Please Save these Dates if you are inter­ested in explor­ing and dis­cussing the lat­est on Opti­miz­ing Health Through Neuroplasticity-Driven Inno­va­tion; the theme for our third annual vir­tual Sharp­Brains Sum­mit (“vir­tual” means every­thing takes place online; no one has to travel):

• Pre-Summit work­shops: May 31st-June 1st, 2012
• Sum­mit: June 7-8th, 2012
• Expo Week: June 12-14th, 2012

17 Con­firmed Sum­mit Speak­ers include: Read the rest of this entry »

The recent dis­cov­ery that expe­ri­ence can change brain struc­ture and func­tion at any age has sparked numer­ous health, edu­ca­tion, and pro­duc­tiv­ity appli­ca­tions whose value and lim­i­ta­tions we are only start­ing to grasp.

Brain fit­ness has quickly become a main­stream aspi­ra­tion among baby boomers and elders, pri­mar­ily in North Amer­ica. It has fueled a grow­ing inter­est in brain fit­ness classes, brain fit­ness cen­ters, and brain fit­ness pro­grams, along with atten­dant oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges. An increas­ing num­ber of adults want use­ful tools to pro­tect cog­ni­tive health and performance—not nec­es­sar­ily to reverse aging—and what they are find­ing is an expand­ing and noisy mar­ket­place where they (and also pro­fes­sion­als) need to care­fully eval­u­ate their own needs and the avail­able options (Fer­nan­dez and Gold­berg, 2009). Read the rest of this entry »

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Time for our monthly eNewslet­ter track­ing recent news and devel­op­ments on how the neu­ro­science of cog­ni­tion and emo­tions can inform edu­ca­tion and health across the lifes­pan. Let us try to be as con­cise as pos­si­ble, so you can spend as much time as pos­si­ble con­nect­ing with your Loved Ones instead of with the World Wide Web.

• Your Brain: Capa­ble of Great­ness, Hard-wired for Survival
• How Phys­i­cal Exer­cise Ben­e­fits the Brain
• Brain changes seen in cab­bies who take ‘The Knowledge’
• How Cul­tural Evo­lu­tion Out­paces Nat­ural Evolution
• Cog­ni­tive Test­ing Pro­gram Fails Sol­diers, Leav­ing Brain Injuries Undetected
• Cog­ni­tive Behav­iour Ther­apy Helps Adults with ADHD
• Check­list to Eval­u­ate Brain Train­ing and Brain Health Claims
• Could study­ing the placebo effect change the way we think about medicine?
• New Online Course: How to Be Your Own Brain Fit­ness Coach in 2012
• The Sharp­Brains Guide: Pre­ven­tive Med­i­cine Best­seller in Ama­zon Kin­dle Store
• Offi­cial selec­tion  by AARP of Best Books on Brain Fitness
• Top 10 Quotes on Life­long Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and Neurogenesis
• Invi­ta­tion for Sharp­Brains Sum­mit Par­tic­i­pants to Com­ment on Meet­ing Report

Wish­ing you a won­der­ful end of 2011 and a happy and suc­cess­ful 2012!

PS: thirty-nine peo­ple have reg­is­tered since this past Tues­day to par­tic­i­pate in the upcom­ing Online Course: How to Be Your Own Brain Fit­ness Coach in 2012. Please remem­ber we will only be able to acco­mo­date the first two hun­dred reg­is­trants, so please take a look soon to see if you are inter­ested in joining!

Here you have a round-up of recent news on how cog­ni­tive and affec­tive neu­ro­science find­ings are start­ing to inform edu­ca­tion and health across the lifespan:

Pedi­a­tri­cians issue a call to aid chil­dren fac­ing ‘toxic stress’ (LA Times)

Teach­ers as Brain-Changers: Neu­ro­science and Learn­ing (EdWeek) Read the rest of this entry »

We just noticed that the Alliance for Aging Research offers an excel­lent list of ref­er­ences on Brain Health Research, orga­nized in these 10 sec­tions below. Enjoy!

#1 Nour­ish Your Nog­gin: Eat a Brain Healthy Diet Read the rest of this entry »

As part of the research behind the book The Sharp­Brains Guide for Brain Fit­ness we inter­viewed dozens of lead­ing cog­ni­tive health and fit­ness sci­en­tists and experts world­wide to learn about their research and thoughts, and have a num­ber of take-aways to report.

What can we clearly say today that we couldn’t have said only 10 years ago? That what neu­ro­science pio­neer San­ti­ago Ramon y Cajal claimed in the XX cen­tury, “Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculp­tor his own brain”, may well become real­ity in the XXI.

And trans­form Edu­ca­tion, Health, Train­ing, and Gam­ing in the process, since Read the rest of this entry »

We’re host­ing here at Sharp­Brains the Octo­ber 5th edi­tion of Grand Rounds blog car­ni­val, the weekly col­lec­tion of best health/ med­ical blog posts. You can sub­mit posts until end of Sun­day: alvaro at sharp­brains dot com, indi­cat­ing Grand Rounds in the sub­ject line. And don’t for­get to come back on Tuesday!

If you hap­pen to be in Barcelona, Spain, on Sep­tem­ber 14th, make sure to attend Alvaro Fer­nan­dez talk there titled “How and Why Dig­i­tal Tech­nol­ogy Will Trans­form Edu­ca­tion, Train­ing and Brain Health”.

• Date: 14/09/2010
• Time: 19:00
• Place: ESADEFORUM. Av. Pedralbes 60–62.

Descrip­tion: You have a brain. Make it reflect on this provoca­tive vision of how the con­ver­gence of demo­graphic and polit­i­cal trends with the dis­cov­er­ies of neu­ro­science and dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy can give rise to a global mar­ket capa­ble of trans­form­ing the way in which we develop and main­tain our brains, in order to attain the high­est pos­si­ble level of brain health and per­for­mance through­out our lives. The neu­ro­sci­en­tist Ramón y Cajal once said: “Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculp­tor of his own brain”. This has become a pre­vail­ing desire, pro­moted by baby boomers who, as they approach their 60th birth­day, embark on a search for life­long “brain fitness”.

Learn more and Reg­is­ter Here.

Mar­ian Dia­mond, UC-Berkeley: “Peo­ple fre­quently do the same level of cross­word puz­zles to stim­u­late their brains year after year. They do not chal­lenge their brains with more dif­fi­cult lev­els of puz­zles. In our research, we showed that if we chal­lenged the rats to reach their food cups by hav­ing to climb over many obstruc­tions, their brains increased more than those of rats who could walk unhin­dered to their food cups. Chal­lenge increased brain size.”

Tom War­den, All­state: “… we see the oppor­tu­nity that cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­vides as just the next evo­lu­tion of things that we can advo­cate and get behind that ulti­mately make for a bet­ter dri­ving expe­ri­ence, a safer dri­ving expe­ri­ence for peo­ple. Not only for our insureds, but to help the roads be safer for everyone…what we did is to attempt to repli­cate the results that were observed in the lab­o­ra­tory envi­ron­ment where older dri­vers who have com­pleted a good amount of train­ing, 10 hours or more of train­ing, had shown that the risk of crash could be reduced by up to about 50%.”

David White­house, OptumHealth Behav­ioral Solu­tions: “Man­aged care has not always been on the fore­front of inno­va­tion and it has been, for us, a chal­lenge and an excite­ment to think about how best to incor­po­rate the lat­est find­ings in neu­ro­science. If I was to give you the major areas that we think are impor­tant, one is the impor­tance of neu­ro­science capa­bilit­ties to improve triage, the sec­ond is the impor­tance that this has on increas­ing access to much bet­ter func­tional assess­ments and its rela­tion­ship to safety. The third is in the area of clin­i­cal deci­sion sup­port and the fourth is in brain health. First and fore­most, why is it that in every other organ we have objec­tive data of the organ itself doing its work under var­i­ous loads to help us when we need to make deci­sions about its health and dis­ease state and how best to sup­port it and intervene.”

William Reich­man, Bay­crest: “…we must do for brain health in the 21st cen­tury what we largely accom­plished in car­dio­vas­cu­lar health in the past century…that includes an increased focus not only on ter­tiary pre­ven­tion, but on pri­mary and sec­ondary prevention…approximately a year and a half ago the Ontario gov­ern­ment made a deci­sion to invest $10 mil­lion in Canada’s first cen­tre for brain fit­ness to be housed at Bay­crest at the Rot­man Research Institute.…Here in Canada I think that we’ve been able to make a com­pelling case main­tain­ing good brain fit­ness needs to be a national pri­or­ity for this coun­try and we have been engaged in dis­cus­sions with the gov­ern­ment, both fed­er­ally and provin­cially, that brain health pro­grams really need to begin in childhood.”

P Murali Doraiswamy, Duke Uni­ver­sity: “… you don’t want to walk into a gro­cery store or into a gas sta­tion and see a brain game claim­ing that they’re a neu­ro­plas­tic­ity brain game or a bot­tle of water that’s claim­ing it’s a cog­ni­tive reserve enhancer because then I think you’re going to destroy the whole field key…So I think it’s essen­tial for acad­e­mia, for indus­try, for think tanks, for even the fed­eral gov­ern­ment agen­cies such as per­haps Eng­land, US, Canada, to come together and form a set of guide­lines that can really guide the proper devel­op­ment of a lot of these prod­ucts and by prod­ucts I’m talk­ing about two types of prod­ucts. One is cog­ni­tive screen­ing instru­ments and the sec­ond is inter­ven­tion prod­ucts to either improve sort of nor­mal func­tion­ing or to increase resilience to stress or three, to pre­vent disease.”

(answer­ing to audi­ence ques­tion, “when do you believe that cog­ni­tive screen­ing may become a pretty rou­tine part of stan­dard med­ical care”) “I think it’s long overdue…the brain is the most impor­tant organ.”

—

In Jan­u­ary of 2010 Sharp­Brains pro­duced the inau­gural vir­tual, global Sharp­Brains Sum­mit on Tech­nol­ogy for Cog­ni­tive Health and Per­for­mance (Jan­u­ary 18-20th, 2010). The Sum­mit fea­tured a dream team of over 40 speak­ers who are lead­ers in indus­try and research to dis­cuss emerg­ing research, tools and best prac­tices for cog­ni­tive health and per­for­mance, and gath­ered over 250 par­tic­i­pants in 16 countries.

Are you inter­ested in what over 40 lead­ing sci­en­tists, clin­i­cians, exec­u­tives and tech­nol­o­gists have to say about the lat­est Tech­nol­ogy for Cog­ni­tive Health and Per­for­mance? Want to hear how they responded to more than 200 audi­ence ques­tions? You can Learn more Here (full tran­scripts are now avail­able). Sharp­Brains read­ers can get a 15% dis­count Read the rest of this entry »

The Sharp­Brains Sum­mit is ongo­ing, with 242 par­tic­i­pants in 15 coun­tries! thanks to the IT brains at the Insti­tute for The Future and col­lab­o­ra­tors such as Anett Gyu­rak, Pas­cale Mich­e­lon and Camille Fin­ley, event is going great.

If you Twit­ter, you can fol­low my updates here. The Sum­mit hashtag/ feed is #sharp2010. Par­tic­i­pants who were actively tweet­ing the first day:

@IFTFHealth @rodfalcon @positscience @billiamjames @drg @FitLifeClubs

@performbetter @YoungDrivers @AOborne

(Reg­is­tra­tion is closed now for new par­tic­i­pants, please sub­scribe to our eNewslet­ter if you want to learn about future events)