Yes­ter­day we had a fun ses­sion on Brain Fit­ness dur­ing the Neu­rolead­er­ship Sum­mit tak­ing place now in San Fran­cisco, explor­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to enhance per­for­mance and health of lead­ers and work­forces by deploy­ing both old tools (like breath­ing and med­i­ta­tion) and new ones (such as biofeed­back and database-driven per­son­al­ized brain train­ing solu­tions). Here are a cou­ple of the main ideas I wanted to introduce:

A. Let’s define Brain Fit­ness as an “inte­grated approach to enhance brain func­tion­al­ity”, com­bin­ing as appro­pri­ate lifestyle, inva­sive and non-invasive options. “Brain fit­ness” is above all an out­come, a cul­ture, sim­i­lar to “phys­i­cal fit­ness” (jok­ingly, I also said that “brain fit­ness” is the part of “phys­i­cal fit­ness” that “phys­i­cal fit­ness” doesn’t yet know what to do with)

B. Then, the ques­tion becomes, “what are the most impor­tant brain func­tions to enhance/ develop/ main­tain?”. Here I shared the fol­low­ing results Read the rest of this entry »

Hiroshi Komiyama, Pres­i­dent of the Uni­ver­sity of Tokyo and Chair­per­son of the Global Agenda Coun­cil on the Chal­lenges of Geron­tol­ogy I am a mem­ber of, just pro­vided coun­cil mem­bers with a brief update of his par­tic­i­pa­tion in the recent World Eco­nomic Forum.

Part of the pro­ceed­ings are pub­lic — you may enjoy read­ing this panel write-up of the ses­sion Health­care under Stress:

- “Japan has the world’s old­est pop­u­la­tion. Health and longevity cre­ate wealth and, thus, “health begets wealth”. It is doc­u­mented that nations that develop a five-year life expectancy advan­tage also cre­ate a larger GDP. A healthy child­hood and adult­hood con­tribute to a more pro­duc­tive old age. New mar­kets and indus­tries are aris­ing – “sil­ver indus­tries” such as finan­cial ser­vices, health, hous­ing and hos­pi­tal­ity geared to senior cit­i­zens. Longevity needs to be linked to health – includ­ing cog­ni­tive health – and lifestyle choices play a major role in health.”

- “The pub­lic health focus is shift­ing from infec­tions to car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­eases. Com­plex new mod­els are nec­es­sary to develop bet­ter responses and improved health – with the pri­mary empha­sis on “really good pri­mary health­care” and pre­ven­tion – to lower costs. Pre­ven­tion increases the healthy years of a person’s life. The chal­lenge is cre­at­ing the incen­tive for pre­ven­tion: how can peo­ple be encour­aged to make healthy choices? Mobi­lized pop­u­la­tions can drive the change. Fin­land has an 80% lower inci­dence of heart dis­ease than 30 years ago due to such incentives.”

Full write-up: Health­care under Stress

Related arti­cles:

- The Future of the Aging Soci­ety: Bur­den or Human Capital?

- Update: Global Con­sor­tium for Neu­rocog­ni­tive Fit­ness Innovation

Here you have the Novem­ber edi­tion of our monthly newslet­ter cov­er­ing cog­ni­tive health and brain fit­ness top­ics. Please remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive this Newslet­ter by email, sim­ply by sub­mit­ting your email at the top of this page.

Thank you for your inter­est, atten­tion and par­tic­i­pa­tion in our Sharp­Brains com­mu­nity. As always, we appre­ci­ate your com­ments and suggestions.

Sum­mit of the Global Agenda

How can we per­suade busi­ness lead­ers, policy-makers and researchers of the urgency to develop and pro­mote an inte­grated “Healthy Liv­ing” agenda focused on main­tain­ing life­long phys­i­cal and cog­ni­tive health, vs. the usual mind­set focused on deal­ing with spe­cific dis­eases and prob­lems once they arise?

In The Future of the Aging Soci­ety: Bur­den or Human Cap­i­tal?, I sum­ma­rize some of the key themes dis­cussed at the World Eco­nomic Forum event in Dubai on Novem­ber 7-9th. The world is aging — and in health­ier ways. But our health­care and retire­ment sys­tems are on track to go bank­rupt — their premises are out­dated. The cur­rent disease-based research agenda com­pounds the prob­lem. Solu­tions? 1) Pro­mote Healthy Lifestyles that help Main­tain Phys­i­cal and Cog­ni­tive Func­tional Abil­i­ties, 2) Redesign Envi­ron­ments to Fos­ter Health, Engage­ment and Finan­cial Secu­rity, 3) Develop an Inte­grated Healthy Liv­ing & Aging Research Agenda. Specif­i­cally, we could work with the UN and Global 2000 com­pa­nies to move for­ward a new agenda.

Planet Earth 2.0: A New Oper­at­ing Sys­tem: Imag­ine see­ing a top sheik in Dubai, wrapped in tra­di­tional Arab cloth­ing, exclaim “Yes We Can (a la Obama) in front of the 800 global experts, adding that “we build the future with our own hands. Some of the atten­dants of the World Eco­nomic Forum’s Sum­mit of the Global Agenda urged us to “reboot” the sys­tem. More than a “reboot”, we may have to upgrade to a new global “Yes We Can” oper­at­ing system.

Brain Fit­ness Research

Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and the Brain That Changes Itself: Lau­rie Bar­tels reviews the excel­lent book by Nor­man Doidge, explain­ing that “the neu­ro­science behind Doidge’s book involves neu­ro­plas­tic­ity, which is the brain’s abil­ity to rewire itself. This means that the brain  is our intel­li­gence,  is not some­thing fixed in con­crete but rather a chang­ing, learn­ing entity.”

Can We Pick Your Brain re: Cog­ni­tive Assess­ments?: In our view, a crit­i­cal com­po­nent in the matu­rity of the brain fit­ness mar­ket will be the avail­abil­ity of inex­pen­sive, valid and reli­able objec­tive cog­ni­tive assess­ments,  to help mea­sure how our brain func­tions change over time and iden­tify pri­or­i­ties for tar­geted improve­ments. Dr. Joshua Stein­er­man asks if you would be up for them?

Use It (Prop­erly) or Lose It

Phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cise to pre­vent cog­ni­tive decline: The Amer­i­can Med­ical News, a weekly news­pa­per for physi­cians pub­lished by the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion, just pub­lished an excel­lent arti­cle on the impor­tance of phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cise. We are very happy to see efforts like these to train physi­cians and health pro­fes­sion­als in gen­eral,  given that most of them were trained under a very dif­fer­ent under­stand­ing of the brain than the one we have today.

Brain Fit­ness 2: Sight & Sound: PBS recently announced the sec­ond install­ment of their pop­u­lar Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram show, to start air­ing soon.

MetaCar­ni­val #1: a con­ver­sa­tion across the blo­gos­phere: We often insist on “Nov­elty, Vari­ety and Chal­lenge” as key ingre­di­ents for good “brain exer­cise”. There are many ways to mix those ingre­di­ents — you may enjoy this one, the first inter­dis­ci­pli­nary gath­er­ing of blogs and blog car­ni­vals cov­er­ing health, sci­ence, anthro­pol­ogy, gen­eral advice and more.

Top 15 Brain Teasers and Games for Men­tal Exer­cise: Over the last 2 years we have pub­lished close to 100 puz­zles, teasers, rid­dles, and every kind of men­tal exer­cise (with­out count­ing our in-depth inter­views with top neu­ro­sci­en­tists). Which ones have proven most stim­u­lat­ing for you. Let us know. Here is a selec­tion of our Top 15 teasers.

Final Details

Please share this newslet­ter with your friends and col­leagues if you haven’t done so already.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

(Please note that this is my per­sonal take at the dis­cus­sions that took place in Dubai as part of the Global Agenda Coun­cil on the Chal­lenges of Geron­tol­ogy put together by the World Eco­nomic Forum, and builds on the work of my col­leagues, but it does not rep­re­sent a for­mal doc­u­ment or state­ment of posi­tion. Sim­ply put, we would like to engage your brain in defin­ing the chal­lenges and outlining/ exe­cut­ing the solutions).

Con­text: The Chal­lenges of the Aging Society

The world is aging. This is occur­ring in two ways: through shifts in the age struc­ture that will even­tu­ally lead to many more peo­ple reach­ing older ages than ever before, and through con­tin­ued suc­cess in extend­ing life. Less than 100 years ago, life expectancy was between 30 to 40 years. Today, close to 800 mil­lion cit­i­zens are 60 and over.

And aging in health­ier ways. Aging has incor­rectly been asso­ci­ated with decline and decay, when in fact many peo­ple live healthy into older ages. There has been a syn­chro­nous exten­sion in life expectancy and qual­ity of life — the aver­age 65-year-old today is much health­ier, phys­i­cally and men­tally, than the aver­age 50-year-old of 100–150 years ago — when most exist­ing insti­tu­tions were envi­sioned and created.

Healthy life can be fur­ther extended with exist­ing knowl­edge. The fact is the onset and pro­gres­sion of fatal and dis­abling dis­eases, dis­or­ders, and dis­abil­ity can be post­poned using well-researched basic mea­sures of pub­lic health, envi­ron­men­tal and behav­ioural changes, and med­ical tech­nol­ogy inter­ven­tions. The same meth­ods may be used to improve or main­tain men­tal and phys­i­cal functioning.

Our health­care and retire­ment sys­tems are on bank­ruptcy track — their premises are out­dated. Exist­ing insti­tu­tions, poli­cies and atti­tudes do not reflect the points out­lined above, hav­ing been devel­oped for a soci­ety that no longer exists. We need to get on the right track: Read the rest of this entry »

Imag­ine see­ing a top sheik from Dubai, wrapped in tra­di­tional Arab cloth­ing, exclaim “Yes We Can” in front of the 800 experts gath­ered dur­ing the Sum­mit of the Global Agenda that just took place in Dubai, co-organized by the World Eco­nomic Forum and the Gov­ern­ment of Dubai. This same sheik added that “we build the future with our own hands”.

You can read more about the main points of the Global Agenda Coun­cils con­ver­sa­tion here: Dis­cus­sion High­lights. Below go some of my own still-jetlagged reflections.

The finan­cial cri­sis has made obvi­ous the obvi­ous: that we live in a truly new and global world.

And that busi­ness as usual will lead to global dis­as­ter — we need new approaches to col­lec­tively adapt to and thrive in this new envi­ron­ment. The answer is not to go back to any old par­a­digm, which sim­ply will not work in a new real­ity, but to imag­ine and build a bet­ter new way of doing things.

Some of the atten­dants urged us to “reboot” the sys­tem. I don’t think that a “reboot” is enough — we need to upgrade to a new oper­at­ing sys­tem. We can call it Planet Earth 2.0.Based on the group dis­cus­sion we had on Sun­day morn­ing, let me pro­pose some of the archi­tec­tural prin­ci­ples that should under­lie any emerg­ing Planet Earth 2.0 oper­at­ing sys­tem. Read the rest of this entry »

Here you have the twice-a-month newslet­ter with our most pop­u­lar blog posts. Please remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive this Newslet­ter by email, sim­ply by sub­mit­ting your email at the top of this page.

There is one type of “brain fit­ness pro­gram” which is not only free but also pays you back. You guessed it, that pro­gram is your “job”. Our occu­pa­tions can pro­vide ben­e­fi­cial men­tal exer­cise if they incor­po­rate the key ingre­di­ents of nov­elty, vari­ety, and chal­lenge, and are not a source of chronic stress.

We start today’s newslet­ter with two arti­cles related to the brain value of hav­ing men­tally stim­u­lat­ing jobs.

Your Brain At Work

ABC Reporter Bob Woodruff’s Recov­ery from Trau­matic Brain Injury: For­mer US pres­i­den­tial con­tender and Sen­a­tor John Edwards recently granted an inter­view to reporter Bob Woodruff. The most remark­able aspect of the inter­view? Bob Woodruff’s spec­tac­u­lar recov­ery from the trau­matic brain injury he suf­fered in Iraq 2 years ago. You can’t miss this inter­view with his wife Lee, where we dis­cuss Bob’s recov­ery process (includ­ing mak­ing a doc­u­men­tary, co-writing a book and other projects at ABC), the Bob Woodruff Foun­da­tion, and the over­all chal­lenge of cog­ni­tive reha­bil­i­ta­tion fol­low­ing trau­matic brain injuries.

Research

San­ti­ago Ramon y Cajal’s “Rec­ol­lec­tions of My Life”: Remark­able and can­did views on neu­ro­plas­tic­ity, learn­ing, aging and life, straight from the auto­bi­og­ra­phy of one of the founders of mod­ern neu­ro­science, who once said “Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculp­tor of his own brain.”

Can food improve brain health?: Dr. Pas­cale Mich­e­lon pro­vides an overview of the effects of food on the brain, build­ing on Fer­nando Gomez-Pinilla’s recent study in Nature Reviews Neu­ro­science. Can­di­dates for “brainy” foods con­tain: Omega-3 fatty acid, folic acid, flavonoids, anti-oxidant foods. Please note her warn­ing, though: most of the stud­ies show­ing pos­i­tive effects have been con­ducted in mice.

The biol­ogy of aging: A monthly vir­tual gath­er­ing of blog­gers to dis­cuss Biol­ogy of Aging top­ics includ­ing research, pol­icy, lifestyle guid­ance, and open ques­tions. We are aware that “aging” may not be the sex­i­est  of words in our vocab­u­lary… unless you con­sider the most com­mon alter­na­tive.

Tech­nol­ogy

The Future of Computer-assisted Cog­ni­tive Ther­apy: Cog­ni­tive ther­apy is one of the most researched types of brain train­ing, espe­cially in deal­ing with depres­sion and anx­i­ety. Why don’t more peo­ple ben­e­fit today from it? The lack of a scal­able dis­tri­b­u­tion model may per­haps explain that. We pre­dict that tech­nol­ogy will help com­ple­ment the role of ther­a­pists, help­ing more peo­ple bet­ter cope with change, life, anx­i­ety, and a range of cog­ni­tive and emo­tional chal­lenges. With­out any stigma. Just as nat­u­rally as one trains abdom­i­nal mus­cles today.

Sev­eral months ago we came across an excel­lent resource for cognitive/ brain fit­ness aimed at help­ing com­pa­nies offer qual­ity brain health infor­ma­tion to their employees.

While it is true that we often tend to believe all this “brain fit­ness” stuff is most rel­e­vant to our par­ents and/ or grand­par­ents, trust me, if you are read­ing this, you need it. Every­one with a brain can ben­e­fit from learn­ing about how his or her brain works and how to main­tain it with proper care.

And, from a company’s point of view, aren’t “tal­ent” and “human cap­i­tal” really all about brain fit­ness and cog­ni­tive performance?

The Con­fer­ence Board and the Dana Alliance for Brain Ini­tia­tives (descrip­tions below) pub­lished in 2008 a 44-page book­let to “teach sim­ple, prac­ti­cal strate­gies for incor­po­rat­ing brain-friendly prac­tices into day-to-day life”.  Your Brain at work: Mak­ing the sci­ence of cog­ni­tive fit­ness to work for you is the first of three planned book­lets on cog­ni­tive fitness.

The Con­fer­ence Board and the Dana Alliance have allowed Sharp­Brains to share the fol­low­ing Action Plan with our read­ers, straight from Your Brain at work brochure. At the bot­tom of this post we also share instruc­tions on how indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies can get their own copies of this excel­lent brochure. Read the rest of this entry »

We read today how Panel Urges Schools to Empha­size Core Math Skills (Wash­ing­ton Post). Now, there is a more fun­da­men­tal ques­tion to con­sider: what should the schools of the XXI cen­tury look like and do?.

To cre­ate a much needed dia­logue, I asked one the most thought­ful edu­ca­tion blog­gers around to share her (I guess it’s “her”) impres­sions with us. Enjoy!
—————

What do we want our schools to do, and for whom? 

–By edu­won­kette

“Schools,” Stan­ford his­to­rian David Laba­ree wrote, “occupy an awk­ward posi­tion at the inter­sec­tion between what we hope soci­ety will become and what we think it really is.” What do we want our schools to do, and for whom?

Schools, like most orga­ni­za­tions, have many goals. These goals often com­pete with and dis­place each other. Rely­ing heav­ily on the work of David Laba­ree, I will dis­cuss three cen­tral goals of Amer­i­can schools – social effi­ciency, demo­c­ra­tic equal­ity, and social mobil­ity. Through­out the his­tory of Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion, these goals have been run­ning against each other in a metaphor­i­cal horser­ace. While they are not mutu­ally exclu­sive, the three goals intro­duce very dif­fer­ent met­rics of edu­ca­tional suc­cess. More often than not, they sit uncom­fort­ably with each other.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nature or nur­ture? well, both of course…but maybe the ques­tion itself is leav­ing out a crit­i­cal com­po­nent: our free will and poten­tial to tran­scend, and influ­ence, both.

My wife Lisa and I just came back from a relax­ing and stim­u­lat­ing 2-week vaca­tion. One of the high­lights was to par­tic­i­pate in the open­ing, at Oslo’s Nobel Peace Cen­ter,  of the exhi­bi­tion Envi­sion­ing Change, orga­nized by The Nat­ural World Museum (NWM) in part­ner­ship with the United Nations Envi­ron­ment Pro­gramme (UNEP) in honor of World Envi­ron­ment Day 2007.

Star­ing at so many inspir­ing pho­tographs  and sto­ries of Win­ners of the Nobel Peace Prize, and read­ing Alfred Nobel’s sim­ple yet pow­er­ful will that estab­lished the Nobel Prizes, I couldn’t avoid but think­ing what a beau­ti­ful exam­ple they have become of the power of an indi­vid­ual to tran­scend both our genes and our “memes” (our cul­tural and envi­ron­men­tal influences-a term coined by biol­o­gist Richard Dawkins).

See Dawkins beau­ti­ful para­graphs (The Self­ish Gene, last 2 para­graphs of the chap­ter on memes):

• “When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes…But if you con­tribute to the world’s cul­ture, if you have a good idea, com­pose a tune, invent a spark­ing plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dis­solved in the com­mon pool.”
• “The point I am mak­ing now is that, even if we look on the dark side and assume that indi­vid­ual man is fun­da­men­tally self­ish, our con­scious foresight-our capac­ity to sim­u­late the future in imag­i­na­tion– could save us from the worst self­ish excesses of the blind repli­ca­tors. We have at least the men­tal equip­ment to fos­ter our long-term self­ish inter­ests rather than merely our short-term ones…We have the power to defy the self­ish genes of our birth and, if nec­es­sary, the self­ish memes of our indoc­tri­na­tion. We can even dis­cuss ways of delib­er­ately cul­ti­vat­ing and nur­tur­ing pure, dis­in­ter­ested altruism-something that has no place in nature, some­thing that has never existed before in the whole his­tory of the world. We are built as gene machine and cul­tured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our cre­ators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the self­ish replicators.”

Here you can read the will that cre­ated the meme of the Nobel Prize-one page worth read­ing, with this core para­graph: Read the rest of this entry »