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:

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The great MIT Open­Course­Ware ini­tia­tive offers a lot of free mate­ri­als on Brain and Cog­ni­tive Sci­ences. You can browse lec­ture notes, read­ings, and more on a vari­ety of psy­chol­ogy and neu­ro­science courses.

• “The human brain is the most com­plex, sophis­ti­cated, and pow­er­ful information-processing device known. To study its com­plex­i­ties, the Depart­ment of Brain and Cog­ni­tive Sci­ences at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy com­bines the exper­i­men­tal tech­nolo­gies of neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy, neu­ro­science, and psy­chol­ogy, with the the­o­ret­i­cal power that comes from the fields of com­pu­ta­tional neu­ro­science and cog­ni­tive science.”
• “The Depart­ment was founded by Hans-Lukas Teu­ber in 1964 as a Depart­ment of Psy­chol­ogy, with the then-radical vision that the study of brain and mind are insep­a­ra­ble. Today, at a time of increas­ing spe­cial­iza­tion and frag­men­ta­tion, our goal remains to under­stand cog­ni­tion– its processes, and its mech­a­nisms at the level of mol­e­cules, neu­rons, net­works of neu­rons, and cog­ni­tive mod­ules. We are unique among neu­ro­science and cog­ni­tive sci­ence depart­ments in our breadth, and in the scope of our ambi­tion. We span a very large range of inquiry into the brain and mind, and our work bridges many dif­fer­ent lev­els of analy­sis includ­ing mol­e­c­u­lar, cel­lu­lar, sys­tems, com­pu­ta­tional and cog­ni­tive approaches.”

There is a fas­ci­nat­ing new course titled A Clin­i­cal Approach to the Human Brain, Fall 2006, includ­ing Top­ics and Lec­ture Sum­maries such as

• “Neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis: Teach­ing Old Dogs New Tricks. A sur­pris­ing dis­cov­ery in the last few years in neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy has been that neu­rons are born, neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, in the adult mam­malian brain. Ini­tially, this had been shown in ani­mals and, more recently, in the humans hip­pocam­pus, the site of declar­a­tive mem­ory for­ma­tion. (See Gree­nough). Fur­ther­more, the rate of neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis in ani­mals has been enhanced by expe­ri­ence, both phys­i­cal activ­ity and liv­ing in enriched envi­ron­ments (See Read the rest of this entry »