Dr. John Docherty is an Adjunct Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chi­a­try at the Weill Med­ical Col­lege, Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity, Direc­tor of Post Grad­u­ate Edu­ca­tion there, and Chief Med­ical Offi­cer of Brain Resource. Trained as a clin­i­cal research fel­low in neu­ropsy­chophar­ma­col­ogy at NIMH, he later returned as Chief of the Psy­choso­cial Treat­ments Research Branch, respon­si­ble for all fed­er­ally sup­ported psy­choso­cial treat­ment research in men­tal health nation­wide. He over­saw the land­mark National Col­lab­o­ra­tive Study of the Treat­ment of Depres­sion and served as a mem­ber and Chair­man for over 10 years on the NIMH and then NIDA Treat­ment Research IRGs. Dr. Docherty has wide expe­ri­ence in suc­cess­fully imple­ment­ing inno­va­tion in both clin­i­cal oper­a­tions and man­aged health care. He founded North­east Psy­chi­atric Asso­ciates in 1985. As National Med­ical Direc­tor for National Med­ical Enter­prises, he over­saw med­ical con­trol and qual­ity improve­ment in 74 hos­pi­tals in 34 states. He was the Exec­u­tive Vice-President and Chief Med­ical Offi­cer for Merit Behav­ioral Care, which then cov­ered 30 mil­lion peo­ple. In 1998, he founded Com­pre­hen­sive Neu­ro­Science (CNS). Its Care Man­age­ment Tech­nolo­gies are cur­rently imple­mented in 17 state Med­ic­aid plans. Dr Docherty has received numer­ous hon­ors and awards and has authored over 100 sci­en­tific publications.

(Editor’s note: this inter­view with Dr. John Docherty was orig­i­nally pub­lished in Sharp­Brains’ mar­ket report Trans­form­ing Brain Health with Dig­i­tal Tools to Assess, Enhance and Treat Cog­ni­tion across the Lifes­pan, pub­lished in July 2010)

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez: Dr. Docherty, it is a plea­sure to be with you today to dis­cuss the main theme of Sharp­Brains’ 2010 mar­ket report – how the con­ver­gence of sci­en­tific find­ings and tech­nol­ogy plat­forms and tools is reshap­ing how as a soci­ety and as indi­vid­u­als we will take care of cog­ni­tion and men­tal well­ness along the life­course, giv­ing birth to the emerg­ing dig­i­tal brain health and fit­ness mar­ket. Can you first briefly dis­cuss your career tra­jec­tory and your cur­rent role at Brain Resource?

Dr. John Docherty: Sure. The main theme of my work since the 1960s has remained the same, “How do we put knowl­edge into effec­tive use to improve men­tal health?” Over the last cen­tury, med­i­cine made tremen­dous progress in gen­er­at­ing sci­en­tific and clin­i­cal knowl­edge. Basic research dis­cov­ery sci­ence and clin­i­cal treat­ment devel­op­ment sci­ence have made great progress. Within Psy­chi­a­try there was stan­dard set­ting advance in the 1960’s through the NIMH-VA coop­er­a­tive stud­ies to the method­ol­ogy of assess­ing the effi­cacy of psy­chophar­ma­co­log­i­cal drugs. This work estab­lished prin­ci­ples adopted for the study of med­ica­tions in the other areas of med­i­cine. The study of psy­chother­apy, how­ever, lagged in devel­op­ment. In my role of Chief of the Psy­choso­cial Treat­ments Branch of the NIMH , I helped con­tribute to the advance of that work by sup­port­ing the efforts of an extra­or­di­nary group of indi­vid­u­als led by Irene Waskow who car­ried out the TDCRP. This study estab­lished the method­olo­gies that made pos­si­ble the effec­tive sci­en­tific study of the effi­cacy of psy­chother­a­pies. The evi­dence base and of such treat­ments as CBT, DBT, Moti­va­tional Enhance­ment Treat­ment and other evidence-based psy­chother­a­pies derives directly from this study and its sem­i­nal influ­ence. This was a con­tri­bu­tion to the sci­ence of Clin­i­cal Treat­ment Devel­op­ment research.

I would say that my major inter­est, how­ever, has been in the next step, the sci­ence of knowl­edge trans­fer. There has been and remains a long and costly (in terms par­tic­u­larly of unnec­es­sary suf­fer­ing) lag between the devel­op­ment of new knowl­edge and its com­mon and effec­tive use in practice.

In order the help the field moved for­ward, I have worked for the last 20 years in the devel­op­ment and imple­men­ta­tion of meth­ods to effec­tively trans­fer knowl­edge into prac­tice. Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Globe has a good article/ book review on the lat­est quasi-luddite attack on the Inter­net (an attack in the name of brain sci­ence no less, and with cool brain scans). The book in ques­tion: “The Shal­lows: What the Inter­net Is Doing to Our Brains.”

The Inter­net ate my brain (Boston Globe)
– Nicholas Carr says that our online lifestyle threat­ens to make us dumber. But resis­tance may not be futile

The reporter, Wes Ander­son, adds the proper per­spec­tive, in my view, by end­ing the arti­cle with:

“Books and the Inter­net, lit­er­ary cul­ture and dig­i­tal cul­ture have coex­isted for many years. It may be that an engaged intel­lec­tual life will now require a sort of hybrid exis­tence — and a hybrid mind that can adapt and sur­vive by the choices one makes. It may require a new kind of self-discipline, a willed and prac­ticed abil­ity to focus, in a pur­pose­ful and almost med­i­ta­tive sense — to step away from the net­work and seek still­ness, immersion.”

“Now, you can call this hybrid mind shal­low. I call it all my only hope.”

Wes: you’re quite right. Not only that, but the Internet-enabled “weaponry to resist”,  what we pre­fer to call a toolkit to mon­i­tor and enhance cognition/ brain fit­ness in ways we couldn’t do before, is grow­ing by the day. We’ll just need to learn to use it prop­erly –and the Inter­net as a whole, to be sure-, to enhance our lives. My bet is: we will.

Nicholas Carr does a great job high­light­ing the impli­ca­tions of life­long neu­ro­plas­tic­ity –every­thing we do/think/feel has a phys­i­cal and func­tional impact on our brains, for bet­ter or for worse-, but misiden­ti­fies  our brains most likely enemy (watch­ing TV? chronic stress?), and fails to con­sider that we tend to learn how to ride bikes by rid­ing bikes.

Today, in honor of both Brain Aware­ness Week (March 15–21) and Brain Injury Aware­ness Month (March), it is my plea­sure to inter­view Patrick Dono­hue, founder of the Sarah Jane Brain Project, a foun­da­tion launched in 2007 with the explicit aim to cre­ate a model sys­tem for chil­dren suf­fer­ing from all Pedi­atric Acquired Brain Injuries, and an implicit poten­tial, in my view, to fun­da­men­tally trans­form med­ical research through the use of neu­roin­for­mat­ics and stan­darized sys­tems of care.

The Foun­da­tion: Story and Objectives

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez: Patrick, thank you very much for your time today. Can you please pro­vide an over­all per­spec­tive into what you are doing and why?

Patrick: Of course. The Sarah Jane Brain Project, named after my daugh­ter Sarah Jane, started when she was shaken by her baby nurse when she was 5 days of age, which resulted in a severe brain injury. Through my con­tin­ued efforts to help her, I couldn’t help but notice that the whole field of brain injury needs to make huge progress in a short time frame if it is to really help Sarah Jane — and thou­sands of chil­dren like her — with pro­vid­ing evidence-based, stan­dard­ized sys­tems of care. Prob­a­bly 85% of patient needs are com­mon, yet each case seems to require rein­vent­ing the wheel. Worse, lit­tle research has been done on children’s rehabilitation.

We prob­a­bly know about 5% of what we will even­tu­ally know about the brain. The sys­tems of research and care remind me of the com­puter sci­ence field in the 1950s: very promis­ing, but frac­tured and incon­sis­tent. In con­sult­ing with many experts on ways to accel­er­ate progress, we real­ized we need to bring both sig­nif­i­cantly more resources and open source prin­ci­ples to the field of pedi­atric neu­rol­ogy. We launched the Sarah Jane Brain Project to trans­form the field to help Sarah Jane and thou­sands of kids like her.

Before you launched the Foun­da­tion, you worked as a lawyer and polit­i­cal con­sul­tant. How did that back­ground help, or hin­der, those very ambi­tious goals?

I believe my back­ground was a great help, to bring an out­side per­spec­tive to the prob­lems that many sci­en­tists and doc­tors were already work­ing on, and to know how to work with politi­cians and policy-makers to obtain needed atten­tion and resources.

Pedi­atric Trau­matic Brain Injury (PTBI) is the lead­ing cause of death and dis­abil­ity for chil­dren and young adults from birth through 25 years of age in the United States, with more new cases in any given year than HIV/AIDS and Autism com­bined, yet it only receives a paultry por­tion of fed­eral research money (we are talk­ing a few mil­lion for brain injury vs, lit­er­ally, bil­lions toward other dis­ease states that have less cases), and it was basi­cally ignored dur­ing the ongo­ing health reform process.

Talk­ing to dozens of experts, I met mul­ti­ple net­works and indi­vid­u­als in the TBI care com­mu­nity who had already iden­ti­fied the need to develop a solid pedi­atric model sys­tem, but needed sup­port and resources. We brain­stormed poten­tial strate­gies, and came to see that we would need to cover all Acquired Brain Injury (includ­ing both trau­matic and not trau­matic causes), to increase learn­ing, and to truly be, as I often say, “on the side of the angels” (I have wit­nessed before how move­ments fail when they start to become myopic and arbi­trary). We also decided to cover birth to 25 years of age, given the slow mat­u­ra­tion of the frontal lobes. We wanted to develop best plan pos­si­ble, irre­spec­tive of sta­tus quo con­sid­er­a­tions. For exam­ple, we con­sciously decided not to tai­lor our plan to the idio­syn­cratic pref­er­ences of dif­fer­ent fund­ing sources, but to present the National PABI Plan, a large, and unso­licited, multi-department grant that crossed 7 departments.

Polit­i­cal ears respond to vic­tims’ sto­ries, and to budget-neutral plans. Our con­cur­rent res­o­lu­tion of Con­gress (H.Con.Res.198) has over 100 co-sponsors in the U.S. House. This mea­sure has the United States Con­gress endors­ing this National PABI Plan as the plan to pre­vent, iden­tify and treat all brain injuries from birth through 25 years of age while encour­ag­ing fed­eral, state and local gov­ern­ments to begin imple­ment­ing it. We expect it to pass very soon.

Pol­icy Inno­va­tion at Fed­eral and State Lev­els

Please explain the ori­gins and core ele­ments of the PABI Plan (opens 500+ PDF document)

Our National Advi­sory Board gath­ered in New York City for a three-day con­fer­ence on Jan­u­ary 8–10, 2009, to fin­ish draft­ing the PABI Plan. On Jan­u­ary 20, 2009, we sent the first let­ter to Pres­i­dent Barack Obama at 12:01 p.m. intro­duc­ing the PABI Plan to him.

At its core, the PABI plan wants to fund and imple­ment a new model sys­tem, using open source infor­mat­ics for the first time in med­ical his­tory, to assist in the study and reha­bil­i­ta­tion of chil­dren suf­fer­ing from Pedi­atric Acquired Brain Injury (PABI). Fam­i­lies will be able to make avail­able, on an anony­mous basis, the com­plete med­ical and ther­apy records and infor­ma­tion of chil­dren suf­fer­ing from PABI to doc­tors, researchers, other par­ents and care­givers, ther­a­pists, stu­dents and the gen­eral public.

Our part­ners in this are 52 State Lead Cen­ters that will focus on devel­op­ing evidence-based stan­darized sys­tem of care across 7 cat­e­gories of care. They will develop Read the rest of this entry »

The Sharp­Brains Sum­mit is ongo­ing, with 242 par­tic­i­pants in 15 coun­tries! thanks to the IT brains at the Insti­tute for The Future and col­lab­o­ra­tors such as Anett Gyu­rak, Pas­cale Mich­e­lon and Camille Fin­ley, event is going great.

If you Twit­ter, you can fol­low my updates here. The Sum­mit hashtag/ feed is #sharp2010. Par­tic­i­pants who were actively tweet­ing the first day:

@IFTFHealth @rodfalcon @positscience @billiamjames @drg @FitLifeClubs

@performbetter @YoungDrivers @AOborne

(Reg­is­tra­tion is closed now for new par­tic­i­pants, please sub­scribe to our eNewslet­ter if you want to learn about future events)

Dr. Michael Merzenich, Emer­i­tus Pro­fes­sor at UCSF, is a lead­ing pio­neer in brain plas­tic­ity research. In the late 1980s, Dr. Merzenich was on the team that invented the cochlear implant. In 1996, he was the found­ing CEO of Sci­en­tific Learn­ing Cor­po­ra­tion (Nas­daq: SCIL), and in 2004 became co-founder and Chief Sci­en­tific Offi­cer of Posit Sci­ence. He was elected to the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences in 1999 and to the Insti­tute of Med­i­cine this year. He retired as Fran­cis A. Sooy Pro­fes­sor and Co-Director of the Keck Cen­ter for Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia at San Fran­cisco in 2007. You may have learned about his work in one of PBS TV spe­cials, mul­ti­ple media appear­ances, or neuroplasticity-related books.

(Alvaro Fer­nan­dez) Dear Michael, thank you very much for agree­ing to par­tic­i­pate in the inau­gural Sharp­Brains Sum­mit in Jan­u­ary, and for your time today. In order to con­tex­tu­al­ize the Summit’s main themes, I would like to focus this inter­view on the likely big-picture impli­ca­tions dur­ing the next 5 years of your work and that of other neu­ro­plas­tic­ity research and indus­try pioneers.

Thank you for invit­ing me. I believe the Sharp­Brains Sum­mit will be very use­ful and stim­u­lat­ing, you are gath­er­ing an impres­sive group together. I am look­ing for­ward to January.

Neuroplasticity-based Tools: The New Health & Well­ness Frontier

There are many dif­fer­ent technology-free approaches to har­ness­ing –enabling, dri­ving– neu­ro­plas­tic­ity. What is the unique value that tech­nol­ogy brings to the cog­ni­tive health table?

It’s all about effi­ciency, scal­a­bil­ity, per­son­al­iza­tion, and assured effec­tive­ness. Tech­nol­ogy sup­ports the imple­men­ta­tion of near-optimally-efficient brain-training strate­gies. Through the Inter­net, it enables the low-cost dis­tri­b­u­tion of these new tools, any­where out in the world. Tech­nol­ogy also enables the per­son­al­iza­tion of brain health train­ing, by pro­vid­ing sim­ple ways to mea­sure and address indi­vid­ual needs in each person’s brain-health train­ing expe­ri­ence. It enables assess­ments of your abil­i­ties that can affirm that your own brain health issues have been effec­tively addressed.

Of course sub­stan­tial gains could also be achieved by orga­niz­ing your every­day activ­i­ties that grow your neu­ro­log­i­cal abil­i­ties and sus­tain your brain health. Still, if the ordi­nary cit­i­zen is to have any real chance of main­tain­ing their brain fit­ness, they’re going to have to spend con­sid­er­able time at the brain gym!

One espe­cially impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion of tech­nol­ogy is the scal­a­bil­ity that it pro­vides for deliv­er­ing brain fit­ness help out into the world. Think about how effi­cient the drug deliv­ery sys­tem is today. Doc­tors pre­scribe drugs, insur­ance cov­ers them, and there is a drug store in every neigh­bor­hood in almost every city in the world so that every patient has access to them. Once neuroplasticity-based tools and out­comes and stan­dard­ized, we can envi­sion a sim­i­lar sce­nario. And we don’t need all those drug stores, because we have the Internet!

Hav­ing said this, there are obvi­ous obsta­cles. One main one, in my mind, is the lack of under­stand­ing of what these new tools can do. Cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­grams, for exam­ple, seem counter-intuitive to con­sumers and many pro­fes­sion­als “ why would one try to improve speed-of-processing if all one cares about is œmem­ory? A sec­ond obvi­ous prob­lem is to get indi­vid­u­als to buy into the effort required to really change their brains for the bet­ter. That buy-in has been achieved for many indi­vid­u­als as it applies to their phys­i­cal health, but we haven’t got­ten that far yet in edu­cat­ing the aver­age older per­son that brain fit­ness train­ing is an equally effort­ful business!

Tools for Safer Dri­ving: Teens and Adults

Safe dri­ving seems to be one area where the ben­e­fits are more intu­itive, which may explain the sig­nif­i­cant traction.

Yes, we see great poten­tial and inter­est among insur­ers for improv­ing dri­ving safety, both for seniors and teens. Appro­pri­ate cog­ni­tive train­ing can lower at-fault acci­dent rates. You can mea­sure clear ben­e­fits in rel­a­tively short time frames, so it won’t take long for insur­ers to see an eco­nomic ratio­nale to not only offer pro­grams at low cost or for free but to incen­tivize dri­vers to com­plete them. All­state, AAA, State Farm and other insur­ers are begin­ning to real­ize this poten­tial. It is impor­tant to note that typ­i­cal acci­dents among teens and seniors are dif­fer­ent, so that train­ing method­olo­gies will need to be dif­fer­ent for dif­fer­ent high-risk populations.

Yet, most dri­ving safety ini­tia­tives today still focus on edu­cat­ing dri­vers, rather that train­ing them neu­ro­log­i­cally. We mea­sure vision, for exam­ple, but com­pletely ignore atten­tional con­trol abil­i­ties, or a driver’s use­ful field of view. I expect this to change sig­nif­i­cantly over the next few years.

Long-term care and health insur­ance com­pa­nies will ulti­mately see sim­i­lar ben­e­fits, and we believe that they will fol­low a sim­i­lar course of action to reduce gen­eral med­ical and neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­ease– (Mild Cog­ni­tive Impair­ment and Alzheimer’s– and Parkinsons-) related costs. In fact, many senior liv­ing com­mu­ni­ties are among the pio­neers in this field.

Boomers & Beyond: Main­tain­ing Cog­ni­tive Vitality

Main­stream media is cov­er­ing this emerg­ing cat­e­gory with thou­sands of sto­ries. But most cov­er­age seems still focused on does it work? more than “how do we define It”, what does work mean? or work for whom, and for what? Can you sum­ma­rize what recent research suggests?

We have seen clear pat­terns in the appli­ca­tion of our train­ing pro­grams, some pub­lished (like IMPACT), some unpub­lished, some with healthy adults, and some with peo­ple with mild cog­ni­tive impair­ment or early Alzheimers Dis­ease (AD). What we see in every case: Read the rest of this entry »

We are excited to invite you to the first vir­tual, global Sharp­Brains Sum­mit (Jan­u­ary 18-20th, 2010). The Sharp­Brains Sum­mit will fea­ture a dream team of over 25 speak­ers who are lead­ers in indus­try and research from 7 coun­tries, to dis­cuss emerg­ing research, tools and best prac­tices for cog­ni­tive health and per­for­mance. This inau­gural event will expose health and insur­ance providers, devel­op­ers, inno­va­tors at For­tune 500 com­pa­nies, investors and researchers, to the oppor­tu­ni­ties, part­ner­ships, trends, and stan­dards of the rapidly evolv­ing cog­ni­tive fit­ness field.

Reg­is­ter Today

Learn more and reg­is­ter Here today, at dis­counted early-bird rates, to receive these benefits:

• Learn: Full access to all Con­fer­ence live ses­sions, and Down­load­able Record­ings and Handouts
• See: lat­est tech­nolo­gies and prod­ucts dur­ing Expo Day
• Con­nect and Dis­cuss: become a mem­ber of the Sharp­Brains Net­work for Brain Fit­ness Inno­va­tion (members-only LinkedIn Group) through the end of 2010, access online chats dur­ing the sum­mit, meet other reg­is­trants in your city
• Under­stand the Big Pic­ture: access 10 Research Exec­u­tive Briefs pre­pared by lead­ing scientists

On top of those early-bird dis­counts, we offer an addi­tional 15% dis­count for Sharp­Brains read­ers who want Reg­u­lar Admis­sion. Dis­count code: sharp2010. You can reg­is­ter Here.

Agenda/ Speak­ers

Mon­day, Jan­u­ary 18th, 2010:

(Pre­lim­i­nary sched­ule, US Pacific Time)

8–9.15am. Cog­ni­tion & Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity: The New Health­care Frontier

• Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, SharpBrains
• David White­house, OptumHealth Behav­ioral Solutions
• William Reich­man, Baycrest
• P Murali Doraiswamy, Duke University

9.30-11am. Tools for Safer Dri­ving: The Oppor­tu­nity with Teenagers and Adults

• Steven Aldrich, Posit Science
• Shlomo Breznitz, CogniFit
• Jerri Edwards, Uni­ver­sity of South Florida
• Peter Chris­tian­son, Young Dri­vers of Canada

Noon-1.30pm. Baby Boomers and Beyond: Main­tain­ing Cog­ni­tive Vitality

• Kunal Sarkar, Lumos Labs
• Eliz­a­beth Zelin­ski, USC Davis School of Geron­tol­ogy Read the rest of this entry »

Encephalon (brain & mind blog car­ni­val, edi­tion ) finally meets Grand Rounds (health & med­i­cine blog carnival).

What a nice sur­prise. Hello. Nice to meet you!

—

Note: Chronic Babe wins a com­pli­men­tary copy of The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness for basi­cally invent­ing cog­ni­tive sleep ther­apy. Con­grats!

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Life and Death

Mind­Hacks dis­cusses an unex­pected surge in brain activ­ity when blood pres­sure drops to zero.

In Sick­ness & In Health suf­fers a death in the fam­ily. Adam shem tov. A man of good name.

Brain­Blog­ger won­ders, is reli­gion a “nat­ural” phe­nom­e­non?

Mind and Empathy

Behav­ior­ism & Men­tal Health finds that every­one can have a men­tal ill­ness — take a look at “Adjust­ment Dis­or­der”.

ACP Internist rein­forces the impor­tance of empa­thy. Novel Patient encour­ages patients to dream big, Flo­re­cen­dot­com high­lights how patients them­selves con­tribute to patient safety. The Hip­po­cratic Oaf dis­cusses the feel­ings of a med­ical stu­dent. Clin­i­cal Cases won­ders what doc­tors  in train­ing carry in their white coats.

Advances in the His­tory of Psy­chol­ogy exam­ines an impor­tant early step in the jour­ney to con­cep­tu­al­ize cog­ni­tion and emo­tion from a neural point of view.

The Fit­ness Fixer empathizes with her feet.

Brain

How to Cope With Pain dis­cusses a con­tro­ver­sial treat­ment for severe pain.

Neu­rophiloso­pher shows how vision (view­ing one’s body) can mod­u­late the senses of touch and pain. Fun exper­i­ments  included. Neu­r­o­critic takes things one step fur­ther, and takes us to the poten­tial future of tat­too removal.

Prov­i­den­tia announces a new NFL Con­cus­sion Com­mit­tee. 300,000 sports-related trau­matic brain injuries occur in the United States alone each year.

Sharp­Brains answers 15 com­mon ques­tions related to neu­ro­plas­tic­ity.

Med­ical Smart­phones Read the rest of this entry »

The San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle brings two great pieces today — includ­ing an excel­lent review of our new Book!

Is Your Brain A Couch Potato? (online book review)

“At 165 pages, we’re talk­ing a short, sweet, enter­tain­ing read of a com­plex topic, with timely (writ­ten in 1/09) reviews of 21 top tech­nol­ogy prod­ucts, as well as informed and expert pre­dic­tions of where this bur­geon­ing brain-fitness field is headed. More impor­tantly, after you read it, you’ll have a good, detailed sense of where you, per­son­ally, can act to improve your own couch-potato brain — and how to keep it fit and flex­i­ble your whole life. The Sharp­Brains Guide To Brain Fit­ness reminds of us all why books (and not just googling a topic) can be well worth your time and money. Two Stetho­scopes Up — check it out.”

Soft­ware designed to make older dri­vers sharper (arti­cle in print ver­sion)

- “All­state is exper­i­ment­ing with the soft­ware because it wants its cus­tomers who are over 50 to become bet­ter dri­vers so they have fewer acci­dents and can drive longer, per­haps in return for lower pre­mi­ums, said Tom War­den, an assis­tant vice pres­i­dent in Allstate’s research and plan­ning center.”

- “All­state found Posit after the insur­ance company’s own sci­en­tists, who were work­ing on the phys­i­ol­ogy and psy­chol­ogy of good dri­vers, dis­cov­ered research done by Visual Aware­ness, a com­pany in Alabama that has worked with State Farm and var­i­ous state motor vehi­cle depart­ments on expand­ing dri­vers’ fields of view. Posit acquired Visual Aware­ness last year.”

Here you have the March edi­tion of our monthly newslet­ter cov­er­ing cog­ni­tive health and brain fit­ness top­ics. Please remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive this Newslet­ter by email, using the box at the top of this page. I know I am biased — but do believe this Newslet­ter issue might well be our best so far. I hope you find the time to enjoy it!

Bird’s Eye View

Brain Fit­ness Sur­vey: Over 2,000 thought­ful responses to our Jan­u­ary sur­vey (Thank You!) rein­force the need for pub­lic aware­ness ini­tia­tives and qual­ity infor­ma­tion to help eval­u­ate and nav­i­gate lifestyle and prod­uct claims, as well as the need for more research, an expanded health­care cul­ture, as more. Given this con­text, we are pub­lish­ing The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness in May 2009, a book with 18 Inter­views with Sci­en­tists, Prac­ti­cal Advice, and Prod­uct Reviews, in addi­tion to our annual mar­ket report for pro­fes­sion­als and exec­u­tives (to be pub­lished in April). If you have ideas to help us pro­mote the book, please reply to this email and let us know!

Life­long Learning

Here you have the pre­sen­ta­tion I deliv­ered on Tues­day at ETech 2009 (this year’s O’Reilly Emerg­ing Tech­nol­ogy Conference):

Emerg­ing Research and Tech­nol­ogy for Life Hacking/ Brain Training

(click to open pre­sen­ta­tion in new window)

Descrip­tion: Life hack­ing. Brain train­ing. They are one and the same. The brain’s frontal lobes enable our goal-oriented behav­ior, sup­port­ing exec­u­tive func­tions, such as decision-making, atten­tion, emo­tional self-regulation, goal-setting, and work­ing mem­ory. These func­tions can be enhanced with tar­geted prac­tice  such as life hack­ing. This ses­sion will pro­vide an overview of the cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science under­pin­ning life hack­ing, and review the state-of-the-art of non-invasive tools for brain train­ing: neu­ro­feed­back, biofeed­back, soft­ware appli­ca­tions, cog­ni­tive sim­u­la­tions, Tran­scra­nial Mag­netic Stim­u­la­tion, and plain-old meditation.

It was great to meet fel­low blog­gers and pre­sen­ters, such as Shel­ley Batts of Of Two Minds and Chris Patil of Ouroboros, and very inquisite and through­ful audi­ence mem­bers. Get­ting ready to speak at ASA/ NCOA and IHRSA next week!