Cog­ni­tive train­ing and stress man­age­ment, Mind­Fit and Freeze-Framer (or emWave): two com­ple­men­tary sides of Brain Fitness.

Research shows that adults can and should take care of their brains, both for short-term and long-term ben­e­fits. Through brain exer­cise we can improve our over­all cog­ni­tive func­tion right now—making quick deci­sions, stay­ing calm and focused under pres­sure, and mul­ti­task­ing effec­tively. Over time, we may not reduce our brain age, but we can build up a cog­ni­tive reserve to buffer against age-related cog­ni­tive decline or other pro­gres­sive dis­eases. Short term and long term, we all want to lead pro­duc­tive, suc­cess­ful lives.

Any good brain fit­ness pro­gram must pro­vide you a vari­ety of new chal­lenges over time. While recre­ational activ­i­ties like bridge, sudoku, and cross­word puz­zles can work our brain, only a com­pre­hen­sive tool based in sci­en­tific research, like Mind­Fit, can work your men­tal mus­cles sys­tem­at­i­cally through a com­pletely indi­vid­u­al­ized train­ing reg­i­men for Read the rest of this entry »

There has been an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion about the issues related to the aging of the legal pro­fes­sion. Stephanie intro­duced us to the arti­cle “the Gray­ing Bar: let’s not for­get the ethics” by David Giacalone.

In short: sta­tis­tics about the increas­ing ratio of lawyers over 70 in active prac­tice, on the one hand, and the gen­eral inci­dence of Alzheimer’s and other demen­tias, on the other, lead David to point out an increas­ing like­li­hood that some lawyers may be prac­tic­ing in less than ideal con­di­tions for their clients, beyond a rea­son­able “brain age”. The ques­tion then becomes: who and how can solve this prob­lem, which is only going to grow given demo­graphic trends?.

We are not legal experts, but would like to inform the debate by offer­ing 10 con­sid­er­a­tions on healthy aging and job per­for­mance from a neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal point of view, that apply to all occupations:

1– We should talk more about change than about decline, as Sharon Beg­ley wrote recently in her great arti­cle on The Upside of Aging — WSJ.com (sub­scrip­tion required).

We dis­cussed some of these effects with Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg, who wrote his great book The Wis­dom Para­dox pre­cisely on this point, at The Exec­u­tive Brain and How our Minds Can Grow Stronger.

2– Some skills improve as we age: In our “Exer­cis­ing Our Brains” Classes, we typ­i­cally explain how some areas typ­i­cally improve as we age, such as self-regulation, emo­tional func­tion­ing and Wis­dom (which means mov­ing from Prob­lem solv­ing to Pat­tern recog­ni­tion). As a lawyer accu­mu­lates more cases under his/ her belt, he or she devel­ops an auto­matic “intu­ition” for solu­tions and strate­gies. As long as the envi­ron­ment doesn’t change too rapidly, this grow­ing wis­dom is very valuable.

3– …whereas, yes, oth­ers typ­i­cally decline: Read the rest of this entry »

Fun arti­cle in the San Fran­cisco Exam­iner today on how High-tech ‘brain gyms’ tone minds, reduce stress. Quotes:

• “Sharp­Brains and Posit Sci­ence are just two of a grow­ing num­ber of start-up com­pa­nies lead­ing the way in the area of pack­ag­ing and devel­op­ing suites of soft­ware they call “brain gyms.”
• “Sharp­Brains offers a suite of prod­ucts that eval­u­ate buy­ers’ needs and tar­get their weak­ness, gen­tly push­ing for improve­ment, Fer­nan­dez said. One pro­gram helps improve mem­ory using a num­ber game (here); another pro­vides instant biofeed­back to users so they can prac­tice breath­ing and pos­i­tive think­ing to reduce stress (here), Fer­nan­dez said.”
• “I can start see­ing the changes in my stress level take place right in front of my eyes,” said Baba Shiv (pro­file here), a neu­ro­sci­en­tist and pro­fes­sor at Stanford’s Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness, who uses Freeze-Framer 2.0 (here), one of the pro­grams licensed by Sharp­Brains. By mon­i­tor­ing his stress level through heart mon­i­tors hooked to his per­sonal com­puter at work, he dis­cov­ered that con­stantly mon­i­tor­ing his e-mail inbox raised his stress level, Shiv said. Now he lim­its him­self to check­ing e-mail every two hours, Shiv said.

The reporter did a great job in under­stand­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing a new and some­times com­plex topic. Read the arti­cle: High-tech ‘brain gyms’ tone minds, reduce stress.

You can learn more about the research on self-control of our advi­sor Baba Shiv in The Frontal Cor­tex blog’s arti­cle Self-Control is a Mus­cle and in Mind Hacks: (un)emotional invest­ment.

Great Brain Fit­ness Car­ni­val Num­ber 3 hosted by Neu­rophiloso­pher, with a vari­ety of posts on stress man­age­ment, hap­pi­ness, healthy eat­ing, pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy, emo­tional intel­li­gence, edu­ca­tion and much more. The next Brain Fit­ness blog car­ni­val will be hosted by Jane Chin at Naked Med­i­cine. Sub­mit your arti­cles here.

Other blog car­ni­vals just pub­lished: Read the rest of this entry »

The new edi­tion of Newsweek brings us a great cover story titled Stronger, Faster, Smarter. “Exer­cise does more than build mus­cles and help pre­vent heart dis­ease. New sci­ence shows that it also boosts brainpower—and may offer hope in the bat­tle against Alzheimer’s.” Check it out!

We addressed the ques­tion Is phys­i­cal fit­ness impor­tant to your brain fit­ness? recently:

Accord­ing to Fred Gage, PhD, of the Salk Insti­tute for Bio­log­i­cal Stud­ies, “We now know that exer­cise helps gen­er­ate new brain cells, even in the aging brain.

Accord­ing to the research of Richard Smeyne, PhD at Saint Jude Children’s Research Hos­pi­tal in Mem­phis, with just two months of exer­cise there are more brain cells and that higher lev­els of exer­cise were sig­nif­i­cantly more ben­e­fi­cial than lower amounts, although any exer­cise was bet­ter than none. He also found that Read the rest of this entry »

Today is Inter­na­tional Women’s Day 2007.

Global con­sult­ing com­pany Accen­ture orga­nized a series of events, and I was for­tu­nate to lead a fun work­shop on The Neu­ro­science of Stress and Stress Man­age­ment in their San Fran­cisco office, help­ing over 125 accom­plished women (and a few men) learn what stress is, its impli­ca­tions for our brain func­tion­ing, per­for­mance and health, and of course some tips and tech­niques to develop our “stress man­age­ment” mus­cles. It was an honor to be able to wrap up a great event that included Dis­trict Attor­ney Kamala D. Har­ris, two of the co-authors of This is Not the Life I Ordered, a video by Sen­a­tor Dianne Fein­stein, and some great Accen­ture women.

We have explained before how men­tal stim­u­la­tion is impor­tant if done in the right sup­port­ive and engag­ing envi­ron­ment. Stanford’s Robert Sapol­sky and oth­ers’ have shown that chronic stress and cor­ti­cal inhi­bi­tion, which may be aggra­vated due to imposed men­tal stim­u­la­tion, may prove coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. Hav­ing the right moti­va­tion is essential.

A promis­ing area of sci­en­tific inquiry for stress man­age­ment’ is Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduc­tion (MBSR).’ You may have read about it in Sharon Begley’s’ Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain’ book. An increas­ing num­ber of neu­ro­sci­en­tists (such as UMass Med­ical School’s Jon Kabat-Zinn and Uni­ver­sity of Wisconsin-Madison’s Richard David­son) have been inves­ti­gat­ing the abil­ity of trained med­i­ta­tors to develop and sus­tain atten­tion and visu­al­iza­tions and to work pos­i­tively with pow­er­ful emo­tional states and stress through the directed men­tal processes of med­i­ta­tion prac­tices. And have put their research into prac­tice for the ben­e­fit of many hos­pi­tal patients through their MSBR programs.

A Stan­ford psy­chol­o­gist and friend recently alerted me to a sim­i­lar pro­gram orga­nized Read the rest of this entry »

We are offer­ing a limited-time deal for the rest of Feb­ru­ary 2007.

You will get Brain Fit­ness 101: Answers to Your Top 25 Ques­tions included for free! (an $11.95 savings!)

Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg and Alvaro Fer­nan­dez answer in plain Eng­lish the most com­mon ques­tions around why and how to exer­cise our brains.

…when you buy any of the fol­low­ing brain exer­cise programs:

Exer­cise Your Brain: New Brain Research and Impli­ca­tions DVD

This one-hour and 20 minute class intro­duces you to the sci­ence of brain fit­ness and includes many engag­ing brain exer­cises you can do on your own or in a group set­ting. You will learn about basic neu­roanatomy and phys­i­ol­ogy, as well as hear about the ground­break­ing pub­li­ca­tions that launched this field. Then, get you will prac­tice how to exer­cise your own brain and flex all your men­tal mus­cles. Per­fect intro­duc­tion to Brain Fit­ness!
Read the rest of this entry »

Inter­est­ing com­men­tary on Entre­pre­neurs and Math Anx­i­ety

Based on a research report that included

• “Math anx­i­ety feel­ings of dread and fear and avoid­ing math  can sap the brain’s lim­ited amount of work­ing capac­ity, a resource needed to com­pute dif­fi­cult math prob­lems, said Mark Ashcroft, a psy­chol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­sity of Nevada Los Vegas who stud­ies the problem.”
• “It turns out that math anx­i­ety occu­pies a person’s work­ing mem­ory, said Ashcroft, who spoke on a panel at the annual meet­ing of the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion for the Advance­ment of Sci­ence in San Francisco.”

You can learn more here about Brain Fit­ness Pro­grams for Stu­dents to help them man­age anx­i­ety and also train work­ing memory.