As you may have noticed, we just changed a few things in our site, includ­ing prepar­ing a more solid Resources sec­tion. Please take a look at the nav­i­ga­tion bar at the top.

One of the new pages, that we will update often, is an expanded Books page. Here are the books that we are rec­om­mend­ing now.

Fas­ci­nat­ing books on neu­ro­plas­tic­ity (the abil­ity of the brain to rewire itself through experience):

Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Sci­ence Reveals Our Extra­or­di­nary Poten­tial to Trans­form Our­selves — by Sharon Begley.

 

The Brain That Changes Itself: Sto­ries of Per­sonal Tri­umph from the Fron­tiers of Brain Sci­ence — by Nor­man Doidge.

 

Great pop­u­lar sci­ence books by Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Con­tin­u­ing with the theme of a Week of Sci­ence spon­sored by Just Sci­ence, we will high­light some of the key points in: Appel­hans BM, Luecken LJ. Heart Rate Vari­abil­ity as an Index of Reg­u­lated Emo­tional Respond­ing. Review of Gen­eral Psy­chol­ogy. 2006;10:229–240.

Defin­ing Heart Rate Vari­abil­ity
Effec­tive emo­tional reg­u­la­tion depends on being able to flex­i­bly adjust your phys­i­o­log­i­cal response to a chang­ing environment.

“… heart rate vari­abil­ity (HRV) is a mea­sure of the con­tin­u­ous inter­play between sym­pa­thetic and parasym­pa­thetic influ­ences on heart rate that yields infor­ma­tion about auto­nomic flex­i­bil­ity and thereby rep­re­sents the capac­ity for reg­u­lated emo­tional responding.”

“HRV reflects the degree to which car­diac activ­ity can be mod­u­lated to meet chang­ing sit­u­a­tional demands.”

The sym­pa­thetic (SNS) and parasym­pa­thetic (PNS) branches of the auto­nomic ner­vous sys­tem (ANS) antag­o­nis­ti­cally influ­ence the lengths of time between con­sec­u­tive heart­beats. Faster heart rates, which can be due to increased SNS and/or lower PNS activ­ity, cor­re­spond to a shorter inter­beat inter­val while slower heart rates have a longer inter­beat inter­val, which can be attrib­uted to increased PNS and/or decreased SNS activity.

The frequency-based HRV analy­ses are based on the fact that the vari­a­tions in heart rate pro­duced by SNS and PNS activ­ity occur at dif­fer­ent speeds, or fre­quen­cies. SNS is slow act­ing and medi­ated by nor­ep­i­neph­rine while PNS influ­ence is fast act­ing and medi­ated by acetylcholine.

Read the rest of this entry »