Wel­come to Encephalon 50th edi­tion, where you will find another superb col­lec­tion of blog posts on all things Brain and Mind.

Enjoy these contributions:

Sci­ence & Technology

Mind Hacks reports that Face­book ate my psy­chi­a­trist. We can learn about the ben­e­fits of social net­work­ing sites like Face­book, bring­ing great per­spec­tive to recent and mis­guided media spec­u­la­tion (fuelled by a recent talk at the Royal Col­lege of Psy­chi­a­trists). Vaughan, will you please report on the ben­e­fits of par­tic­i­pat­ing (and, bet­ter, host­ing) Encephalon?.

Dun­geons And Drag­ons — Or Mazes And Mon­sters?: Pod­Black Cat offers a thought-provoking review of the ther­apy (includ­ing self-therapy) appli­ca­tions of role-playing games such as the clas­sic Dun­geons And Drag­ons and the more recent mas­sively mul­ti­player online games.

Cog­ni­tive Daily cov­ers another type of game. Read the rest of this entry »

A few very inter­est­ing New York Times arti­cles over the last cou­ple of days, plus a great oppor­tu­nity for clin­i­cians and researchers in Latin America.

- Well: When a Brain Sci­en­tist Suf­fers a Stroke

“Dr. Tay­lor recounts the details of her stroke and the amaz­ing insights she gained from it in a riv­et­ing 18-minute video of her speech at the Tech­nol­ogy, Enter­tain­ment, Design Con­fer­ence in Mon­terey, Calif., last month.”

Read the rest of this entry »

In the ETech panel a few days ago, we dis­cussed some futur­is­tic and some emerg­ing ways in which we can “hack our minds”, mostly from a tech­nol­ogy point of view.

Nei­ther myself nor the other pan­elists thought of sug­gest­ing the most obvi­ous and inex­pen­sive method, proven in thou­sands of research studies.

The secret com­pound?: Belief. Also called “the placebo effect”. Let’s see what Wikipedia says:

Read the rest of this entry »

A few updates and announcements:

- 1) My apolo­gies for slow blog­ging, due to travel. I par­tic­i­pated yes­ter­day in a fun panel dis­cus­sion at ETech on Use Your Head– The Future of Mind Hacks. You can read some take-aways (in Ital­ian, so this may be good brain exer­cise) here.

- 2) We will release our report The State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket 2008 next Mon­day (Update: Tues­day March 11th!), to coin­cide with Brain Aware­ness Week. Make sure to visit our blog next Mon­day if you want to learn more.

- 3) The National Museum of Health and Med­i­cine at Wal­ter Reed Army Med­ical Cen­ter is plan­ning some great activ­i­ties dur­ing Brain Aware­ness Week (Thank you, Tim). Learn more about their “Part­ners in Edu­ca­tion” activ­i­ties for stu­dents in the Wash­ing­ton DC area.

- 4) The Dana Foun­da­tion has released a great research report to address the ques­tion “Are smart peo­ple drawn to the arts or does arts train­ing make peo­ple smarter?” Enjoy the report and some excel­lent related resources Here.

- 5) Eric Jensen has writ­ten a great arti­cle on Brain-Based Edu­ca­tion for PDK Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Edu­ca­tion. Enjoy it!

Senia writes a great arti­cle on How You Tell the Story of Your Life in Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­ogy News Daily. As part of the story, she men­tions a very fun study on the power of the Placebo effect.

From Senia’s post:

“In the Feb­ru­ary, 2007 issue of Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, Langer and col­league Alia Crum reported that they took 84 hotel work­ers and told one group that “the work they do (clean­ing hotel rooms) is good exer­cise and sat­is­fies the Sur­geon General’s rec­om­men­da­tions for an active lifestyle. Exam­ples of how their work was exer­cise were pro­vided. Langer and Crum told the con­trol group noth­ing. Four weeks later, Langer and Crum returned to find some mea­sure­ments of both groups: the con­trol group hadn’t changed phys­i­cally, but the test group had decreased all of the fol­low­ing: weight, blood pres­sure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index.

Langer and Crum describe this study as sup­port­ing the the­ory that exer­cise affects health at least partly due to the placebo effect. Fur­ther­more, we can ask, what are the sto­ries that these hotel work­ers are telling them­selves? Why do the hotel work­ers sud­denly believe that they actively affect their exer­cise regiment?”

Impli­ca­tion: the placebo effect is real, and it can help our health.

A few fun ques­tions to consider:

- How do we pre­vent other peo­ple from sell­ing us stuff that only works based on the placebo effect?

- Once we decide to do some­thing, shouldn’t we try to “placebo” our­selves in order to get the most of it? this is another man­i­fes­ta­tion of the impor­tance of emo­tional self-regulation.

Enjoy the long weekend