Here you have the March edi­tion of our monthly newslet­ter cov­er­ing cog­ni­tive health and brain fit­ness top­ics. Please remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive this Newslet­ter by email, using the box at the top of this page. I know I am biased — but do believe this Newslet­ter issue might well be our best so far. I hope you find the time to enjoy it!

Bird’s Eye View

Brain Fit­ness Sur­vey: Over 2,000 thought­ful responses to our Jan­u­ary sur­vey (Thank You!) rein­force the need for pub­lic aware­ness ini­tia­tives and qual­ity infor­ma­tion to help eval­u­ate and nav­i­gate lifestyle and prod­uct claims, as well as the need for more research, an expanded health­care cul­ture, as more. Given this con­text, we are pub­lish­ing The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness in May 2009, a book with 18 Inter­views with Sci­en­tists, Prac­ti­cal Advice, and Prod­uct Reviews, in addi­tion to our annual mar­ket report for pro­fes­sion­als and exec­u­tives (to be pub­lished in April). If you have ideas to help us pro­mote the book, please reply to this email and let us know!

Life­long Learning

Here you have the pre­sen­ta­tion I deliv­ered on Tues­day at ETech 2009 (this year’s O’Reilly Emerg­ing Tech­nol­ogy Conference):

Emerg­ing Research and Tech­nol­ogy for Life Hacking/ Brain Training

(click to open pre­sen­ta­tion in new window)

Descrip­tion: Life hack­ing. Brain train­ing. They are one and the same. The brain’s frontal lobes enable our goal-oriented behav­ior, sup­port­ing exec­u­tive func­tions, such as decision-making, atten­tion, emo­tional self-regulation, goal-setting, and work­ing mem­ory. These func­tions can be enhanced with tar­geted prac­tice  such as life hack­ing. This ses­sion will pro­vide an overview of the cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science under­pin­ning life hack­ing, and review the state-of-the-art of non-invasive tools for brain train­ing: neu­ro­feed­back, biofeed­back, soft­ware appli­ca­tions, cog­ni­tive sim­u­la­tions, Tran­scra­nial Mag­netic Stim­u­la­tion, and plain-old meditation.

It was great to meet fel­low blog­gers and pre­sen­ters, such as Shel­ley Batts of Of Two Minds and Chris Patil of Ouroboros, and very inquisite and through­ful audi­ence mem­bers. Get­ting ready to speak at ASA/ NCOA and IHRSA next week!

In the ETech panel a few days ago, we dis­cussed some futur­is­tic and some emerg­ing ways in which we can “hack our minds”, mostly from a tech­nol­ogy point of view.

Nei­ther myself nor the other pan­elists thought of sug­gest­ing the most obvi­ous and inex­pen­sive method, proven in thou­sands of research studies.

The secret com­pound?: Belief. Also called “the placebo effect”. Let’s see what Wikipedia says:

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!

Senia writes a great arti­cle on How You Tell the Story of Your Life in Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­ogy News Daily. As part of the story, she men­tions a very fun study on the power of the Placebo effect.

From Senia’s post:

“In the Feb­ru­ary, 2007 issue of Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, Langer and col­league Alia Crum reported that they took 84 hotel work­ers and told one group that “the work they do (clean­ing hotel rooms) is good exer­cise and sat­is­fies the Sur­geon General’s rec­om­men­da­tions for an active lifestyle. Exam­ples of how their work was exer­cise were pro­vided. Langer and Crum told the con­trol group noth­ing. Four weeks later, Langer and Crum returned to find some mea­sure­ments of both groups: the con­trol group hadn’t changed phys­i­cally, but the test group had decreased all of the fol­low­ing: weight, blood pres­sure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index.

Langer and Crum describe this study as sup­port­ing the the­ory that exer­cise affects health at least partly due to the placebo effect. Fur­ther­more, we can ask, what are the sto­ries that these hotel work­ers are telling them­selves? Why do the hotel work­ers sud­denly believe that they actively affect their exer­cise regiment?”

Impli­ca­tion: the placebo effect is real, and it can help our health.

A few fun ques­tions to consider:

- How do we pre­vent other peo­ple from sell­ing us stuff that only works based on the placebo effect?

- Once we decide to do some­thing, shouldn’t we try to “placebo” our­selves in order to get the most of it? this is another man­i­fes­ta­tion of the impor­tance of emo­tional self-regulation.

Enjoy the long weekend