Dear Mr or Mrs Next US President,

Thank you for stop­ping dur­ing recess for a quick study session. 35 edu­ca­tors have col­lab­o­rated to present this Car­ni­val of Edu­ca­tion as a use­ful les­son plan for you and your edu­ca­tion pol­icy team on what our real con­cerns and sug­ges­tions are.

In case this is your first visit to our Sharp­Brains blog, let me first of all point out some use­ful resources to stay sane dur­ing the rest of the cam­paign: selected Brain Teasers, a list of 21 great Brain Books, over a dozen inter­views with lead­ing sci­en­tists on learn­ing and brain-based top­ics, and more.

With­out fur­ther ado, let’s pro­ceed to the issues raised. We hope they pro­vide, at the very least, good men­tal stim­u­la­tion for you and your advisors.

Edu­ca­tion as a System

There are sev­eral brain fit­ness top­ics where we still see a large dis­con­nect between research and pop­u­lar knowl­edge, and a major one is the rela­tion­ship between mem­ory and stress. Car­o­line and I col­lab­o­rated on this post to bring you some con­text and tips.

Our soci­ety has changed faster than our genes. Instead of being faced with phys­i­cal, imme­di­ately life-threatening crises that demand instant action, these days we deal with events and ill­nesses that gnaw away at us slowly, that stress us out and that, believe it or not, end up hurt­ing our mem­ory and brain.

Dr. Robert Sapol­sky, in an inter­view about his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, points out that humans uniquely “can get stressed sim­ply with thought, turn­ing on the same stress response as does the zebra.” But, the zebra releases the stress hor­mones through life-preserving action, while we usu­ally just keep mud­dling along, get­ting more anx­ious by the moment.

What is the rela­tion­ship between stress and mem­ory? We all know chronic stress is bad for our heart, our weight, and our mood, but how about our mem­ory? Inter­est­ingly, acute stress can help us focus and remem­ber things more vividly. Chronic stress, on the other hand, reduce our abil­ity to focus and can specif­i­cally dam­age cells in the hip­pocam­pus, a brain struc­ture crit­i­cal to encod­ing short term memory.

When is stress chronic? When one feels Read the rest of this entry »

Inter­est­ing arti­cle titled Key to fund­ing for elder­care tech­nolo­gies? Pilots, just pub­lished in CNET. A few quotes:

• “No mat­ter the size, a pilot not only serves as a means to vet whether an elder­care tech­nol­ogy will work, but it also gen­er­ates much needed data for insur­ance com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ment enti­ties to weigh whether they might be will­ing to pay for such tech­nolo­gies, accord­ing to pan­elists Tues­day at the fourth annual Health­care Unbound conference.”
• “Other pilots included a group of 35 par­tic­i­pants in 2003 with IBM and the Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging. The 18-month pilot exam­ined how seniors ages 65 and over used IBM’s soft­ware to change the way a Web site is viewed, such as its font size­col­ors, size of the page and other fea­tures, Gaudet said.”
• “Front Porch, a California-based orga­ni­za­tion that oper­ates a net­work of retire­ment com­mu­ni­ties, began a pilot two years ago with Dakim, using its Dakim (m)Power Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness System.”

I’d say the key goes beyond pilots: we need good qual­ity and pub­lished research to engage pol­icy mak­ers and insur­ance com­pa­nies. And a big­ger focus on pre­ven­tion and well­ness, as we saw in the post Bill Clin­ton on health care and well­ness.

Dana Press kindly sent us a cou­ple of books. One of them, The Dana Guide to Brain Health: A Prac­ti­cal Fam­ily Ref­er­ence From Med­ical Experts, is our topic today.

We are impressed by what Dana is doing to insert neu­ro­science find­ings and impli­ca­tions into the pub­lic discourse.

No big sur­prise then, to find out so much qual­ity con­tent inside a 700-page one-of-a-kind guide, some of it, inci­den­tally, pro­vided by Dr. Gold­berg, our Chief Sci­en­tific Advisor.

The guide is really 4 books inside a com­mon bind­ing. Priced at a rea­son­able level, and with superb in-depth text and images in all rel­e­vant areas, the book can be used as a 1) Brain 101 tuto­r­ial, 2) brief sum­mary of the basics of Brain Care and Well­ness, 3) descrip­tion of the stages of brain devel­op­ment, 4) ref­er­ence guide for around 70 brain-related con­di­tions. In my per­sonal opin­ion, every neu­ro­science, med­ical and psy­chol­ogy stu­dent, clin­i­cian and researcher should have this book in their hands to keep abreast of many recent devel­op­ments, and also be exposed to pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment courses based on it. Many fam­i­lies and indi­vid­u­als inter­ested in the brain should con­sider buy­ing it too.

Given the focus of our blog-brain fit­ness for healthy individuals-, we par­tic­u­larly enjoyed the sec­tions Read the rest of this entry »