Below you can find the full tran­script of our engag­ing Q&A ses­sion today with David DiS­alvo, author of What makes your brain happy and why you should do the oppo­site, mod­er­ated by Alvaro Fer­nan­dez. You visit pre­vi­ous Q&A Ses­sions Here.

Full Tran­script (Lightly edited) of Live Q&A held on Decem­ber 9th, 2-3pm ET

Read the rest of this entry »

How To Help Your Child’s Brain Grow Up Strong (NPR):

- “Kids who learn two lan­guages young are bet­ter able to learn abstract rules and to reverse rules that they’ve already learned,” says Aamodt. “They’re less likely to have dif­fi­culty choos­ing between con­flict­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties when there are two pos­si­ble responses that both present them­selves. They’re also bet­ter at fig­ur­ing out what other peo­ple are think­ing, which is prob­a­bly because they have to fig­ure out which lan­guage to use every time they talk to Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times has recently pub­lished sev­eral very good and seem­ingly unre­lated articles…let’s try and con­nect some dots. What if we ques­tioned the very premise behind nam­ing some class­rooms the “class­rooms of the future” sim­ply because they have been adding tech­nol­ogy in lit­er­ally mind­less ways? What if the Edu­ca­tion of the Future (some­times also referred to as “21st Cen­tury Skills”) wasn’t so much about the How we edu­cate but about the What we want stu­dents to learn and develop, apply­ing what we know about mind and brain to the needs they are likely to face dur­ing the next 50–70 years of their lives? Read the rest of this entry »

Here you have the July 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.

Pub­lic libraries have long offered the pub­lic more than books. And now, recent demo­graphic and sci­en­tific trends are con­verg­ing to fun­da­men­tally trans­form the role of libraries in our cul­ture. You may enjoy read­ing this recent arti­cle I wrote for the May-June 2009 Issue of Aging Today, the bimonthly pub­li­ca­tion of the Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging: Pub­lic Libraries: Community-Based Health Clubs for the Brain.

The Big Picture

Can You Out­smart Your Genes? An Inter­view with Author Richard Nis­bett: David DiS­alvo inter­views Richard Nis­bett, the author of Intel­li­gence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cul­tures Count, who has emerged as a per­sua­sive voice mar­shalling evi­dence to dis­prove the heredity-is-destiny argument.

Yes, You Can Build Willpower: Daniel Gole­man dis­cusses how the brain makes about 10,000 new cells every day, how they migrate to where they are needed, and how each cell can make around 10,000 con­nec­tions to other brain cells. Impli­ca­tion? Med­i­tate, mind­fully, and build pos­i­tive habits.

Bird’s Eye View of Cog­ni­tive Health Inno­va­tion: Alvaro Fer­nan­dez opened the Cog­ni­tive Health Track dur­ing the Games for Health Con­fer­ence (June 11-12th, Boston) with an overview of the seri­ous games, soft­ware and online appli­ca­tions that can help assess and train cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties. The pre­sen­ta­tion is avail­able Here.

Brain Tests and Myths

The Best Mem­ory Tests, from the Alzheimer’s Action Plan: Dr. Murali Doraiswamy dis­cusses the Pros and Cons of the most com­mon assess­ments to iden­tify cog­ni­tive prob­lems, includ­ing what the Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE) does and doesn´t, and inno­v­a­tive com­put­er­ized neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal tests.

Debunk­ing 10 Brain Health Myths: Does your brain have a “Brain Age”? Is a Magic Pill to “pre­vent mem­ory prob­lems” right around the cor­ner? Does “aging” equal “decline”? Check out the facts to debunk 10 com­mon myths on brain health.

Resources

Free Webi­nar: On July 21st, 10am Pacific Time/ 1pm East­ern Time, Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg and Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, co-authors of The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness, will cover the main high­lights from this new book and address the ques­tions sub­mit­ted by read­ers. You can learn more and reg­is­ter HERE.

Research Ref­er­ences:  This is a par­tial list of the sci­en­tific stud­ies reviewed dur­ing the research phase of SharpBrains’s new book, orga­nized by rel­e­vant chap­ter, for those of you who like to explore top­ics in depth by read­ing orig­i­nal research (per­haps PubMed should pro­mote itself as a never end­ing source of men­tal stimulation?).

Brain Teasers

Brain Teasers on Brain Fit­ness: Are you ready to test your knowl­edge of sev­eral key brain fit­ness met­rics? For exam­ple: How many sol­diers in the US Army have gone through com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive test­ing before being deployed, and why?
Finally, a request: if you have already read The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness, and could write a brief cus­tomer review at Amazon.com, we would surely appre­ci­ate! The Amazon.com book page is Here.

Best regards, and enjoy the month

(Editor’s note: Daniel Gole­man is now con­duct­ing a series of audio inter­views includ­ing a great one with Richard David­son on Train­ing the Brain. We are hon­ored to bring you this guest post by Daniel Gole­man, thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with Greater Good Mag­a­zine.)

—

Yes, You Can:

New research sug­gests we can build our willpower

– By Daniel Goleman

Those of us who strug­gle to resist junk foods or oth­er­wise suf­fer a lack of willpower will be heart­ened by some good news from neu­ro­science. But there’s some bad news, too.

First, the bad news. A slew of stud­ies sug­gest that we each have a fixed neural reser­voir of willpower, and that if we use it on one thing, we have less for oth­ers. Tasks that demand some self-control make it harder for us to do the next thing that takes willpower.

In a typ­i­cal exper­i­ment on this effect, one group of peo­ple was made to watch a video of a bor­ing scene; another was not. Then both groups had to cir­cle every “e” in a long pas­sage of writ­ing. The result? The peo­ple who had to first sit through the bor­ing video gave up faster. The same loss of per­sis­tence has been found when peo­ple try to resist tempt­ing foods, sup­press emo­tional reac­tions, or even make the effort to try to impress someone.

This all sug­gests we have a fixed willpower bud­get, one we should be care­ful in spend­ing. Some neu­ro­sci­en­tists sus­pect that self-control con­sumes blood sugar, which takes a while to build up again; thus, the deple­tion effect.

But the good news is that we can grow our willpower; like a mus­cle, the more we use it, the more it grad­u­ally increases over time. But doing this takes, of all things, willpower.

As the mus­cle of will grows, the larger our reser­voir of self-discipline becomes. So peo­ple who are able to Read the rest of this entry »

Quick: say the color in which each word in this graphic is dis­played (don’t just read the word!):

Here you have a round-up of some great recent arti­cles on mem­ory, aging, and cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties such as self-control:

1) How to Boost Your Willpower (New York Times).

- “The video watch­ers were later given a con­cen­tra­tion test in which they were asked to iden­tify the color in which words were dis­played. (Note: now you see why we started with that brain exer­cise…) The word  for instance, might appear in blue ink. The video watch­ers who had sti­fled their responses did the worst on the test, sug­gest­ing that their self-control had already been depleted by the film challenge.”

- “Finally, some research sug­gests that peo­ple strug­gling with self-control should start small. A few stud­ies show that peo­ple who were instructed for two weeks to make small changes like improv­ing their pos­ture or brush­ing their teeth with their oppo­site hand improved their scores on lab­o­ra­tory tests of self-control. The data aren’t con­clu­sive, but they do sug­gest that the quest for self-improvement should start small. A vow to stop swear­ing, to make the bed every day or to give up just one food may be a way to strengthen your self-control, giv­ing you more willpower reserves for big­ger chal­lenges later.”

Com­ment: learn­ing, build­ing abil­i­ties, are processes that require prac­tice and grow­ing lev­els of dif­fi­culty. Like train­ing our mus­cles in the gym. So the advice to start small and pro­gres­sively do more makes sense. Many times the enemy of learn­ing is the stress and anx­i­ety we pro­voke by try­ing to do too many things at the same time…

2) Jog­ging Your Mem­ory (Newsweek) Thanks Chris for alert­ing us!

- “No one should expect mir­a­cles soon, if at all. But the deeper sci­en­tists peer into the work­ings of mem­ory, the bet­ter they under­stand Read the rest of this entry »