The Power of Noth­ing: Could study­ing the placebo effect change the way we think about med­i­cine? (The New Yorker):

“For years, Ted Kaptchuk per­formed acupunc­ture at a tiny clinic in Cam­bridge, a few miles from his cur­rent office, at the Har­vard Med­ical School. He opened for busi­ness in 1976, hav­ing just returned from Asia, where he had spent four years hon­ing his craft. Not long after he arrived in Boston, he treated an Armen­ian woman for chronic bron­chi­tis. A few weeks later, the woman returned with her hus­band and told Kaptchuk that he had “cured” her.” Read the rest of this entry »

Very inter­est­ing new data rein­forc­ing two main themes we have been ana­lyz­ing for a while:
1) We bet­ter start pay­ing seri­ous atten­tion (and R&D dol­lars) to lifestyle-based and non-invasive cog­ni­tive and emo­tional health inter­ven­tions, which are mostly ignored in favor of inva­sive, drug-based options
2) Inter­ven­tions will need to be per­son­al­ized. The study below ana­lyzes data at the coun­try level, but the same logic applies to the indi­vid­ual level

Many fear Alzheimer’s, want to be tested: sur­vey (Reuters):

- “The tele­phone sur­vey of 2,678 adults aged 18 and older in the United States, France, Ger­many, Spain and Poland was con­ducted by researchers at the Har­vard School of Pub­lic Health and Read the rest of this entry »

Here you are have the bi-monthly update with our 10 most Pop­u­lar blog posts. (Also, remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive our RSS feed, or to our newslet­ter, at the top of this page, if you want to receive this digest by email).

News and Events

Exer­cise your brain in the Cog­ni­tive Age: The New York Times pub­lished two thought-provoking arti­cles on brain and cog­ni­tive fit­ness, one of them fea­tur­ing SharpBrains.

Read the rest of this entry »

We were very happy to dis­cover that Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can Mind has high­lighted Sharp­Brains in their June/July 2007 issue!

Here’s what they had to say:

“Every­one knows the impor­tance of stay­ing phys­i­cally fit. But what about stay­ing men­tally fit? Research in the past sev­eral years has shown that men­tal “work­outs” may improve mem­ory, relieve stress and even help stave off Alzheimer’s. This new site is an online gym for the mind, offer­ing a blog about the sci­ence of brain fit­ness and links to rel­e­vant research. It also sells “exer­cise” soft­ware and offers per­sonal training.”

If you are here due to that intro­duc­tion, we’d like to wel­come you and show you around a bit. You might enjoy:

• The Neu­ro­science Inter­view Series in our brain health blog, in which we inter­view some of the lead­ing neu­ro­sci­en­tists in brain fit­ness, including:
  • Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg on Brain Fit­ness Pro­grams and Cog­ni­tive Train­ing,
  • Cog­ni­tive Sim­u­la­tions for Bas­ket­ball Game-Intelligence: Inter­view with Prof. Daniel Gopher,
  • Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing and RoboMemo: Inter­view with Dr. Torkel Kling­berg,
  • Mem­ory train­ing and atten­tion deficits: inter­view with Notre Dame’s Bradley Gib­son,
  • and an upcom­ing inter­view with Yaakov Stern, the lead­ing researcher behind the Cog­ni­tive Reserve theory
• Our col­lec­tion of Brain Teasers and Puzzles
• A selec­tion of Hot Top­ics in Brain Health and Fitness
• Or, sign up for our free monthly brain fit­ness newslet­ter that keeps you up to date with the lat­est arti­cles and events in brain fitness

But most of all, enjoy your­self, learn some­thing new, and let us know what you think!