ques­tion:

I am busy exec­u­tive with a chal­leng­ing job. How is brain fit­ness rel­e­vant to me?

Key Points:

• Reduce your stress to improve con­cen­tra­tion and learn­ing readi­ness and reduce distractions.
• Increase your men­tal stim­u­la­tion to help main­tain a healthy, flex­i­ble brain.

Answer:

Exec­u­tives, or any­one involved in com­plex and rapidly evolv­ing envi­ron­ments, need to make pres­sured deci­sions based on sound logic, instead of emo­tional impulses. It is not easy to deal with the frus­tra­tion, for exam­ple, when Read the rest of this entry »

Atten­tion (or con­cen­tra­tion), and mem­ory are two men­tal skills directly related. In fact, many mem­ory com­plaints have noth­ing to do with the actual abil­ity to remem­ber things. They come from a fail­ure to focus prop­erly on the task at hand.

Take the exam­ple of not remem­ber­ing where you parked your car after shop­ping at the mall… It is likely that you did not pay much atten­tion to where you parked the car in the first place, thus leav­ing your brain with few oppor­tu­ni­ties to reg­is­ter any infor­ma­tion that could be recalled later to help you find your car. The same rea­son­ing goes for not remem­ber­ing where we put our glasses!

Many of our actions are per­formed auto­mat­i­cally. By oppo­si­tion, focus­ing atten­tion is effort­ful. As you know, with age the brain needs more time to process infor­ma­tion.  Along with speed of pro­cess­ing, other brain func­tions decline. A cru­cial one is the abil­ity to focus and ignore distraction.

As we age it thus get harder and harder to pay atten­tion. But focus­ing our atten­tion on the task at hand is key for bet­ter mem­ory per­for­mance. What can we do then to improve con­cen­tra­tion and memory?

One gen­eral solu­tion is to keep the brain healthy. This can be done by adher­ing to the main pil­lars of brain health and main­te­nance: bal­anced diet, phys­i­cal exer­cise, cog­ni­tive stim­u­la­tion, stress man­age­ment, and social engage­ment.

How to improve concentration

• Focus on the task at hand: If talk­ing with some­one: ask ques­tions; if read­ing a book or a report: ask your­self how you would sum­ma­rize what you just read to a friend or to your boss.

• In gen­eral, avoid and/or elim­i­nate dis­trac­tions. Tune out every­thing else. The harder the task, the more impor­tant it is to tune out distractions.

• Do not try to double-task, this will increase your errors and divide your atten­tion. Atten­tion is lim­ited. When you try to do sev­eral things at once, you nec­es­sar­ily have to divide your atten­tion and thus con­cen­trate less on each indi­vid­ual tasks.

• Use med­i­ta­tion. Sev­eral stud­ies have shown that med­i­ta­tion can be a good brain train­ing tool that affects espe­cially atten­tional / con­cen­tra­tion skills.

How to improve memory

• Pay atten­tion and con­cen­trate! (see above)

• Relate to the infor­ma­tion you are learn­ing. The more per­sonal the infor­ma­tion becomes, the eas­ier it is to remem­ber it. Ask your­self how it makes you feel. Ask your­self where else you have heard this. Ask your­self whether there is some­thing in your per­sonal life related to this piece of information.

• Repeat the infor­ma­tion: Come back to it more than one time. This has been found in tons of stud­ies: repeated infor­ma­tion is eas­ier to recall. Spaced retrieval (a method with which a per­son is cued to recall a piece of infor­ma­tion at dif­fer­ent inter­vals) is one of the rare meth­ods that show some results with Alzheimer’s patients.

• Elab­o­rate on the infor­ma­tion: think about it. Things that are con­crete and have a clear mean­ing are eas­ier to remem­ber than abstract and vague ones. Try­ing to attach mean­ing to the infor­ma­tion you are try­ing to mem­o­rize will make it eas­ier to recall later. Your brain will have more cues to look for. For instance, try to pic­ture the infor­ma­tion in your head. Pic­tures are much eas­ier to mem­o­rize than words. To remem­ber fig­ures and per­cent­ages it is much eas­ier to pic­ture these in a graph for instance. Relate the infor­ma­tion to some­thing you know already.

Let’s put it all together: Remem­ber­ing names

We often for­get names in the few sec­ond after we have heard them. Most of the time this phe­nom­e­non can be related to a lack of atten­tion or con­cen­tra­tion. It is also caused by the fact that names have no spe­cific mean­ing and are thus hard to mem­o­rize. Say you are intro­duced to Kim today:

1. Pay atten­tion to the name: Ask Kim to repeat her name if you have not heard it very well. Make a con­scious effort of try­ing to mem­o­rize the name: Focus on it (“Her name is Kim. I want to remem­ber it.”)

2. Relate to the name: What does this per­son make you feel like? Do you know some­one else named like this? Think about this other per­son. (“She seems quite ner­vous, I won­der why. She makes me feel a bit uneasy. Not at all like the other Kim I know from the gym.”)

3. Repeat the name: Use the name sev­eral times in the con­ver­sa­tion. (“What do you think of this, Kim?”) If applic­a­ble, use the person’s busi­ness card later on to read her name over and over.

4. Elab­o­rate on the name: Relate the name to pre­vi­ous infor­ma­tion (“Kim, as in Kim Wilde I used to lis­ten to when I was a kid. Well, she sure doesn’t look like Kim Wilde!”). Pic­ture her face later on in the day as you repeat her name.

Hope this helps!

Related arti­cles on how to improve con­cen­tra­tion and memory:

• How can I improve my short term mem­ory? Is there a daily exer­cise I can do to improve it?

• The Ten Habits of Highly Effec­tive Brains

And to stim­u­late and chal­lenge your whole brain, check out our Top 50 Brain Teasers!

.

Q: How can I improve my mem­ory? Is there a daily exer­cise I can do to improve it?

A: The most impor­tant com­po­nent of mem­ory is atten­tion. By choos­ing to attend to some­thing and focus on it, you cre­ate a per­sonal inter­ac­tion with it, which gives it per­sonal mean­ing, mak­ing it eas­ier to remem­ber.
Read the rest of this entry »