Spon­sored Ad (How to Adver­tise on SharpBrains.com)

Time for our monthly eNewslet­ter track­ing recent news and devel­op­ments on how the neu­ro­science of cog­ni­tion and emo­tions can inform edu­ca­tion and health across the lifes­pan. Let us try to be as con­cise as pos­si­ble, so you can spend as much time as pos­si­ble con­nect­ing with your Loved Ones instead of with the World Wide Web.

• Your Brain: Capa­ble of Great­ness, Hard-wired for Survival
• How Phys­i­cal Exer­cise Ben­e­fits the Brain
• Brain changes seen in cab­bies who take ‘The Knowledge’
• How Cul­tural Evo­lu­tion Out­paces Nat­ural Evolution
• Cog­ni­tive Test­ing Pro­gram Fails Sol­diers, Leav­ing Brain Injuries Undetected
• Cog­ni­tive Behav­iour Ther­apy Helps Adults with ADHD
• Check­list to Eval­u­ate Brain Train­ing and Brain Health Claims
• Could study­ing the placebo effect change the way we think about medicine?
• New Online Course: How to Be Your Own Brain Fit­ness Coach in 2012
• The Sharp­Brains Guide: Pre­ven­tive Med­i­cine Best­seller in Ama­zon Kin­dle Store
• Offi­cial selec­tion  by AARP of Best Books on Brain Fitness
• Top 10 Quotes on Life­long Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and Neurogenesis
• Invi­ta­tion for Sharp­Brains Sum­mit Par­tic­i­pants to Com­ment on Meet­ing Report

Wish­ing you a won­der­ful end of 2011 and a happy and suc­cess­ful 2012!

PS: thirty-nine peo­ple have reg­is­tered since this past Tues­day to par­tic­i­pate in the upcom­ing Online Course: How to Be Your Own Brain Fit­ness Coach in 2012. Please remem­ber we will only be able to acco­mo­date the first two hun­dred reg­is­trants, so please take a look soon to see if you are inter­ested in joining!

Below you can find the full tran­script of our engag­ing Q&A ses­sion today on mem­ory, mem­ory tech­niques and brain-healthy lifestyles with Dr. Gary  Small, Direc­tor of UCLA’s Mem­ory Clinic and Cen­ter on Aging, and author of The Mem­ory Bible. You can learn more about his book  Here, and learn more about upcom­ing Brain Fit­ness Q&A Ses­sions Here.

Per­haps one of the best ques­tions and answers was:

2:55
Ques­tion: Gary, you’ve worked many years in this field. Let us in on the secret. What do YOU do you, per­son­ally, to pro­mote your own brain fit­ness?
2:57
Answer: I try to get at least 30 min­utes of aer­o­bic con­di­tion­ing each day; try to min­i­mize my stress by stay­ing con­nected with fam­ily and friends; gen­er­ally eat a brain healthy diet (fish, fruits, veg­eta­bles), and try to bal­ance my online time with my offline time. Which reminds me, I think it is almost time for me to sign off line. Read the rest of this entry »

Wel­come to the 61st edi­tion of Encephalon, the blog car­ni­val that offers some of the best neu­ro­science and psy­chol­ogy blog posts every other week.

We do have an excel­lent set of arti­cles today. cov­er­ing much ground. Enjoy the reading:

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Neu­ro­science and Society

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Alzheimer’s Dis­ease and Neu­rocog­ni­tive Health 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 »

(Note: neu­ro­feed­back is a form of biofeed­back that mea­sures brain waves and that, accord­ing to prac­ti­tion­ers, pro­vides good “brain train­ing” for spe­cific clin­i­cal con­di­tions).
A few weeks ago Dr. David Rabiner wrote a great post on How Strong is the Research Sup­port for Neu­ro­feed­back in Atten­tion Deficits?, con­clud­ing that

- “It is for these rea­sons that neu­ro­feed­back is under­stand­ably regarded as an unproven treat­ment approach for ADHD at this time by many ADHD researchers.

- How­ever, these stud­ies do pro­vide a solid basis for sug­gest­ing that if par­ents choose to pur­sue neu­ro­feed­back for their child, there is a rea­son­able chance that their child will ben­e­fit even though we can’t be sure that it is the spe­cific EEG train­ing that is respon­si­ble for the ben­e­fits. Thus, although the effi­cacy of neu­ro­feed­back has yet to be con­clu­sively con­firmed in a ran­dom­ized, placebo-controlled trial, it is impor­tant to place this lim­i­ta­tion in the con­text of the sup­port­ive research evi­dence that has been accumulated.

Read the rest of this entry »

Prof. Baba Shiv, one of our advi­sors, just pub­lished a fas­ci­nat­ing paper on the power of our beliefs to influ­ence brain acti­va­tion, and on how mar­ket­ing can influ­ence those beliefs:

Price Tag Can Change The Way Peo­ple Expe­ri­ence Wine, Study Shows (Sci­ence Daily)

- Accord­ing to researchers at the Stan­ford Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness and the Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy, if a per­son is told he or she is tast­ing two dif­fer­ent wines and that one costs $5 and the other $45 when they are, in fact, the same wine the part of the brain that expe­ri­ences plea­sure will become more active when the drinker thinks he or she is enjoy­ing the more expen­sive vintage.

- “What we doc­u­ment is that price is not just about infer­ences of qual­ity, but it can actu­ally affect real qual­ity,” said Baba Shiv, a pro­fes­sor of mar­ket­ing who co-authored a paper titled “Mar­ket­ing Actions Can Mod­u­late Neural Rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Expe­ri­enced Pleas­ant­ness,” pub­lished online Jan. 14 in the Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences. (Note: link here)

This Stan­ford arti­cle pro­vides an overview of his research: click Here.

- “The belief in the aca­d­e­mic field is that emo­tions are essen­tial to deci­sion mak­ing, oth­er­wise you’ll end up mak­ing bad deci­sions, Shiv says. “But, he adds, explain­ing his huge con­trar­ian streak, “I can show the oppo­site as well, that Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: Neu­ro­feed­back is one of the tech­nolo­gies that peo­ple often ask us about.  It is a promis­ing inter­ven­tion in a vari­ety of areas, and has got sig­nif­i­cant trac­tion in help­ing kids with ADD/ ADHD. Now, given the sig­nif­i­cant cost it poses for par­ents, we need to ask the ques­tion: “How Strong is the Research Sup­port for Neu­ro­feed­back Treat­ment of Chil­dren with ADHD”? We are hon­ored to present the thoughts of Duke University’s Dr. David Rabiner, a lead­ing author­ity on the field, on that impor­tant issue. As a bonus, you will enjoy his detailed descrip­tion and sug­ges­tions of how to design a high-quality sci­en­tific study.)

(Update as of March 2009: Dr. David Rabiner has writ­ten an update to the arti­cle below based on a newer study. You can read it click­ing on link: New Study Sup­ports Neu­ro­feed­back Treat­ment for ADHD)
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How Strong is the Research Sup­port for Neu­ro­feed­back Treat­ment of Chil­dren with ADHD?

Nei­ther of the two promi­nent approaches to treat­ing ADHD — med­ica­tion treat­ment and behav­ior ther­apy — are expected to effect long term changes in the child. Med­ica­tion treat­ment induces short-term changes in brain activ­ity that is asso­ci­ated with a reduc­tion in symp­toms for many indi­vid­u­als. Behav­ior ther­apy attempts to cre­ate a set of envi­ron­men­tal con­tin­gen­cies that pro­mote desired behav­ior in the child, but which is unlikely to endure when those con­tin­gen­cies are removed.

In recent years, researchers have begun devot­ing greater atten­tion to the pos­si­bil­ity that chil­dren — and adults — may be pro­vided with par­tic­u­lar kinds of expe­ri­ences that may induce alter­ations in brain func­tion­ing that are asso­ci­ated with more endur­ing changes, i.e., they do not dis­si­pate as soon as treat­ment ends.

Neu­ro­feed­back — also known as EEG Biofeed­back — is reflec­tive of this approach and has a his­tory that goes back Read the rest of this entry »

Good inter­view with Posit Science’s Dr. Michael Merzenich. (Thanks, Steve!)

Includes the quote “Peo­ple can be active learn­ers by learn­ing in new forms and in new domains. It’s not just being active and get­ting up every day. The brain is a learn­ing machine, and it needs to be engaged in new learn­ing of dif­fer­ent dimen­sions. The best kinds of exer­cise are those that chal­lenge. For exam­ple, to mas­ter a musi­cal instru­ment at an older age is a won­der­ful thing. Or, seri­ously under­tak­ing the mas­tery of a sec­ond lan­guage is a won­der­ful thing to do. One of the prob­lems with such exer­cises is that it’s very hard to main­tain the skills and abil­i­ties nec­es­sary to main­tain a men­tal fit­ness program.”

You can read our pre­vi­ous Brain Coach Answers post on why cross­words and sudoku aren’t suf­fi­cient brain exer­cise.