In 2005 the Amer­i­can Acad­emy of Pedi­atrics (AAP) began an ini­tia­tive to pro­mote an approach to care among its mem­bers in which “…the pedi­atric team works in part­ner­ship with a child and a child’s fam­ily to assure that all of the med­ical and non-medical needs of the patient are met.” A crit­i­cally impor­tant focus of this approach is the role of the fam­ily and child — as devel­op­men­tally appro­pri­ate — in the devel­op­ment of an over­all plan of care.

This shared decision-making approach is espe­cially impor­tant for con­di­tions like ADHD where there is not a sin­gle treat­ment that is the most appro­pri­ate and pre­ferred option for all patients. How­ever, Read the rest of this entry »

We have talked about the value of med­i­ta­tion before (see Mind­ful­ness and Med­i­ta­tion in Schools), as a form of well-directed men­tal exer­cise than can help train atten­tion and emo­tional self-regulation.  Which other stud­ies have shown how it strength­ens spe­cific parts of the brain, mainly in the frontal lobe.

Dr. Rabiner shares with us, below, an excel­lent review of a new study that ana­lyzes the ben­e­fits of mind­ful­ness for ado­les­cents and adults with atten­tion deficits. He writes that “although this is clearly a pre­lim­i­nary study, the results are both inter­est­ing and encouraging.”

- Alvaro

Does Mind­ful­ness Med­i­ta­tion Help Adults & Teens with ADHD

– By Dr. David Rabiner

Although med­ica­tion treat­ment is effec­tive for many indi­vid­u­als with ADHD, includ­ing ado­les­cents adults, there remains an under­stand­able need to explore and develop inter­ven­tions that can com­ple­ment or even sub­sti­tute for med­ica­tion. This is true for a vari­ety of rea­sons includ­ing:
1) Not all adults with ADHD ben­e­fit from med­ica­tion.
2) Among those who ben­e­fit, many have resid­ual dif­fi­cul­ties that need to be addressed via other means.
3) Some adults with ADHD expe­ri­ence adverse effects that pre­vent them from remain­ing on medication.

Read the rest of this entry »

We often are told that we offer too much con­tent for you to read given var­i­ous time pres­sures… but it is tough for us to write less given the wealth of areas we cover around cog­ni­tive and emo­tional training.

To make your life eas­ier (and please feel free to give us feed­back!), what we will do is to offer a Monthly Digest of Most Pop­u­lar Blog Posts. Today, August 1st, we will list the most pop­u­lar July posts. Con­sider it your monthly Brain Exer­cise Mag­a­zine

(Also, remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive our RSS feed, check our Top­ics sec­tion, and sub­scribe to our monthly newslet­ter at the top of this page).

News you can use

Trad­ing per­for­mance psy­chol­ogy and self-talk

Stress Man­age­ment for Lawyers

Men­tal Train­ing for Grat­i­tude and Altruism

Brain Fitness/ Train­ing Mar­ket News

Mar­ket­Watch on Beat­ing for­get­ful­ness and boost­ing the brain

Nin­tendo BrainAge, Lumos­ity, Happy Neu­ron, MyBrainTrainer…

Brain Health through Seri­ous Games and Brain Exercise

Brain Fit­ness Workshops

Osher Life­long Learn­ing Insti­tute Brain Fit­ness class at UC Berkeley

Healthy Aging

Inter­view with Neu­ro­sci­en­tist Yaakov Stern: Build Your Cog­ni­tive Reserve

Jud­son Laipply’s Danc­ing Brain

Jack and Elaine LaLanne and Brain Health

Exer­cise Your Brain! Enjoy Learning!

Atten­tion Deficits

Read the rest of this entry »