Here is the fifth ques­tion of 25 from Brain Fit­ness 101: Answers to Your Top 25 Ques­tions. To down­load the com­plete ver­sion, please click here.

Ques­tion:
Do I really need a brain fit­ness program?

Key Points:

• Brain fit­ness requires men­tal stim­u­la­tion, phys­i­cal fit­ness, good nutri­tion, and stress management.
• A good pro­gram of men­tal stim­u­la­tion must pro­vide nov­elty, chal­lenge, and cog­ni­tive variety.
• Use it or lose it! (Or even bet­ter, “use it and improve it!”)

Answer:
Yes, you need a brain fit­ness pro­gram if you want to keep your mind in top shape and dra­mat­i­cally slow the effects of age-related cog­ni­tive decline. If you don’t do any­thing Read the rest of this entry »

Today we are going to talk about the appli­ca­tions of cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science to trad­ing and neu­ro­fi­nance. Brett N. Steen­barger , Ph.D. is Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chi­a­try and Behav­ioral Sci­ences at SUNY Upstate Med­ical Uni­ver­sity, active trader for over 30 years, for­mer Direc­tor of Trader Devel­op­ment for Kingstree Trad­ing, LLC, and author of The Psy­chol­ogy of Trad­ing: Tools and Tech­niques for Mind­ing the Mar­kets(Wiley, 2003) and the new Enhanc­ing Trader Per­for­mance: Proven Strate­gies From the Cut­ting Edge of Trad­ing Psy­chol­ogy (Wiley, 2007).

He writes fea­ture columns for the Trad­ing Mar­kets web­site and sev­eral trad­ing pub­li­ca­tions, includ­ing Stocks Futures and Options Magazine.

Key take-aways

–Elite per­form­ers in any highly-competitive field fol­low struc­tured learn­ing and train­ing processes to develop their skills, ensur­ing con­tin­u­ous feed­back and refinement.

- Traders would ben­e­fit to fol­low­ing this exam­ple. Tools at their dis­posal include books, sim­u­la­tion pro­grams, biofeed­back pro­grams for emo­tional man­age­ment, and coaches.

- Spe­cific skills to train are brain speed and work­ing mem­ory (for short-term traders), ana­lyt­i­cal skills (long-term ones). For both, man­ag­ing emotional-driven impul­sive behavior.

Books on Trad­ing and Peak Performance

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez (Alvaro): Wel­come, Prof. Steen­barger. Why don’t you start by pro­vid­ing us some con­text on your inter­est in trad­ing per­for­mance and how it led you to your new book? Read the rest of this entry »

The MacArthur Foun­da­tion has awarded the 2006 MacArthur “Genius Grants” to 25 indi­vid­u­als for their “their cre­ativ­ity, orig­i­nal­ity, and poten­tial to be sig­nif­i­cant con­trib­u­tors in their fields”. We are happy that some friends received the award, and that we will be able to inter­view them here, in this blog.

How were they able to accom­plish such a feat? what kind of brain is help­ing them? Also, how are their life­long expe­ri­ences shap­ing their brains?

We can not place them all under fMRI exam­i­na­tion , so we will have to ask them ques­tions to under­stand how they deal with, and devel­oped, what neu­ropsy­chol­o­gists call Exec­u­tive Func­tions, which are mostly located in our Frontal Lobes , the most recent part of our brains in evo­lu­tion­ary terms.

We will ask them about some key Frontal Lobe “Men­tal Mus­cles”, such as:

Plan­ning: fore­sight in devis­ing multi-step strategies.

Flex­i­bil­ity: capac­ity for quickly switch­ing to the appro­pri­ate men­tal mode.

Inhi­bi­tion: the abil­ity to with­stand dis­trac­tion, and inter­nal urges.

Antic­i­pa­tion: pre­dic­tion based on pat­tern recognition.

Crit­i­cal eval­u­a­tion: log­i­cal analysis.

Work­ing mem­ory: capac­ity to hold and manip­u­late infor­ma­tion “on-line” in our minds in real time.

Fuzzy logic: capac­ity to choose with incom­plete information.

Divided atten­tion: abil­ity to pay atten­tion to more than one thing at a time.

Decision-making: both qual­ity and speed.

A highly rec­om­mended book, if you are inter­ested in learn­ing more about Exec­u­tive Func­tions and Frontal Lobes, is The Exec­u­tive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civ­i­lized Mind , by Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg. You can read an in-depth review here.

If you had some of the MacArthur Fel­lows in front of you, right now, what would you ask them?

Last week I had the plea­sure to meet, in his NYC clin­i­cal prac­tice, with our sci­en­tific advi­sor Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg, renowned neu­ropsy­chol­o­gist and author of The Exec­u­tive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civ­i­lized Mind and The Wis­dom Para­dox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Older

Which brings me back to the begin­ning of our Brain Fit­ness adven­ture, once it became obvi­ous that the world of Brain Fit­ness was real and com­ing. Let me try to sum­ma­rize some of the key over­all research find­ings out­lined in both books:

-  Our brains enjoy Life­long Brain Plas­tic­ity: until recently, a pop­u­lar mis­con­cep­tion was that  neu­rons die through life and do not get replen­ished. Now, neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, or the abil­ity of our brains to cre­ate new neu­rons until the very day we die, is proven.

- Intense men­tal chal­lenges pro­vide extra resis­tance to age­ing and improve pat­tern recog­ni­tion and brain “effi­ciency”, this is, the abil­ity to take on sim­i­lar chal­lenges with reduced meta­bol­i­cal demands

- Our men­tal activ­ity influ­ences the gen­er­a­tion of neu­rons and where they go. The func­tional capac­ity of our neural net­works depends on the num­ber of neu­rons and their connections-both short and long

- Exer­cis­ing our brains is as impor­tant as exer­cis­ing our bod­ies. “Use it or lose it” came from ath­let­ics to brain sci­ence. Even bet­ter, now we know that“Use it and get more of it.

-  The path­ways that con­nect the frontal lobes with the rest of the brain are slow to mature, reach­ing full oper­a­tional state, and there­fore social matu­rity, between the ages of 18 and 30.

- Inten­sive and well-targeted Brain Fit­ness Pro­grams can pro­duce good results in as short as 3 months.

- The rate of devel­op­ment of new neu­rons can be influ­enced by cog­ni­tive activ­i­ties. Another day we will cover more ground on the spe­cific research stud­ies that dis­cov­ered the find­ings above, and on Dr. Goldberg’s work on Brain Fit­ness programs.In the mean­time, you can read some fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cles cat­e­go­rized by topic at our Resources section.