Top Arti­cles and Resources in March: High­lights — a) great arti­cles in SciAm Mind and the Wall Street Jour­nal, b) new resources (book and free DVD) by the Dana Foun­da­tion, c) research stud­ies on how our cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties tend to evolve as we age, the impact of phys­i­cal exer­cise on the brain, the lack of long-term effec­tive­ness of ADHD drugs, and how work­ing mem­ory train­ing may ben­e­fit math performance.

Elderhostel’s Marty Knowl­ton dies at 88: He helped launch Elder­hos­tel, rein­vented “aging”, “retire­ment” and “learn­ing”, and con­tributed to the brain fit­ness of mil­lions of indi­vid­u­als as a result.

MetLife Mature Mar­ket Insti­tute Report: Geron­tol­o­gist Fay Radding presents the find­ings of a recent MetLife report, con­clud­ing that “As indi­vid­u­als age, mean­ing­ful inter­ac­tions and pur­pose­ful activ­ity become even more val­ued and cru­cial to cog­ni­tive health– and cog­ni­tive health itself becomes more of a priority.”

Change Your Envi­ron­ment, Change Your­self: Dr. Brett Steen­barger explains in his recent book that, “The great­est enemy of change is rou­tine. When we lapse into rou­tine and oper­ate on autopi­lot, we are no longer fully and actively con­scious of what we’re doing and why. That is why some of the most fer­tile sit­u­a­tions for per­sonal growth those that occur within new envi­ron­ments are those that force us to exit our rou­tines and actively mas­ter unfa­mil­iar challenges.”

Food for Thought

Ther­apy vs. Med­ica­tion, Con­flicts of Inter­est, and Intim­i­da­tion: What started as an aca­d­e­mic dis­pute regard­ing dis­clo­sure of con­flict of inter­est is now snow­balling. Dr. Jonathan Leo crit­i­cized two impor­tant aspects of a recent a study pub­lished in JAMA that com­pared the effi­cacy of ther­apy vs. med­ica­tion. JAMA edi­tors then tried to intim­i­date Dr. Leo and his uni­ver­sity. An inves­ti­ga­tion by the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion is under way.

ETech09 on Life Hack­ing and Brain Train­ing: Here you have the pre­sen­ta­tion Alvaro Fer­nan­dez deliv­ered at O’Reilly Emerg­ing Tech­nol­ogy Con­fer­ence 2009, a gath­er­ing of tech­nol­ogy pio­neers with a grow­ing inter­est in sci­ence and biol­ogy topics.

Atten­tion!

New Study Sup­ports Neu­ro­feed­back Treat­ment for ADHD: Dr. David Rabiner reports the promis­ing find­ings from the first well-designed con­trolled trial on the effect of neu­ro­feed­back treat­ment for ADHD.

Twit­ter

Finally, I wanted to let you know that you can fol­low quick Sharp­Brains updates and some of my thoughts via Twit­ter: http://twitter.com/AlvaroF

Have a great National Car Care Month in April! (now, wouldn’t you please pay at least equal atten­tion to Brain Care than to Car Care?)